I ran across this interesting little piece on focus.com. My favorite is number 6.

6. “Ah well, this is your free dead Indian, as advertised.
-I didn’t see that in the adverts
-No, it’s in the very small print, you see, sir, so as not to affect the sales.”

A good way to irritate customers is to offer “disagreeable” terms and conditions that they don’t learn about until their transactions have already been completed. Sure, the customer might have “consented” and the vendor might end up collecting the additional revenue. However, this same customer will bombard customer service with angry calls, tell all of his or her friends about your company’s poor policies and post hate messages on the Internet. It’s always more cost effective to generate repeat business from existing customers than acquire new customers, so companies should treat their patrons well.

Lots of other funny ones. See the full article on focus.com.

A good list:

50 Best Websites for Moviemakers 2009

Where am I?

I’m sitting in my studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s a Saturday. There is an art festival going on across the street and I can hear live music through the open windows at the other end of the studio. There was a crowd out there earlier but it started raining a bit and they dispersed.

I have folders on my desktop full of test pictures from models at Elite, Marilyn, and Women. I’m about a month behind on editing and retouching tests, which is unusual. My normal turnaround time is a week and a half.

I’m looking over my monitor at an array of 4×6 postcard-sized photos from test shoots that I printed out on my handy little Canon Selphy photo printer. There’s Imogen Morris Clarke, on her 4th or 5th day in New York, swirling a candy-red blowpop on her lips from when she first joined Surpeme (now at Next, which seems to be kicking ass with new faces lately), Cristina Jurach with mile-long golden braids cracking up laughing on her first day as a model, Diandra Forrest with her hair spiked up into two points like bat ears or something out of a classic 1930’s horror film, Sofi Berelidze’s first good headshot (I laways misspell/pronounce her last name), cool as frozen steel in a turquoise light, California sweetheart Tamara Edwards bent awkwardly with a mens shirt wrapped low under her shoulders in the cool light of an Italian winter sky passed through rippled glass, and Inna Pilipenko’s fierce stare down under a shaft of stark light in her first Polaroid.

Around me, business documents for modaCYCLE, Craftsman cabinets full of tools and computer parts and random objects with interesting textures I intend to eventually forge into as yet truly unconvinced works of art. There is a book case near the door. 12 feet high, 9 feet wide, and not big enough, so I built another one at the other end of the studio. Now that one is full too. Scanners, printers, hard drives, notebooks are piled up around the desk. To my right is a hook overflowing with tote bags from hacker conferences and fashion trade shows like The Train, Platform 2, and the ENK pier shows.

On my laptop over by the couch I have two screenplays. One 22 pages in (goal: 100 pages), the other more outline than anything else. On the desk behind me materials for an article on the Drama Desk Awards that probably will be cannibalized for articles I have a gut feeling about later. Sometimes you go and do all that reporting, you take pictures, you collect peoples PR materials, you talk to people, and no good story comes. I prefer not to write the story if it doesn’t flow naturally. Sure I can start writing and see if it comes, but as I said I’m a month behind on editing model tests, and the Tony Awards already came and went to it’s a little late to be talking about Drama Desk now. Maybe it will help me write a piece next season. I like looking at things in the context of time. Change is inter sating. Change is the basis of story. If you don’t have a sense of something’s history it’s hard to talk about it sensibly.

I thought I might be back in Milan by now, but I just haven’t gotten around to planning a trip. Milan Moda Uomo is coming up, and I was there for it last season. That was interesting. I have a great little video clip from back stage at the Les Hommes show.

I spent the last week in bed with some sort of throat thing. Lost my voice for a couple of days. That was a relief. I hate talking on the telephone. I got sick right after I started the big overhaul on modacycle.com. I changed it from Blogger hosted by Google to Wordpress hosted by myself, got a spiffy visual package installed for it, and when I wasn’t delusional with fever the last week or so I’ve been making this transition happen. I wish it was as simple as flipping a switch, but I guess it’s more satisfying having worked hard to put it together. Now I’m looking at this blog thinking it looks rather drab. Blogger is quick and dirty.

So, tonight I edit. That’s where I am.

Umi Akiyoshi, age 13, Elite Model Management. 5′8.5″ tall.

Shot April 11th, 2009.