Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

November 10, 2009

It’s official: Nike screwing with LSU uniforms

Filed under: Baton Rouge, College Football, Culture, LSU Football, Les Miles — Cap'n Ken @ 10:50 pm

Well, it looks like my beloved LSU Tigers are about to be caught up in the big-money marketing push of Nike and roll out “futuristic” uniforms for the Arkansas game Nov. 28.

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UPDATE 3: The LSU Nike uniforms in their full abominable glory.

UPDATE 2: More details on the uniform design from Nike.

UPDATE 1: LSU A.D. Joe Alleva confirms this oh-so-special event for LSU fans Nike that is a real special honor:

We will soon be unveiling an exciting one-game change to the LSU football uniform as part of Nike’s Rivalry uniform program that will be a tribute to LSU teams of the past. Our coaches and players are excited to be participating in this program that is being employed by a number of other major schools across the country because it offers a product with cutting-edge fabric and technology. The uniforms, which will debut on LSUsports.net on Sunday, November 22, will feature a unique design with a throwback element that Tiger fans will enjoy for our season finale against Arkansas. This is a one-time uniform adjustment to honor our past. We have no plans to make any permanent changes to the traditional LSU uniform.

Wow, cutting-edge fabric? Sign me up! To hell with all the LSU tradition Mr. Alleva has no doubt soaked up in the past 16 months. Can’t wait for the full view of the “unique design with a throwback element” (I’m guessing the different color of gold is the “throwback element”). Note that he makes it clear that LSU is only willing to sell out its traditions for Nike dollars for this one game. That’s second only to not actually selling out LSU’s traditions to Nike at all, I suppose. And I wonder how Mr. Alleva’s masters at Nike feel about him spilling the beans about LSU’s participation a week before Nike planned the big unveil.
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The very alert folks at Friends of The Program apparently dug deep into the web assets of Nike to uncover the yet-to-be-unveiled remaining participants in this Pro Combat marketing gimmick that I suppose pays football programs a butt-load of money to ditch their own uniforms for special – and generally really ugly – new “pro combat” Nike getups.

And LSU is on the list.

So far the only image floating around of the LSU Nike abomination is this:

Nike's LSU uniform abomination pro combat

Nike's LSU uniform abomination


I also did some digging in Nike’s source code and discovered that Nike will announce the LSU uniform on November 20 and unveil the actual hideousness November 23. That, I assume, is timed for the Tigers to wear this monstrosity against Arkansas in the season finale that weekend.

And Friends of The Program is correct – though it’s hard to believe – that the tagline for LSU’s jersey is “COCHON DE LAIT“. Yes, the suckling pig. To digress for a second, the other taglines Nike is using are “GOOD GUYS WEAR WHITE” for Virginia Tech, “DON’T BACK DOWN” for TCU, “EARNED” for Ohio State, “FEAR THE SPEAR” for Florida State, “STAKE OUR CLAIM” for Oklahoma, “FINISH THE MISSION” for Florida, “IT ONLY TAKES ELEVEN” for Texas, “BEAST MODE” for Missouri and “THE U KNOWS” for Miami.

LSU’s is “suckling pig”. Um, ok …

If you know one thing about me, it’s that I don’t want you to screw with LSU tradition. I don’t like that stupid Eye of the Tiger painted on the field, and I sure as hell don’t want Les Miles, Joe Alleva and Mike Martin selling out LSU’s uniform to Nike. Which is exactly what they are doing. Maybe the fact that none of those gentlemen have any significant history with LSU – Miles has not yet reached five years there; Alleva and Martin are under two each. Their combined tenure at LSU just barely totals more time than I spent in school there – doesn’t give them the appropriate reverence for things like LSU’s football uniforms.

I will be in Baton Rouge that weekend because our Thanksgiving rotation is set to have us in Louisiana the years LSU and Arkansas are playing at Tiger Stadium. My plans had been to go to the game. But I won’t go watch LSU in these uniforms. I don’t go to games to watch a Nike infomercial. I go to games to see LSU, and LSU looks like this:

Proper LSU uniform

LSU’s football program, athletic department and administration is choosing its association with Nike and the dollars being delivered over its fans. Their choice – fine. But I won’t be a participant in this. I’ll watch it on TV and spend my money that would have gone to the athletic department someplace else.

August 17, 2008

TechCrunch rant about ‘CNN’ Phelps ’spoiler’ on Twitter goes haywire

Filed under: Atlanta, Culture, Media & Things, New Orleans, Tech & Whatnot — Cap'n Ken @ 10:31 am

One of the great things about an RSS client is that once it grabs a published article, it hangs on to it. If you make changes later, the first thing you published will disappear from your site, but not my client if it passed by before the change. If you change the title of a post, I end up with two copies of the article.

This actually happens fairly frequently; usually it’s some minor thing like a misspelled word or fixing an awkwardly-written headline. Pre-publication editing is a not a strong suit of many blogs, especially the technology blogs out on the west coast.

So this morning I started browsing RSS feeds and came across two versions of a TechCrunch article. The first was titled “CNN Fails To Include Spoiler Alert in Tweets, Ruins Olympics”. The second carried the headline “CNN Doesn’t Include Spoiler Alerts in Tweets, Twitter Users Say It Ruined Olympics“.

Yeah, that looked like a fun change to examine.

After publication of the original article, a flood of users (rightly) defended the notion that breaking news waits for no network and no tape delay, and TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid quickly jumped in to say he agrees with that and was being sarcastic in writing about the Twitter complaints. Likely? Let’s examine the before and after.

Just in case things change again, I’m including screen grabs of the story in my RSS reader and what’s on TechCrunch now.

Original:

Apologies for the smallness of the type there. But the critical elements are:

- Headline with the “Fails” and “Ruins” elements
- “Too bad CNN already spoiled the results”
- “CNN has unfortunately failed to account for this”
- “CNN has shown little remorse”
- “For shame, CNN. For shame.”

Also notice the item from MSNBC published right before the TechCrunch one – “Phelps wins record 8th gold”. I should write about RSS ruining the Olympics.

Changed:

Kincaid says he was being sarcastic in the original post and the readers just didn’t get it. I think that argument falls apart upon reading of the original version, and especially falls apart when you consider the following:

- The Twitter account Kincaid wrote about does not actually belong to CNN. He did not realize that.
- The Phelps event was only tape-delayed by NBC in the western U.S.; it was shown live in the east. Kincaid doesn’t seem to understand that.

I’m not giving somebody the benefit of the doubt that he was writing poorly-received sarcasm when he can’t even get basic facts straight. No, I think this was a case of blind excitement over being able to weave Twitter into the Phelps story (or is that vice-versa with TechCrunch?) getting in the way of stopping to think for a second.

Amusing.

August 1, 2008

Georgia town spends half its annual budget to drive out business

Filed under: Big Brother, Culture, Hotties — Cap'n Ken @ 9:32 am

The town of Lavonia in extreme northeast Georgia is making news today for spending $1 million to buy and close a strip club called Cafe Risque that the town has been trying to shut down for years. A million bucks, I suppose, is the market price for self-righteous indignation that a business you don’t approve of would dare bring visitors and money to your community.

There are a couple of aspects of this not being touched upon by the media – which is focused on the “town buys strip club” angle. One is that Lavonia is a very small town. So small, in fact, that they haven’t updated their budget on the city’s website in four years. But in 2004, the total operating budget for Lavonia was $1.78 million, meaning the $1 million spent to drive the club out of town (no doubt rolled in to a capital budget, not operating) probably still represents half of the city’s total annual operating budget. Couple the up-front costs with the ongoing lost tax revenue from the club itself and other businesses such as gas stations and restaurants that benefit from the traffic, and Lavonia is putting a huge premium on their piousness.

Secondly, Lavonia is just a few miles from the South Carolina border, and about 20 miles from the southernmost strip club along I-85 in the Palmetto State. So Lavonia was no doubt getting strip-club business from Georgians who otherwise would (and now will) drive on up to South Carolina to get their strip on. A Google Maps search shows Greenville and eastern South Carolina is silly with strip clubs. Buying out Club Risque will have little impact on the immoral behavior of Lavonians and northeast Georgians – it’ll just send them up the road to South Carolina to spend their money.

The town could have simply accepted the existence of Club Risque – opened before Lavonia clamped down on strip clubs in their local ordinances – as a loopholed business and let things be. Customers would visit if they chose to, Club Risque would generate tax revenue, drive traffic to other nearby businesses and Lavonians could just go about their lives; helped along by a little smut-generated tax revenue.

But no. Nakedness and sexuality so offend this outpost of propriety that the town was willing to come up with half as much money as it spends to operate the entire town each year and forego untold future tax revenue to make their town strip-club free.

Sad.

April 26, 2008

Link targeting, the “rules”, and the experience

Filed under: Culture, Media & Things, Tech & Whatnot — Tags: , , — Cap'n Ken @ 12:26 pm

I’ve been tinkering around with things on my new Wordpress install, and one of the tweaks I just rolled out was changing the default behavior of the “link” button in my post editor to add ‘target=”new”‘ to the end of URLs I’m linking to. Simple enough tweak (look for quicktags.js in your wp-includes/js directory, kids), but the lack of this as a configuration option hints at the disdain for “target=new” among the Lords of the Internet.

If you don’t know, “target=new” in a link makes that link open in a new browser window, rather than in the window you’re currently looking at. And for many minds absorbed with Internet propriety, that’s just wrong. It’s not quite on the level of “breaking the Internet” (I cherish my freedom …), but it’s widely viewed as “bad user experience”.

But I challenge that notion when it comes to pages referenced in content. Navigational links; links to original sources at the end of an article, blogrolls, etc. – sure, the good user experience is sending folks along and away from your site. It’s been perceived that “bad actors” use “target=new” or “target=_blank” to keep their site alive in your browser even after you’re done with it. And that’s probably the case a lot of times.

Within the context of an article, however, that logic often falls apart. I’ll reference this Wired blog post about Google & ComScore as an example if you’d like to follow along.

Wired links to five outside sources in this rather short article, with each link providing some background or context to the topic at hand. It’s good context and just linking over to previous Wired pieces or outside data or opinion provides quick and easy reference without having to dump a lot of background information, quotes, etc. into the article.

Presumably, the reader has come to the article to read the article. Reference links invite the reader to leave the article and visit the linked content. Having links open in the same window requires the reader to use the “back button” functionality to return to the article they were reading. Using the “target=new” attribute requires the reader to switch back to the original tab or window to return to the article. Neither is an ideal experience, but I would argue that keeping the original page open is a preferable flow. In any case, I don’t think “target=new” is the evil monster some would make it out to be, and in the world of connected content I’d like to see it embraced a bit more.

Ideally, the reference links would appear in such a way as to not disrupt the reader’s flow in the current article. Perhaps something akin to the rather annoying and generally useless Snap Shots functionality some sites such as TechCrunch are in love with is a model, but it’s difficult to display much more than images in a way that makes sense in less than a full-window view.

Not long ago, online content was a series of silos. Newspaper articles republished online would rarely include in-content links, and there was so little original web content out there that linking between pieces wasn’t an issue. That’s changed, of course, so I think more thought is needed on how to best flow users through interconnected content.

April 21, 2008

Extraface scores Yahoo thrift store gem

Filed under: Culture, Tech & Whatnot — Cap'n Ken @ 10:38 am

My buddy and former EarthLink underling Dave Coustan (brilliantly known as Extraface out in the world) scored himself a hell of a find at a thrift store this weekend.

The Yahoo Web Speak game no doubt made many a girl LOL around the turn of the century, and I hear Microsoft and Yahoo executives are actually communicating through the game’s IM cards during merger negotiations.

Somewhere around here, I still have my new-in-box Monopoly – The Dot Com Edition, but Yahoo Web Speak blows that away in terms of awesome Pre-Bubble 1.0 board games. And for those who think we’re again in an Internet Bubble – you’re wrong! I just checked around, and neither Scene It? – The YouTube Edition or Mad Libs – The Twitter Edition are in production – yet.

March 31, 2008

April 1 should be Power Off The Internet Day

Filed under: Culture, Tech & Whatnot — Tags: , — Cap'n Ken @ 8:01 pm

Just to spare everybody the inevitable flood of lame online April Fools pranks, the Internet should just be powered off for the day.

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