If It's Pain They Want

As an unemployed writer, I am considering all my career options, including becoming the host of my own show on the Food Network. It will be about making food in a kitchen, or something. But if I'm going to do that, I'd better have a line of overpriced products ready to ship to my legions of devoted viewers.

I note that hot sauce manufacturers are increasingly naming their products things like "Death," "Misery," "Anguish," "Pain," "Torture," and other words that dare the modern foodie with a penchant for hot stuff to douse their dishes with a splash of masochism. I like spicy food, but I draw the line at hurting myself to eat it. But if that's how the game is played, I will beat them at it.

UPDATE: I'm late to the game, as Chris notes in the comments, linking us to "Screaming Sphincter" and "Anal Angst."

He Would've Made a Cool Brand Icon

Like the Quaker Oats guy, or even Cap'n Crunch. Can't you see that serious but slightly smiling face on a label, the wild hair and beard alerting you to what must've been an original personality?

Born in England, he came to America as a boy, living in New York, later Minnesota and finally New Jersey. He was schooled at a seminary in upstate New York. He became a physician, later changing professions to dentistry. He founded a dental products company and a dentistry journal.

At the age of 44, he discovered a way to pasteurize wine so that fermentation was stopped. A staunch prohibitionist, he convinced local churches to use his unfermented wine for communion services.

The man above is Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch. He founded Welch’s Grape Juice Company. Because it sounded better than Crazy Preacherman’s Fake Wine.

And why am I posting this? Because I just finished a small bottle of Welch’s grape juice and noted the “since 1869” on the label, which made me curious. So I looked it up. On Wikipedia.

Remember when you had to go to a library to find out useless stuff?

Take it to The Bridge

Art is so subjective, but every time I'm in the conference room and I see this logo on the speakerphone in the center of the table, it makes me cringe. I just find it lame. And on the phone itself, the logo is all beveled out to the extreme, making the effect even more "wife had an early copy of Photoshop and designed low-budget corporate logo for new start-up." But I guess it goes along with the name, which is pretty literal as well. We need something that says "Many communications." It's got that fake, "evil corporation" ring to it, like they use in comedy movies; GloboDyne, ChemTech or PlastiCorp.


Polycom, Inc.�(NASDAQ:PLCM) is the leading independent supplier of standards-based IP phones, and has over 600 patents either issued or pending approval and over 15 million lines of active code across its product portfolio. In addition to their leadership in IP phone technology, Polycom� hired someone with no skill at all to design their logo. Well, maybe in 1986 this was considered really "cutting edge." Polycom steadfastly refuses to upgrade its logo.