Everything is Interesting
Tapatío is a hot sauce, produced in Vernon, California, that can be found at many grocery stores in the United States.
It rates 3,000 on the scale of Scoville units (Tabasco sauce is 2100 Scovilles) ‘Tapatío’ is the name given to people from Guadalajara, Jalisco. The company’s founders come from Guadalajara.
BC Bud is a generic term for several varieties of potent cannabis grown in the Canadian province of British Columbia. The term has almost become a brand name, especially in California, Oregon, Alaska, Idaho and Washington, to where most of the province’s cannabis is exported.
The United States Drug Enforcement Administration considers BC production to be a major problem, given the porous United States-Canada border, and has launched several major initiatives to cut down on its flow, including collaborative operations targeting marijuana activists such as Marc Emery.
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Vaporware is a term in the computer industry that describes a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is never actually released nor officially canceled. The term also generally applies to a product that is announced months or years before its release, and for which public development details are lacking.
The word has been applied to a growing range of products including consumer electronics, automobiles, and some stock trading practices. At times, vendors are criticized for intentionally producing vaporware in order to keep customers from switching to competitive products that offer more features.
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Every year in the United States, there are approximately 2.5 million weddings, and the wedding industry has grown into a $40 billion a year market. The wedding industry is a modern phenomenon. In the past, women were viewed as possessions and sold as wives; today, couples spend thousands of dollars to have their ideal of the perfect day of union.
Until the Middle Ages, the Wedding ceremony or betrothal involved of the exchange of a ring or a piece of fruit, a kiss, and then the bride moved into the groom’s home. Today however, the ceremonial aspect of marriage has become more extravagant and more detailed. The average couple will spend up to $4,411 for the engagement ring, and $2,067 for his and hers wedding bands, and the average American couple today spends more than $20,000 on their wedding. For a middle class family, this can be about 51 percent of their income.
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An early adopter (or lighthouse customer or trendsetter) is an early consumer of a given company, product, or technology; in politics, fashion, art, and other fields, this person would be referred to as a trendsetter. The term originates from communications scholar Everett M. Rogers’ 1962 sociology text, ‘Diffusion of Innovations.’ Early adopters often provide considerable and candid feedback to help vendors refine future product releases, as well as the associated means of distribution, service, and support.
The relationship is synergistic, with the customer having early (and sometimes unique, or at least uniquely early) access to a new product or technology, but also serving as a test subject. In exchange for being an early adopter, and thus being exposed to the problems, risks, and annoyances common to early-stage product testing and deployment, the lighthouse customer is sometimes given especially attentive vendor assistance and support, even to the point of having personnel at the customer’s work site to assist with implementation. The customer is sometimes given preferential pricing, terms, and conditions, although new technology is very often expensive.
Chiclets is a brand of candy coated chewing gum made by Cadbury Adams. The colors of chiclets are: yellow, green, orange, red, white, and pink. The product’s name is derived from Nahuatl word tziktli, in English chicle, the substance from which chewing gum was traditionally made. The original flavor was peppermint but many flavors have been added and discontinued over the decades since the introduction in 1906.
In some countries the term ‘Chiclet’, ‘Chic’ or ‘Chicla’ is often used to refer to any brand and/or type of chewing gum. In Spain, Peru, and many other Spanish or Portuguese speaking countries, as a result of the brand’s popularity the term ‘Chicle’ is used in every-day language to refer to chewing gum, this ias particular in Mexico as the Nahuatl term derives from there. Furthermore, in Iran any type of chewing gum is referred to as ‘Adams’. The gum is the biggest gum brand in the Middle East, especially in Egypt where it has a huge market share. In South America, and Thailand, Chiclets is also produced, but the brand has been extended to include various formats like bubble gum and stick gum.
Andre Romelle Young (b. 1965), primarily known by his stage name Dr. Dre, is an American record producer, rapper, and record executive. He is the founder and current CEO of Aftermath Entertainment and a former co-owner and artist of Death Row Records, also having produced albums for and overseeing the careers of many rappers signed to those record labels, such as Snoop Dogg, Eminem and 50 Cent. As a producer he is credited as a key figure in the popularization of West Coast G-funk, a style of rap music characterized as synthesizer-based with slow, heavy beats.
Dr. Dre began his career in music as a member of the World Class Wreckin’ Cru and he later found fame with the influential gangsta rap group N.W.A with Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Mc Ren, and DJ Yella which popularized the use of explicit lyrics in rap to detail the violence of street life. His 1992 solo debut, ‘The Chronic,’ released under Death Row Records, led him to become one of the best-selling American performing artists of 1993. In 1996, he left Death Row to establish his own label, Aftermath Entertainment. Under that label he produced and released a solo album titled ‘2001’ in 1999.
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The Show is a 1995 documentary film about hip hop music. It was directed by Brian Robbins and featured interviews with some of hip hop’s biggest names. Def Jam founder Russell Simmons stars in and narrates the film. The documentary chronicles a diverse group of performers preparing to give a major concert at Philadelphia’s Armory.
Interspersed amongst the preparations are interviews with rappers past and present, looks at their personal lives, and commentary on their significance and upon the music. Featured acts and performers include, Slick Rick, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, LL Cool J, Run-DMC, Afrika Bambaataa, Biggie Smalls, Kurtis Blow, Sean Combs, and Method Man.
The Ad Council is an American non-profit organization that distributes public service announcements on behalf of various sponsors, including non-profit organizations and agencies of the United States government. The Advertising Council generally does not produce public service advertisements itself, rather, it acts as a coordinator and distributor.
The Advertising Council accepts requests from sponsor organizations for advertising campaigns that focus on particular social issues. To qualify, an issue must be non-partisan (though not necessarily unbiased) and have national relevance. The Advertising Council then assigns each campaign to a volunteer advertising agency that produces the actual advertisements. Finally, the Advertising Council distributes the finished advertisements to media outlets.
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In economics, Veblen [veb-luhn] goods are a group of commodities for which people’s preference for buying them increases as a direct function of their price, as greater price confers greater status, instead of decreasing according to the law of demand. A Veblen good is often also a positional good. The Veblen effect is named after economist Thorstein Veblen, who first pointed out the concepts of conspicuous consumption and status-seeking.
Some types of high-status goods, such as high-end wines, designer handbags and luxury cars are Veblen goods, in that decreasing their prices decreases people’s preference for buying them because they are no longer perceived as exclusive or high status products. Similarly, a price increase may increase that high status and perception of exclusivity, thereby making the good even more preferable. Often such goods are no better or even worse than their lower priced counterparts.
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New Belgium Brewing Company is a regional brewery located in Fort Collins, Colorado. The brewery was founded by husband-and-wife team Jeff Lebesch and Kim Jordan in 1991 and emphasizes eco-friendly practices and employee ownership in its marketing materials. Fat Tire, an amber ale, is the company’s flagship beer. Its recipe originates from a co-founder’s bicycle trip through Belgium from brewery to brewery. The company promotes its Fat Tire ale locally by the public placement of colorful vintage bicycles outside its brewery, which is located adjacent to the public bike path along the Cache La Poudre River. New Belgium beer labels are designed by Anne Fitch, a watercolorist. Kim Jordan, the President of New Belgium Brewery, credits the success of New Belgium Brewery in part on Anne’s artwork, ‘Our beers were good, our labels were interesting to people, and we pretty quickly had a fairly robust following.’ In 2006, her artwork appeared on each of the over 125 million bottles sold by New Belgium.
Tour de Fat is a bicycle parade and festival sponsored by New Belgium. The events, which take place annually in various large- and medium-sized cities around the West, include music, New Belgium beer, circus- and -vaudeville type acts, bicycle dance troupes, and the main activist spectacle, a giant group bike ride/parade wherein the participants, many of whom are in fanciful costume, ride through town. The actual activist climax of the tour, however, is the bike trade, in which a local participant transfers the keys and title of their motor vehicle to New Belgium in exchange for a new commuter bike and trailer in order to promote bike riding and sustainability. The ‘Fat Tire’ bike is so strongly associated with New Belgium Breweries that employees of the brewery are given a ‘cruiser bike’ ‘like the one pictured on its Fat Tire Amber Ale label’ on their one -year anniversary with the company.
Edward Tufte (b. 1942) is an American statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University. He is noted for his writings on information design and as a pioneer in the field of data visualization.Tufte’s writing is important in such fields as information design and visual literacy, which deal with the visual communication of information. He coined the term ‘chartjunk’ to refer to useless, non-informative, or information-obscuring elements of quantitative information displays. Other key concepts of Tufte are the ‘lie factor,’ the ‘data-ink ratio,’ and the ‘data density’ of a graphic.
He uses the term ‘data-ink ratio’ to argue against using excessive decoration in visual displays of quantitative information. Tufte states, ‘Sometimes decorations can help editorialize about the substance of the graphic. But it’s wrong to distort the data measures—the ink locating values of numbers—in order to make an editorial comment or fit a decorative scheme.’
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