After the Egg Joke, Scrambled Thoughts

• With the recent addition internet domain name extensions, from the standard .com and .net to newer ones like .us, let's take .us and play around with it. What's to stop someone from registering real corporate names, like ToysR.us or BabiesR.us or any other name that fits those genres. Hopefully, these company's marketing departments already gave that some thought and registered those names to stop internet money-mongers in their tracks. But suppose you want to register your own, and they can be had relatively cheaply now, like one for your 12 year old son, BoogersR.us...the list can go on forever, with just the addition of the letter "R".

It doesn't stop there. Imagine:
stimul.us
arg.us
circ.us
bog.us
religio.us (this would be great for some church organization)
an.us (well, suppose your name is Andrea or Andrew?)
howardstern_siri.us (ha, ha, ha)

Assorted Notes

• I like to come up with company names. A good one for a landscaping company, for example, would be LAWN ORDER. A wine shop could be called THE PORT AUTHORITY.

• A few years back, a Brazilian lawyer contacted me about creating a kiosk design for malls in Brazil. He told me that Brazilians have a major fixation with American westerns. Could I design a kiosk with a western theme? These were supposed to sell fresh squeezed orange juice and offer donuts and coffee. It was a new type of squeezer he and his partners had invented. You drop the whole orange in and out comes just the juice. I'd seen similar machines, but this one was really compact. He wanted it to look like an old covered wagon. I went to the library and took out books that had photographs and sketches of covered wagons. My design had to be illustrated from all angles. I asked him what he was going to call it. He said, "The Orange Juice, Donut & Coffee Wagon." I cringed. How creative, I said. He told me if I could come up with a better name for it, he would throw in an additional $200. I said, OK.

My mind can work in mysterious ways sometimes. Having been in the design business for so many years, you just give it some thought, to plant a seed so to speak, and forget about it. Usually, when you least expect it, an idea pops up in your head and you know it's perfect...

OJ Corral

The guy loved it. And I made the wagon wheels look like orange slices.

• One time, a roofing company asked me to come up with a yellow pages ad design. I drew a cartoon of a doghouse with missing shingles and some at the point of falling off. Above it was an impending storm, with heavy rain clouds and a few drops beginning to fall. Inside the darkened doorway were two bright eyes of a dog peering out that just screamed "ROOF! ROOF! Then, I wrote the body copy below it. It was very effective.

• How come the U.S. Mint didn't come up with a new nickel design for 1976? Instead of Monticello on the back, they could have made a BISON-tennial coin.