There are no bad owners, only bad dogs

2005-02-09

Another day, another big X on the calendar

Once again, I don't know if my head is lumpy or if I sat on my glasses.

Pimp, there's a new reality show coming on here. It's called "Extreme Celebrity Detox" and the detoxification part is a bit more stringent than just drinking a lot of broccoli juice. These "celebrities" (once again, I recognize no one) are detoxed in all sorts of bizarre-o ways, like living with aboriginal tribes and eating guano. Or something. It's all very spiritual and voodoo-y looking on the promos. Anyway, it's stressful enough to make a lot of them cry, and I'm all for that sort of torture of D-list celebrities. Maybe they'll even remove some implants and replace them with something organic, like ... lentils or potatoes (in Anna Nicole's case, eggplants).

I had to observe some marketing focus groups last night, and it was quite weird. We were going out of town, so had arranged for a facility in which to hold these meetings. It had a one-way mirrored window so we could watch in anonymity (for no good reason) and facilities for video recording of the festivities, and it was...in someone's house. We got to the location, and it was, you know, a house. They led us upstairs, where this nice middle-aged couple had coverted an area into a marketing suite for observing focus groups (and probably for videotaping illicit middle-aged British sex orgies). At one point, someone accidentally locked me and a colleague into the observation room for an hour, but luckily no one had to pee. Being an observer at these things tends to be incredibly dull unless you make up nicknames for all of the participants, try to guess who is gay, and vote people off. We may have also scripted a scene or two in the couple's next independent feature. In another odd note, apparently there's nothing in the British building codes about safe stairs, because the depth of each step was about 6 or 7 inches (no exaggerating!), and the length of my feet is considerably more than that, so I almost fell up the stairs on the way in and down them on the way out.

Tonight I'm going down the pub with the techie boys for a cocktail (or two). Then it will be Thursday, more focus groups, then Friday, then monkey, then wooo hooo it will be my last week here! Yay!!

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