Three stories by me from Brandweek

First, the one that won me the coveted Satan beat: Companies Have Devil Of A Time Denying Rumors

Next is this week’s installment of The 16th Minute: Pet food recall catches brands with their product down.

Then there’s the full-length story on the problems with marketers and Second Life: Are marketers dying on Second Life?

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Odds and/or ends

1. Belated Headline of The Day (from last week): Wrigley Starts Online 'Cult' I would describe the Cubs as more of a multi-media cult…
2. When life imitates the movies
   1. Wallace & Gromit and the Curse of The Real Were-Rabbit: "Furious villagers in northeast England have hired armed guards to protect their beloved communal vegetable gardens from a suspected monster rabbit."
   2. Duckback Mountain: "Stockholm – In the middle of mating season, a pair of male ducks have returned to a park in southern Sweden for the third consecutive year, ignoring the siren calls of all the lady ducks around them."
3. Dave's Insanity Hot Sauce: Is there anything it can't do? " After years of customers telling us that they use hot sauce to keep animals out of their garden and off their dinner table, we had an idea. We created this sauce to be a delicious addition to your food and a way to keep deer and rabbits from eating your roses and carrots. The pump spray also allows you to have a more even distribution of sauce on your food."
4. Meeple, Meeple, Meeple. My friend Alison Hansel coined the term meeple several years ago to describe those funny human-shaped wood pieces you see in a lot of the games I play and it has spread like wildfire through the weird subcult of us board gamers. I bring this up a) because there's a really great site called MeeplePeople.com that sells meeple themed stuff and b) because in year's past this has been the week I have spent in Columbus, Ohio, at Alan Moon's industry fest/game convention "The Gathering of Friends" (how cultish is that name?) playing board games. It is very peculiar to hear the words, "It would be nice to be in Columbus" come out of my mouth. It's easily one of the most boring places I've ever been. The lack of distractions makes it a perfect place to hold a gaming event. Cultural highlights of Columbus include a topiary garden cut/planted to look like Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" and the James Thurber House. Thirty minutes killed and there's plenty of time to get back to the game tables.