Brilliant Marketing

Heinz takes special pride in the thickness of its ketchup. So much, in fact, that their web site sports a trivia page which includes the following nugget:

At what speed does ketchup exit the iconic glass bottle?
Ketchup exits the iconic glass bottle at .028 miles per hour. If the viscosity of the ketchup is greater than this speed, the ketchup is rejected for sale.

What they forgot to mention is that achieving the .028 mph speed requires an equally iconic attack by a coordinated team, with one person holding the bottle upside-down and hammering its base while another is prying the ketchup out using a knife.

How they managed to take the most annoying feature about their product and turn it into a selling point is beyond me.

Zzzzz...

P.S. Food cools down much faster, at an average speed of 0.57 mph.

What Do I Wear At Night?

Sunglasses.

Yes, sunglasses, sorry to disappoint you; I don't even want to know what you were thinking.

Why do I wear sunglasses at night? So I can keep track of the visions in my eyes.

Confused? Ok, ok, I'll explain --- at least as well as one can explain wearing sunglasses at night. See, I take a weekly spin bike class during which we pedal to the sounds of the instructor's iPod. Occasionally an oldie sneaks into the playlist and I find myself biking down memory lane. Yesterday, for example, I was spinning in the 80's wearing sunglasses at night.

Interestingly enough, Wikipedia says:

The original lyrics for the song were about a totalitarian society that made everyone wear their sunglasses at night. Hart altered the lyrics to be "more romantic" after his record company pushed for something deemed more marketable.

It turns out that even pop/rock lyrics need to be dumbed-down in order to appeal to the audience. Alternatively it's possible that the music marketing execs are the ones who are dumb. Or perhaps both statements hold...

At any rate, the claim that content needs to be dumbed down because the masses are dumb will eventually turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Zzzzz (from behind the shades)...