06.03.09

Mae day

Posted in assorted weird crap, misspelling, verbal indiscretions at 6:01 am by Bill Brohaugh

Forgive me for playing a little catch-up after a long blogsnooze. And forgive me for being late in taking the opportunity to promote a worthy cause: the National Association of Letter Carriers’ Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive. Watch for it next year.

Or, if the Family Circus comic strip has any say in it, “Wach four itt neckst yeer.” I appreciate familial circus support, but couldn’t Bil Keane’s promotional art have been a little less cute, with non-precocious Billy pointing out that the date of the drive was “Satidy May 9″?


Well, at least he spelled “May” right. What explains young Billy’s spelling? Perhaps Josh over at Comics Curmudgeon has the answer.

Meantime, back at the land of superbig spiral notebooks, let’s appreciate the unfortunate message: Letter Carriers will forgive misspellings—even on envelopes, perhaps? If they’re so forgiving of spelling, why do all my letters addressed to “Bill” Keane come back as “undeliverable as addressed”?

06.02.09

The Bing is dead. Long live the Bing.

Posted in acronyms, assorted weird crap at 5:53 am by Bill Brohaugh

Bing doesn’t sing.

That’s because Bing is dead. Bing Crosby, that is—as the fans of “White Christmas” and of the hilarious “Road” movies with Bob Hope will recall.

Bing also doesn’t sing as the new name of Microsoft’s search engine, once sporting the now-non-live “Live Search” name. Writes The New York Times:

Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on “The Sopranos” but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the “aha” moment when a search leads to an answer.

The name is meant to conjure “the sound of found” as Bing helps people with complex tasks like shopping for a camera, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business group.

And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.”

“The sound of found”? Well, then, aha . . . haha. Ha ha.

OK, it’s meta-Bing time. A search for “Bing” on Bing. The number-one result under “News about Bing” as I write this? “Bing’s communications director resigns.” OK, maybe the search engine’s name is kinda silly, but resigning because of it seems a little severe. Oh, wait. That Bing is Dave Bing, Mayor of Detroit. Totally different story.

The number-one regular result points to bing.com. Didn’t realize the mayor had his own site. Oh, wait. That’s the search engine this time. In the top 9 non-news-specific results (the first screenful that I see), Bing the search engine gets four results, Bing the Crosby gets two, Bing the energy drink (never heard of it, myself) gets two, Bada Bing the fictional bar on The Sopranos gets one. (At least the latter is a better/bettah/bada use of Bing.)

Finally, I can’t write a topper to this story any better than the Times did: “Meanwhile, some tech people were already noting that Bing is also an unfortunate acronym: ‘But It’s Not Google.’”