OK, so a socially-conscious hip hop act [The Black Eyed Peas ] goes on tour, underwritten by a major Japanese auto manufacturer [Honda ]. Of course they need an over-the-top promotion.

Since they are a hip-hop act, it would seem to follow that they should give away a custom Civic. But since they're socially-conscious, it would seem to follow that they should give away one of Honda's alternative-fuel vehicles. And thus was begat the Black Eyed Peas Riced Out Honda Civic Hybrid Tour

(e:dragonlady7) imagines a discussion in Marketing where one manager says, 'why don't we give away a custom Civic?' and another manager says, 'make that a Civic Hybrid' and the other manager says, 'done,' and all the underlings groan and make fun of them at the water cooler for having no idea.

I guess I have more faith in the human condition than that. I imagine the ad exec coming in and saying, 'Dude. We gotta give away a riced-out Civic Hybrid. How awesome would that be?' and the manager goes, 'no that's ridiculous,' and the ad exec spells it out real slow, like 'Dude. Riced - out - Civic - Hybrid,' and the manager goes 'yeah, ok, that would be pretty sweet.'

- Z

[New journal music: The Skatalites/James Bond Theme gather:0481374001148138769 ]

I picked up a copy of 'Kepa 3 Gallery News,' v1n1 at lunch today. Very amusing. It is a one-page, front-and-back, 11"x17" xeroxed paper, written and illustrated entirely in laundry marker. I liked the following two articles, which were necessarily short due to the medium:

Mystery of El Greco Christ Revealed

Prado, Madrid- Officials find "trimmed" portion from middle section confirms tighty whitey prototype theory.

Casino to promote fine art using Vegas style. Is it possible to believe that big dollars will finally promote local fine art!? Past mayor Tony said Friday that this and pulled pork are win wins for our city.

It gave me an interesting idea for a concept newspaper: find a dozen interesting people and give them each a page. Content, photos, graphics, design are entirely their responsibility. Use InDesign, Word, paste-up, typewriter, marker, MS Paint, whatever. Collect and publish regularly.

- Z

(e:kara) made an excellent point in my last journal (e:zobar,53) that nobody gives a good God damn what a website looks like as long as it delivers the goods . I couldn't agree more.

So in that spirit, I thrust both middle fingers skyward and wave them defiantly in the direction of the art department and propose: The Best Ugly Local Website Award. Substitute 'utilitarian' if you must, but you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's that one website that was designed in Netscape Navigator Gold 3.04 about ten years ago that lives in some god-forsaken frameset at greyskull.someancientbbs.net/~skeletor79/Great%20Stuff/default.htm that you still visit all the time because it's the best damn website around. So let's fire up Lynx and get this party started!

At the risk of creating enemies, I nominate Bill Rapaport's ***** INTERACTIVE ***** BUFFALO RESTAURANT GUIDE , which has existed in one form or another since 1988. This guy is a motherfucking machine. Dude's got more restaurants listed than I have any hope of ever going to, and he does it all in HTML3.2. No Quicktime, Flash, AJAX, Javascript, or even CSS, just a huge wealth of information - the World Wide Web as pure as Tim intended *.

So let's hear it! What ugly websites are in your bookmarks?

- Z

_______________

• 'Storage of ASCII text, and display on 24x80 screens, is in the short term sufficient, and essential. Addition of graphics would be an optional extra with very much less penetration for the moment.'

A little vignette for background: A few months ago I was walking past the boss's office and he called me in and said 'hey Dave, come here - I want you to look at this website.' So I came in and crawled over the detritus all over his office to look at his computer screen and as I watched, he slowly pecked out the address of ...our own website. He poked his finger at the screen for about five minutes, and I could tell he was trying to communicate and that perhaps he was unhappy about something, but I'll be damned if I could tell you what. Flash forward to two days ago when I was copied on an email to our art director, regarding our website:

good mechanics under the hood .....but it looks like an absolute bore....

which then went on to compare our site to another extremely popular and more brightly-colored local website. So I said that

The popularity of a website has less to do with how many colors it uses than with what it has to offer readers.

and explained that if one wants people to visit a site more often than once a week, it had better have fresh content more often than once a week.

Yesterday I was told by someone else that there were going to be professional web consultants critiquing websites at an upcoming conference and would I like to volunteer our site? So yeah, I said of course, it would be great to have an actual professional look it over. She said great, but clear it with the boss first. So I emailed him and he replied that we'd better hurry because

they may not accept us if they are looking for more primitive newspaper sites that are really bad

So in a way, I'm actually really relieved that while our site is pretty bad, there are some out there that can be considered really bad. Go me!!

- Z

I wish I could say that this was the first time this happened to us (e:zobar,12) . They called us up to tell us one of our lines was down, we said go ahead and test it, and they took down the other one for the rest of the afternoon.

One of our lines remains up, the other remains down, and Verizon has been notified. More updates when available and possible. Sorry guys.

- Z