You ask for a spark.  It comes in the form of an animated movie, “Rango”, with Johnny Depp voicing the lead role of a chameleon forced out of his element and made to survive – and thrive! – in a tiny critter version of a Wild West town.

Rango received 89% on the Tomatometer, which is a decent score, if not great.  I’m guessing Toy Story 3 got something like 95%, because who doesn’t like Tom Hanks?  Nobody, that’s who.  But Rango is by far the better movie.  It’s a classic of the form – film, not just animated film – and is one of those rare films that I wanted to see again as soon as I was walking out of the theater.

The Guardian review described it as “trippy”, and I agree – the script combines elements of pop-shamanism, mysticism, existential self-reflection, and armadillo spirit guides, and at the same time blows us over with Hollywood insider-ish references.  The Clint Eastwood scene, for example, was so abrupt and surprising and that I laughed out loud – along with most of the other adults in the audience.  And knowing that Rango is acting – capital “A” Acting – throughout gives us an extra layer of drama beneath the foreground events.

My main props go to the screenwriting team, who weave everything together so well that you’re never “out” of this magical universe they’ve created.  They’ve taken the classic western story – a stranger comes into town, becomes the sheriff, and helps the townspeople out of a pickle – and tweaked it ever so lovingly. 

I should point out, however, that the animation is TREMENDOUS.  From a guy who has long thought that 3-D would be the only thing cooking in the future, this is conceding a big point.  I noticed how good the animation was when I was watching the little mole-girl talk, and noticing that each little hair on her snout looked perfectly drawn/created/digitized/whatever.

I would be shocked – shocked! If Rango didn’t get nominated for a host of awards next winter.  It’s that good.

Paul Constant writes this week in The Stranger about Scott Berkun’s new book “The Myths of Innovation”.  Constant, the Stranger’s books editor, has written a subtly fawning review called “Real Artists Ship”, which is supposed to mean that the important part of innovation is not the generation of the idea(s), but rather in the hard work of implementation, in the getting-one’s-hands-dirty, in the revision, revision, endless revision.

Berkun’s authorial teat proves irresistibly full and sumptuous to Constant, who, like a suckling piglet, has blindly swallowed the whole of the thesis.   I suppose if you’re a underappreciated writer stuck amidst a sea of reprobate coworkers who, depending on the week, are either on benders or in detox, this is a sympathetic impulse. One must achieve faith through works, to borrow from Martin Luther.

Constant’s review dismisses Isaac Newton for not having “deliver[ed] gravity to us like Moses down from Mount Sinai,” giving the lie to the central argument in two ways.  In the first place, Newton cheerfully acknowledged his predecessors by writing “If I have seen far, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants” (I’m paraphrasing from memory here).  In the second place, the concept of a single God who is simultaneously creator and law-giver is surely one of the most notable innovations of all of history, no matter your religious inclinations (if any).

If the notion of epiphanic innovation is incorrect, why is our history and language so rich in this area?  Is it because, as Constant reports, that the specifics of history have been washed out, leaving us with a misguided understanding of the true origins of our innovative history?  Or, could it be that the single “Eureka! moment” is a true phenomenon, and that Berkun has presented us with an opinionated but incorrect argument that refuses to acknowledge the other side?  Is the epiphany, the road-to-Damascus experience, too difficult to analyze, to interpret?

I’m biased.  I have had my own Eureka! moment and know that it is a true phenomenon.  I also know that hard work must come in the months and years after the moment, in order to make manifest in the tangible world that thing that showed up so abruptly and surprisingly in the world of ideas.  But the hard work can complement the epiphany, not necessarily displace it.

To argue that “ideas are cheap” is to avoid the task of discovering where ideas come from.  That is not Berkun’s apparent goal; but it does not mean that ideas don’t matter.  And innovation – invention – requires ideas, even if they are the products of synthesis.  I read with laughter the jab at Steve Jobs, who in Constant’s sidebar is not a great innovator because “he didn’t invent the touchscreen or most of the relevant technologies”.  Jobs was instrumental the 1970’s personal-computing revolution (to call it a mere innovation is to severely discount its impact) well before he innovated with the Macintosh in the 1980’s, or with NeXTSTEP in the 1990’s, or, yes, with the iPhone in the 2000’s.  He is a poster child for innovation, for all the right reasons – he is part inventor, part implementer, and has the foresight of any twenty people you can name.  Whether he has had any middle-of-the-night epiphanies along the way, I can not say one way or the other.  I assume that neither can Berkun or Constant.  Either way, one can not prove they do not exist.

Keyless locks.  The elevator.  The wing.  The shotgun offense.  New ideas abound and it’s a sad day when we try to “democratize” something by tearing it down to the lowest common denominator by taking away its magic.  Ideas are frequently inspired in ways we can not put our finger on, and yes, the genesis of any particular epiphany is difficult to explain, but epiphanies do happen, despite Berkun’s claims to the contrary.

Now, I must confess this blog post is based on Constant’s review, and he may have mangled or misinterpreted Berkun’s book.  In fact, as a cast member in The Stranger’s long-running farce, one might do a healthy bookmaking business assuming from the start that he has got it wrong.  Nevertheless, I need to get my hands on the source material and judge it on its own merits.  I’ve heard nothing but good things about Scott Berkun, and have seen him speak and know him firsthand to be knowledgeable, informative, and charismatic.  So take this review-of-a-review with a grain of salt.

The other day I saw this tweet by Peter Drury referencing Canlis’ “[o]utstanding strategic use of social media”.  Click through to the original article in Seattle Weekly by Jason Sheehan and you’ll see that Canlis has developed a plan to use Twitter to publish clues to the location of 50 Canlis menus from 1950, each of which are hidden at various places around Seattle.  Find a menu and you get treated to a sumptuous dinner for 1950’s prices – ten bucks.

First, a little context.  Canlis is one of THE preeminent luxury restaurants in Seattle.  It’s the type of place that you make reservations well in advance for those once-a-decade celebrations – significant wedding anniversaries, making partner at the law firm, parents’ 75th birthdays, that sort of thing. Unless, of course, you have money to burn and you keep a tab at Canlis and eat there several times a month, as my late father-in-law did for a number of years.  It is not cheap and I would wager that something like 95% of the major metropolitan Seattle population has NEVER eaten at Canlis.  It’s a place that (sad to say) has the whiff of Brylcreem about it – I’m guessing the average age of the guests is well over 50, maybe even 60.

So, to the point – will this twitter scavenger hunt strategy work?  Let’s go back to the goals of any restaurant. I would posit that the following list is a good start:

• Get (paying) butts in seats
• Develop mindshare among current or future customers
• Defend and enhance the brand

Get (paying) butts in seats. I would argue that this scavenger hunt strategy is not going to significantly increase the traffic into Canlis.  First of all, it’s too expensive to make reservations on a whim, unless you’re the type of person to go there anyway.  It *might* take some small incremental business away from competitors like El Gaucho, The Met, or Rover’s, but enough to make a difference?  Hm.

Develop mindshare among current or future customers.  I think that the probable intersection between Twitter enthusiasts and regular Canlis guests is about 5.  As in, 5 people, all of whom made millions selling companies to Google or Microsoft.  So that’s a #fail.  Future customers?  Possible.  Today’s tweeps are tomorrow’s old money.  That’s a long-term bet, however.

Defend and enhance the brand.  It may be that Mark is actively trying to reposition Canlis as less of an old-guard, iconic, special-occasion place and more of a hip, world-class restaurant that caters to a younger crowd with some disposable income.  I don’t know.  But as it stands right now, the Twitter campaign seems awfully awkward, given the current clientele and reputation of Canlis within the Seattle cultural scene.  It chafes.  It would be sort of like DeBeers doing a campaign centered around Kanye West’s diamond dentures.

In summary, I do think that the menu scavenger hunt is a neat idea.  I do not, however, think that it’s a natural fit for a social media campaign, given Canlis’ current brand.

Having said that, the question goes begging: how does a luxury/upscale brand take advantage of social media?  That’s a very interesting question.

I think that first of all, defending the brand position remains paramount in *any* marketing campaign.  Tacking to the middle because it’s cool is a long-term loser proposition.  Twitter is not yet an elite marketing medium (on average).

Rewarding loyal guests would be a useful strategic goal.  The people who can afford Canlis twice can afford it ten times, so getting eight extra $800 dinners over the course of the year from this crowd would be nice.  So using Twitter, Facebook, or blogging to encourage repeat visits with information, specials, new menu items, limited-run dishes, etc. would be interesting.

Promoting the brand by cross-pollination with other brands with a similar customer profile would be interesting.  So teaming up on promoting campaigns from ritzy local charities, civic programs initiated by or supported by the Seattle old guard, etc. would be interesting.

Inviting key influencers from the younger Twitter crowd to come in for a free meal and blog about their meals would be interesting.  This is where a service like Klout might come in handy – identify the up-and-coming foodies, bring them into Canlis, one or two per week, and promote their published experiences to the younger crowd.  This has two beneficial outcomes – you’re explicitly not impinging upon the existing brand, but you’re getting word out to the next generation of customers in the media that they are comfortable with.

What I would not recommend is a “Mark Canlis twitter stream”.  What little I know about the business leads me to believe that unless the restaurant owner eats, sleeps and breathes social media, attempts to personalize the business with an open dialogue with the social-media universe ends up being either slightly or mostly awkward, if not humorously PR-catastrophic.

OK.  I’ve written a ton.  What do you think?  Leave a comment!

“Totes”.  If you run around online at all, you’ll have seen this word and recognized it as a trendy new way to say “totally”.  It’s Valley Girl squared – taking an adverb, making an expletive out of it, then making an even shorter expletive.

Example:

I’m totes in love with Kate Nash.

It’s used a lot by itself, as in:

– Do you like Kate Nash?

– Totes.

The interesting linguistic element for me is the excision of the ending –ally; a tactic that I foresee becoming more common.  Future predictions of new words to enter the language this way:

• brutes (brutally)
• fates (fatally)
• fines (finally)
• profs (professionally)
• norms (normally)
• informs (informally)

So the question was posed: how many Oscar nominations have the Coen brothers received in their career?  At stake was a free ticket to tonight’s Lebowski Fest screening, a madcap event filled with White Russians, ugly sweaters, and lots of laughs.

I answered “11”.  WRONG, I was told.  The Wikipedia entry for the Coen brothers says 10.  But add them up:

1. Fargo:
1. Best Picture
2. Best Director
3. Best Screenplay – Original
4. Best Film Editing (as Roderick Jaynes)
2. O Brother Where Art Thou?
1. Best Screenplay – Adapted
3. No Country For Old Men
1. Best Picture
2. Best Director
3. Best Screenplay – Adapted
4. Best Editing (as Roderick Jaynes)
4. A Serious Man
1. Best Picture
2. Best Screenplay – Original

I get 11.  I’m not sure where the 10 number comes from.

Tonight I’m drinking White Russians by myself and spending time thinking that the rug really ties the room together.

It’s early Sunday (well, early for you, maybe, and the world, but not for me), and my wee head hasn’t fully processed the caffeine yet.  I’m like a boulder perched on the edge of a steep cliff, Road Runner-style, about to topple off, achieve max airspeed, and pound poor Wily E.  Coyote into the desert floor.  Potential energy abounds.  Kinetic?  Not so much. Yet.

So, as a trigger, I thought I might blog about some random stuff that’s been going through my head lately, things I’ve experienced recently, anecdotes, flashes, insights, etc.

• I was sad to miss StartupDay yesterday.  Bill posted a good recap here and I’m sure there will be others coming along.  Search the twitter for #startupday.
• The reason I missed it?  Kids’ soccer games, during which my progeny scored goals like Fernando Torres, defended like Martin Skrtel, and/or jumped in mud puddles and looked for worms, depending on age and gender.  Fun times.  The Magnolia fields are muddy, boggy even, and they emit a bog-like stink as well.  Imagine vast green-brown acres of Honey Bucket aroma.  But we got sun (sun! rejoice!) and the kids had fun, which is the most important part.
• Pet peeve: don’t refer to a blog post as “a blog”.  As in “I wrote a blog the other day about the Puyallup Fair”.  You’re nouning a noun in the wrong way, nincompoop.  Yes, language is my bitch-trigger.
• Related: if you post something to Tumblr, should you use the verb “to tumble”?  As in, “I tumbled that pic of the ferris wheel?”  I posted the question to the twitter and got mixed responses.  Try an extension: what verb would be appropriate if you use Posterous?  “To Posterize”?  Yeah, doesn’t work.  Creating new verbs for specialized situations sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t.  Let’s use another example, because my potty-mouth hasn’t been fully exercised yet: if somebody in the company does something really stupid, you can say, properly, that “he wanked it” and everyone will know what you mean.  You could not say, “he masturbated it” – it just doesn’t work.  Though the Latin roots of both verbs may be the same, the English language doesn’t accommodate both in the same way.
• My last day of work at my current job is next Tuesday.  I have very complicated emotions around the whole moving on thing.   Interestingly, responses from coworkers have been mixed.  Some people can’t believe I would leave; others are openly sad; others are like “don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.”  In sum: it’s a good thing.  I worry about my team, the team I leave behind, good people all, who I have nurtured and developed and cared for and protected and defended these last couple years.  They’re grownups, obviously, and can fend for themselves, but among my vast repertoire of skills (*cough*) is the ability to inspire and encourage teamwork, and lead teams with a very light hand on the tiller.
• Friday a friend did an extremely nice and unexpected thing for me.  This proves the hypothesis that the best friends, the truest and longest-lasting friends, do nice things for you and look out for you even when it’s not conventionally expected.  When your aunt dies, even loose connections on Facebook will say “Oh, I’m so sorry.”  Only true friends will surprise you with the unexpected gesture.
• I’m about to kick Unfuddle to the curb.  It’s slow and those minutes waiting around for it to fuck up a merge are among the most annoying of my day.  So I set up VisualSVN Server on a box I manage, and am going to attempt the transition.  We’ll see how it goes.
• Friday night in Fremont was A. Fucking.  Madhouse.  In a fun way.  Thousands of drunk hipsters milling around in long lines, swilling beer and having fun.  Fremont Oktoberfest, represent!
• This past Thursday I went to Hops and Chops, at its usual location at Auto Battery on Union.

I went in hopes of meeting Dave McClure, profanity-shouting super-angel and occasional colluder.  I didn’t get to meet him, but I did get a chance to catch up with friends old and new.  Among the new friends was Eric Bogs, co-founder of the Wingmap App for the iPhone, whom I had just met up the street at The Garage.  Eric is working with Jim Mitchell and Elise Oras, on the rollout of  Wingman in Seattle.  Also: met Daryn Nakhuda of TeachStreet, who gave me a new t-shirt to replace the old one I currently have.  Thanks TeachStreet!

• Also: Friday, I had the most interesting convo with a friend that I’ve had in a long while.  Interesting not in the typical snobby lit-crit way that an educated Seattleite might suggest, as in “That Town Hall presentation by Nobel Laureate so-and-so was tremendously interesting!”, but interesting in terms of my thought processes, emotional response, and the multi-faceted aspects of the conversation.  Yeah.  Interesting.
• That’s all for now, peeps.  Have a great Sunday.  Go out there and pin some motherfucking tails on some motherfucking donkeys.  Yes, you know what I mean.

So I must have been offline or in orbit when these were announced, and frankly the timing and sequencing of the news has me wondering if I’m in some sort of Nolan-esque noir film, but local actor, writer, and director Marya Sea Kaminski won a 2010 Stranger Genius Award.  I raved about Marya’s performance at a Hugo House event I attended back in March, and am really happy that she’s gotten some much-deserved love from the degenerate parolees that parade through the Stranger’s Arts & Entertainment pages in between 30-day stints back at rehab.

The reason I’m confused: Apparently they announced the winners back in August.  Check out this Slog post from August 5th about Marya’s award.  But they didn’t announce the short lists in the various categories until a few days ago.  And the Genius Awards party was last night at the Moore Theatre. Do I have this wrong?  Has my internal clock been replaced by a dippy bird?  I’m not sure.  It seems like the Stranger would be better served by the following timeline:

1. Announce the short lists
2. Spend a couple months accepting financial bribes and sexual favors from the nominees
3. Milk the angst and petty backbiting for story material
4. Have a huge party sponsored by an alcohol company and announce the winners
5. Milk the despair and recriminations from the losers for yet more story material

But maybe the Stranger staff, desperate as they are for their next fix, can’t grok even the most basic methods of entertainment journalism.  Whatevs.  I’m happy for Marya, and whichever winner it is that’s pictured as a horse’s ass on their website, and wish I could have attended the celebration last night.

Last night was the tenth edition in what is unarguably the best geek event in Seattle, the Ignite! series.  Hey – don’t believe me?  The Ignite! crew just won some sort of award.  To summarize the format for those of you too new or too forgetful to the scene – bring about 15 speakers up on stage in front of about 700 raucous geeks, have them talk for exactly 5 minutes in front of their slideshow, which is exactly 20 sliides long and which advances every 15 seconds.

You get nerves.  You get laughter.  You get those squirmy uncomfortable silences as the slide show gets borked or the speaker goes all doe-eyed in front of the headlights.  Mostly you get entertained and informed.

Maybe it was just me, but the crowd last night seemed more restrained compared to previous Ignite events.  My hunch is that there were a lot of people attending Ignite for the first time – call them late adopters, to use a geek’s parlance.  The cover charge may have had something to do with it.  It may also just be a busy time of year and the normal attendee patterns are thrown off a bit.  Don’t get me wrong – it’s very nice to see new faces and meet some new people.  But the normal drunken naked debauchery was in short supply.  (ed: Drunken?  Naked? – OK, not naked, and maybe just buzzed).

There were some headline names that everyone in the Seattle geek scene probably knows, or knows of: Marcelo Calbucci, founder of Seattle 2.0; Andy Sack, founder of Founder’s Co-op; and Matt Harding, better known as Dancing Matt, and who is truly Internet Famous.  In keeping with the egalitarian theme of the event, however, the speakers that stole the show were:

• Mark Selander, presenting on the Commutapult, a utopian commuting scheme with a sure-thing 100% safety record.  Biggest LOLs of the night.
• Bradley Vickers, who gave a talk on his real-world experience rowing across the North Atlantic with four guys and not enough food.  Not quite the Shackleton experience, but very captivating.
• Dan Shapiro, former CEO of Seattle mobile tech company Ontela (which merged with PhotoBucket last year), who gave a funny and informative presentation called “Hacking Birth”.
• Vanessa Fox, one of the handful of people who might legitimately vie for the title of “Best Search Expert in the World” (ed: didn’t she just write a book? Yes!  Yes she did), gave a fast-paced and very diverting talk about search and Those Crazy People On the Internet.  I must, in good conscience, ding Vanessa several points for showing photos of a guy on ChatRoulette dressed in a very meowy cat costume.

Last night was one of those nights I learned a lot.  For example:

• You can put rose petals in ice cubes. (via Kim Prohaska)
• You can hail a taxi using the same dispatch system the cab companies use. (via Aimee Cardwell)
• There is a restaurant in Seattle called Nettletown, which coincidentally is located not 100 yards from where I sit as I write this, that serves foraged food. (via Michelle Broderick)
• A donation of one pint of blood can save three lives. (via Jeff Shuey)

Overall: Even a slightly subdued crowd can’t diminish the pure genius of the format or the enthusiasm that the speakers bring to the stage.  If you haven’t yet attended an Ignite event, plan on making the next one – they’re not going away soon.

p.s. What happened to the exclamation point?  I think it used to be Ignite! Seattle, but now it’s just Ignite Seattle.  As a result, my synapses fire slightly less frequently when I read the name.

p.p.s. PSA: do not – EVER – use your cell phone when you are standing at the urinal.  Just sayin’.

p.p.p.s. If you’re in even the slightest funk, go to an Ignite event.  It will expand your consciousness, connect you with the community, and make you laugh.  Guaranteed.

This past Thursday, Peter Sagal and the rest of the crew from NPR’s Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me! radio show arrived in Seattle for a sold-out show at the Paramount.  The day before, my friend Rob had posted on his Facebook wall that he had an extra ticket.

Alas, I saw the note a few hours after Rob had posted.  Surely, thought I, surely the ticket can’t still be available, can it? But I e-mailed him anyway.  Fortune smiled on me, or perhaps Rob took special pity on me, but either way, he responded soon with the best news of my week, that yes, the ticket was still available.  I did a sort of mental entrechat-dix.

We met beforehand for a drink at the Dragonfish Asian Cafe, which is altogether too busy, but convenient to the Paramount.  Then on through the vast mooing crowd, rubbing elbows with fellow nerds, geeks, fanboys and –girls, bluehaired NPR diehards, hipsters, members of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, and of course the Contingent That Would Like To Take Carl Kasell To Bed And I Don’t Care How Old He Is.  Our seats were just shy of nosebleed, but *cough* it’s a radio show, and last I checked, sound travels pretty well.  So our seats were just fine.  And distance can have some advantages.  Those sitting closer to the stage probably left the Paramount a little sunblind due the glare from Peter Sagal’s, um, hair.  Watching from great heights, it was like watching a shiny dime hovering around behind the podium.

Of special note to Seattle locals was the presence of Luke Burbank, late of the much-praised radio program Too Beautiful To Live, which went off the air last September. TBTL still has a podcast available, and if you’ haven’t yet drank (drunk? Damn you, Heather, for introducing doubt into my tense-world) the kool-aid, you should give it a listen.  Luke has a semi-long history with WWDTM, having been a panelist and guest host off an on for the last few years.  And if you read “semi-long” in the previous sentence and thought “that sounds naughty”, you have my kind of sense of humor.

Also: I’ve never seen anyone referred to as an “American podcaster” until I went to Luke’s Wikipedia page.  That phrase carries the hum of disappointment, of temporariness, of “I’m between gigs right now”.

Joining Luke on the stage were, of course, Carl Kasell (who is very funny), the comedienne Paula Poundstone and the writer Tom Bodett.  Paula spent the night channeling Gilbert Gottfried, which may not have been a conscious attempt.  Perhaps as we age we all end up like Gilbert; squinting, confused, and wry.  Nevertheless, all of the panelists had their moments of glory: the well-timed jibe, the elegant riposte, the throwback, the send-down.

Special guest of honor for this week’s program was Northwest author and literary superhero Tom Robbins, who is seventy-seven years old.  Hard to believe.  He gets around pretty well for having one foot in the grave.  He noted he’s on sabbatical right now.  Tom doesn’t really have the right presence for radio (IMHO, of course) – he’s a slow, sure speaker, thoughtful, and taciturn – he actually reminded me of my dad a bit.  He’s got a sort of throaty/scratchy/hoarse inflection, and further, he’s sort of a low talker.

I was very interested to witness some of the minutia of the recording of the radio show; the retakes, the do-overs, the little hand gestures that Peter Sagal used to indicate this or that or the other thing; the hovering presence just out of the spotlights of the show’s production staff; the practiced way that the lady came out and mic’d up Tom Robbins just before his spot.  It’s a world completely unknown to me and I loved every minute of it.

Also: Peter Sagal really looks nothing like he sounds.  Take a look at his website and tell me if you don’t agree.

So is it not with me as with that Muse
Stirr’d by a painted beauty to his verse,
Who heaven itself for ornament doth use,
And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,
Making a couplement of proud compare
With sun and moon, with earth and sea’s rich gems,
With April’s first-born flowers, and all things rare
That heaven’s air in this huge rondure hems.
O, let me, true in love, but truly write,
And then believe me, my love is as fair
As any mother’s child, though not so bright
As those gold candles fix’d in heaven’s air:
Let them say more that like of hearsay well,
I will not praise that purpose not to sell.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 21