Summer Vacation 2012

We’ll be taking a little trip to Selkirk, this coming summer, to kick someone’s ass. Expect us!

A Black President? Muhammad Ali’s comments…

Too Pretty For Homework

On August 31st at 5am, I saw something in my G+ stream that I decided to take action on. A shirt that was being sold online by JC Penny had been mentioned by one of the people I have circled. The shirt read, “I’m too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me”. Obviously, the message that the shirt is sending has a big problem… I won’t get into that, here.

Rather than re-posting what Anna had written, or writing anything about it on my own, I immediately went to the JC Penny website and looked for their contact information. I called a toll-free number and was talking to a customer service person rather quickly (it was 5 in the morning, so I really didn’t have to hold, at all).

I told her that I was calling about the shirt. She had me describe the shirt to her. I could tell that she was looking it up, writing stuff down, or something. I explained to her that I “personally” didn’t have a problem with them selling the shirt. I also explained how I found the shirt, though, and was concerned that this could spread into a PR nightmare (I referred to it as a “shitstorm”) for them, once this started spreading out to Twitter and Facebook. She took my name and phone number and said that somebody would get back to me about this.

Right after I got off the phone, I did a search to see how far this had gone, already, and came up with hardly anything about it. There were a few links to the products page at jcpenny.com and not much else.

Well, within about three hours of me calling them, the shirt had been removed from their website. Of course, I’m not sure about how many other calls they received, but that was pretty quick. This morning (September 1st), I received a call from them, just after 9am. They thanked me for letting them know about it, and informed me that they were no longer selling the shirt.

Within the last hour, I decided to see just how far the “shitstorm” went, so I did a search for “too pretty for homework” on Google. To my surprise, there were over 300 results. Everything from large media sites to personal blogs had been in an uproar over this. There were 170 news articles mentioning this on Google News. An online petition had even been started, and had gathered more than 1000 signatures. JC Penny’s Facebook page was loaded with comments (both good and bad) about the shirt.

After thinking about it for a bit, I decided to write this post. I have a couple different thoughts about this.

Was the shirt sending a bad message? In my opinion, it was.

Should the problem have been noticed before the shirt was ever sold? Yes, unless JC Penny only has pretty girls working for them (j/k).

If social media was not a deciding factor in whether the shirt should remain for sale (if social media didn’t exist) would the shirt have remained on their website, for sale? Possibly.

If JC Penny was never directly called, would the shirt have been removed as fast as it was? How long would it have taken them to discover that they were the center of a shitstorm if nobody actually contacted them, and only used social media to voice their opinions?

Like I said, before, I don’t know how many other people directly called and contacted JC Penny about this. I only contacted them because I knew where this would go, once it hit Twitter and Facebook. I don’t have any loyalty to JC Penny, at all, except that they are the only place I can still seem to find Levi’s 501′s. I just hate to see anybody (a company or a person) blasted online for small mistakes, though. In the scope of everything, this was actually a pretty small mistake… too pretty!

Green Lights In The Sky

My wife and I headed out, last night, to go take a look at the night sky. A night or two earlier, (Tuesday or Wednesday) our daughter told us that she saw something in the sky. We figured we would go out and stargaze for a while on the off-chance that we may get to see something interesting.

Well, we headed out for about an hour, or so… driving north of town to get away from the light pollution. About two blocks away from our house, we had actually saw a green light flying across the sky. When we spotted it, it was almost directly to the west of us, moving at a pretty high speed toward the north, in what looked like a straight line. It seemed to get lower in altitude, and we ended up losing sight of it, by the time it got into the northeast part of the sky.

It looked like a solid green light with no “tail”. There was no good way for us to judge the actual distance, except that there were clouds in the sky and it seemed like we were able to see it clearly. It did not look like it was beyond the clouds, since the intensity of the light seemed consistent. As far as the distance of the clouds, though, it was hard to tell.

We did not get any kind of pictures or video of it. We were not expecting to see something that soon into our short outing, and the urge for me to drive as fast as I could to the north outweighed the thought of actually grabbing either of the two cameras that we had with us.

Of course, today, I did a few Google searches for what we might have seen, and realized that we may have seen something similar to what others (including our daughter) had seen on Tuesday. In that case (and likely this one) it was most likely a meteor. I also looked for videos that might be similar to what we saw, but after looking at a bunch of them, none of the videos that I saw online resembled what we saw.

Next time, we’ll have the cameras ready.

Stargazing or UFO Hunting

We’re going out, tonight, to the middle of nowhere to look at stars. Actually, we’re hoping to catch a glimpse of some weird stuff, if we can… you never know. There’s been a few odd things reported to have happened in the sky, here in ND, so there’s a possibility.

We’ll be taking two different cameras, since mine is not a very high quality. Both of the cameras are able to do video, so if we find any odd lights in the sky, I’ll link to the video, here.

I had a weird thought pop into my head, a few nights ago. What if every single star in the sky (each on the sun of a solar system) had a planet orbiting it that was able to support life? The thought isn’t too far-fetched. I mean, we haven’t been able to communicate with any of them, and the chances of them communicating with us is also pretty high. We have, however, had some strange things happen, here.

If each solar system had a planet that supports life, we are not as alone as we thing we are.

One of the most amazing videos that I’ve seen happened in February of this year. Multiple different people in multiple places, catching the exact same thing on camera.