My weekend project which turned into my multi-weekend project: the nookbook. I took a standard hardback sketchbook from the nearby art store, carved up its guts, used a little Mod Podge, and had myself a pretty nifty (if I do say so myself) protective case for my new nook.

I was hoping to use a Moleskine because I liked the idea of having the built-in rubber band that holds it closed, but the Moleskine dimensions didn’t match up correctly with the size of the nook. So I did the next best thing – found an old Moleskine, tore it to pieces in order to steal the rubber band and the built-in fabric bookmark and re-purposed it for the perfectly sized Cachet sketchbook, et voila:

Immediately after I finished my project, I came across the Book Book which puts my creation to shame. I now have more work to do to up the ante, but that’ll have to wait for another weekend.

Besides, Kurt seems to like mine just fine:

Apologies for the overuse of Ralph Wiggum-related ephemera, but I couldn’t help myself. The Phillies take on the Evil Empire in the World Series starting tomorrow and Jorge Posada is about to get introduced to Choochtober. Here’s how I envision it:

Yahoo! and T-Mobile are both getting all up in your business. Or “you” business, more specifically. Both have recently launched new campaigns that are all about “you” and they’re both getting a lot of attention, mostly because there’s clearly a lot of money behind them – Yahoo!’s money is in the form of a worldwide multimedia campaign and T-Mobile’s is in the form of Whoopi, Phil Jackson and a guy who buys pants for someone 4 inches taller than himself.

The YLou campaign is being panned for pretty obvious reasons. Such as, who is YLou? Or how could they expect offline advertising to drive online traffic? (I guess Bing sort of pulled it off, right?) But most importantly, what is Yahoo! trying to actually say in these ads? What’s the message? According to the commercial, “you’re about to enter a place where time and space collide.” I believe that’s called reality, and it’s a universal constant. Also, it’s a Rush lyric, according to the first result in my search on Yahoo.com. These ads don’t tell me why I should want to go to Yahoo!, but they do make me want to get out and play some soccer and visit India.



While Yahoo! may be “Y!ou”, T-Mobile’s new phone is “100% you”, which I believe is the maximum amount of “you” one can hope to attain. So the My Touch is more “you” than “Y!ou”.


While I’m not positive about what “100% me” really is in the context of a cell phone, I can only infer that the My Touch is the technological embodiment of my personality, which in Phil Jackson’s case means a delicately balanced stack of pebbles….



Or in Whoopi’s case, a deep-seated resentment that she lost out to Eddie Murphy for the role of a lifetime…




The only thing I really know about the My Touch at this point is that I can customize the wallpaper, which really isn’t all that revolutionary, so I think for now I’ll be sticking with my BlackBerry despite the fact that it only feels about 50% me.

During the GMail outages this past week, I thought Google needed their own version of the Twitter Fail Whale, so I went about creating one while watching Wedding Crashers for about the 30th time. If for just one disruptive morning, snail mail, the enemy of e-mail, slowly dragged GMail out of the clouds. Google, feel free to use this in a non-evil way.

Finally, Philly gets the Ork poster treatment it deserves. Clearly Ork heard my complaints and made appropriate reparations. I’ll forgive their treatment of Philly as a second-tier US city because I want one… at a discount.

I just I can’t help getting fired up about the latest issue of Philadelphia Magazine because my high school alma mater, Father Judge Catholic High School for Boys (the official title) was prominently featured in the cover story, “Best of Philly Schools 2009″. What does Judge, an all boys high school, do better than other Philadelphia area high schools? Lead cheers, that’s what. The cheerleaders, composed entirely of girls from other schools, constitute the only thing worth mentioning about Judge.

In a sport — yes, sport — dominated by Southerners, the members of Father Judge’s all-female “super varsity” squad (made up, since Northeast Philly’s Father Judge is all boys, mostly of students from St. Hubert’s) don’t just stand out for their accents. They stand out for their seamless choreography of back handsprings, back tucks and stunts. The 36-girl team has won Top 10 status since it began competing in nationals in 2005. (Last year, the Crusaders took second.) Their theme song: “Philadelphia Freedom.” You go girls, indeed.

[Best of Philly Schools 2009]

This is just too good not to spread around the interwebs.

From [The700Level] and [The Sporting Blog]

Nike unleashed a new advertising campaign all over the boob tubes and interwebs this weekend which featured a handful of NFL superstars in separate spots, the most notable of which starred Adrian Peterson in an ad which hearkened back to the opening scene of The Last Boy Scout, except instead of a torrential downpour, we were watching a game played in post-apocalyptic nuclear fallout.

The featured ad on ESPN.com this morning was quite unfortunately ill-timed for Nike, considering that Brian Urlacher of the Chicago Bears was lost for the season due to a wrist injury suffered last night. Given that Nike’s ads are presumably for a new brand of protective athletic gear (either that, or some sort of lizard-like skin graft procedure), they would have been wise to act quickly to disassociate their new protective gear from painfully injured players.

superpoop.com