Archives for category: Weird
« Older Entries

Acquisitions and Movies

April 15, 06 //
18

Update #3: (drum­roll) Arno is/was Andy “Malarkey” Clarke. What a crazy — but funny — bloke!

Update #2: Jeremy Keith responds to Arno after receiv­ing a sim­il­iar email, but for perfume.

Update: Arno responds to this post. (read below first if you haven’t already for the full scoop)

You know, I’ve sifted through a truck­load of emails in the past few years about instant credit reports, money-making oppor­tu­ni­ties and not to men­tion sales­peo­ple inter­ested in sell­ing me every­thing from pet rocks to laser-guided golf ball retreivers.

In all this time I’ve never once received a domain acqui­si­tion email, until today of course.

Not more than 8 hours ago, I received an email from an Arno Zim­mer­man in regards to pur­chas­ing, or actu­ally acquir­ing this domain for a “well-known Hol­ly­wood stu­dio”. The email was a bit hazy, but to keep this on record for future con­ver­sa­tions I’m pre­sent­ing it here in it’s entirety.

Read on as I really can’t make this kind of stuff up:

Dear Mr Sagen,

My sin­cere apolo­gies for writ­ing to you unan­nounced. My name is Arno Zim­mer­man and I am CEO of an Inter­net domain name acqui­si­tions agency based here in Los Ange­les, California.

My agency is cur­rently engaged by a well-known Hol­ly­wood stu­dio. The stu­dio is pro­duc­ing a new action movie called The Kar­tooner. The movie has an all star cast, includ­ing Bruce Willis in the title role, and will be released in the fall. My client is there­fore very keen to pur­chase the rights to the domain name kar​tooner​.com from you.

I am sure that you will under­stand that I can­not pro­vide you with much in the way of infor­ma­tion about our client at this time. How­ever I can assure you that they are sin­cere in their offer, and that they are keen to con­clude this pur­chase quickly.

I would be inter­ested to learn how much you would require for this trans­fer of ownership.

Many kind regards,

Arno Zim­mer­man

Okay, admit­tedly, you caught me off guard Mr. Zim­mer­man. If some­one were to tell me — like you just did — that Bruce Willis would be star­ring in an action movie called The Kar­tooner, I’d be hes­is­tant to believe such a thing.

How­ever, if you want to talk about the green­back, I might be will­ing to budge for about $66,000 dol­lars, give or take.

Let me know, alright? In the mean­time, I’m going to try and fig­ure out what I’d pur­chase with that kind of money.

Arno Responds

Dear Mr. Sagen,

My client’s legal team have informed me of your arti­cle regard­ing our offer to pur­chase your domain name. While I was a lit­tle sur­prised, as I have not yet had a reply from you directly, I do not think that this will cause us a prob­lem as The Kar­tooner is now in full pro­duc­tion, cur­rently shoot­ing live action in Manhattan.

As I men­tioned in my pre­vi­ous email, The Kar­tooner will star Bruce Willis in the title role. Bruce plays an impov­er­ished artist in New York who pays his bills by draw­ing car­toons for the New York Times. Through a series of unfor­tu­nate acci­dents, Bruce’s char­ac­ter mis­tak­enly becomes the tar­get of a Mafia hit squad and must use all his wits (as well as his artis­tic skills) to stay alive. Need­less to say I can­not divulge any fur­ther plot details.

You men­tioned in your arti­cle today that you would be pre­pared to accept a sum of $66,000. Unfor­tu­nately this is over the bud­get that my agency has been autho­rized to pay for the aqui­si­tion of your domain name. How­ever I won­der whether you would accept a smaller sum, in addi­tion to a small walk on part in the movie?

Would you please be so kind as to let us know your deci­sion as my clients are keen to con­clude this pur­chase quickly

Many kind regards,

Arno Zim­mer­man
CEO and Inter­net domain name acquisitions

Newborn in a Bottle

February 19, 06 //
10

Ever think you suf­fer from too much sleep? That your nights are never really rest­less and that you might have too much energy? Would you like to change this immediately?

Boy, have I got a solu­tion for you! Fresh from the aroma-scented boxes sit­ting on our shelves comes a new one-of-a-kind prod­uct for those who don’t suf­fer from sleep deprivation:

Inconsequential Thoughts

October 26, 05 //
14

Have you ever had those moments where you com­pletely for­get what­ever it was you were sup­posed to do? Despite metic­u­lously jot­ting said “to-do” item in an event plan­ner, jour­nal, online app or just a plain piece of paper you still for­get. It doesn’t mat­ter if you used a blue pen, if you were prac­tic­ing yoga at the time or fly­ing 2,000 feet over the Indian Ocean, we rarely remem­ber every­thing we need to accom­plish, even when we write them down.

Then, out of the blue, some­one says some­thing com­pletely ran­dom like, “Gee, I really like scrub­bing the mold off three-day-old bread with the edge of a but­ter knife.” and sud­denly that lit­tle light­bulb turns on over your head, blink­ing on and off like a busted neon sign, and you remem­ber that you needed to pick up but­ter from the store.

I can’t remem­ber what I said the other night to my wife, non­cha­lantly, as I was adjust­ing the cush­ions on our couch. What­ever it was it inad­vert­edly reminded her that she needed to call her mother about some­thing impor­tant and all because I made an off­hand remark about some­thing com­pletely ran­dom and incon­se­quen­tial but oddly rel­e­vant to our dis­jointed conversation.

Snuggets

July 10, 05 //
13

As far as blog­ging is con­cerned, I’ve been a bit out of the loop lately. You could attribute it to the daily rit­ual of let­ting life’s respon­si­bil­i­ties take focus or another excuse could be that I really haven’t had much to say of as late.

Hon­estly, I could wag, point or wig­gle a fin­ger in the direc­tion of either excuse if it really came down to it, but instead I’ll just relin­quish any excuse and steer my atten­tion towards main­tain­ing a sense of sta­bil­ity in regards to the life­line of this site.

That said, I’d like to share with you a few snip­pets, which in some sense could also be nuggets of infor­ma­tion, so I’ll call them “snuggets”. If you’re like me and love using com­pletely made up words in every­day con­ver­sa­tion, then feel free to use that in future dis­cus­sions around the water cooler.

And now, I present this week’s worth of snuggets:

Blingo

As it says in the About sec­tion on the Blingo site: “Blingo is a search engine with a twist. Each search on Blingo is also a chance to win a prize.” It’s really that sim­ple. In fact, just moments ago I was ran­domly selected to win a free movie ticket and because Colin Devroe invited me ini­tially he’ll also receive the prize.

The Case of the Burnt Grilled Cheese Imprint

Word to the wise; when cook­ing a grilled cheese sand­wich at your inlaws remem­ber to check the pan to see if it’s non-stick. Last week I made the mis­take of prepar­ing a grilled cheese sand­wich and then cook­ing it on a reg­u­lar pan.

It didn’t help that the stove was gas burn­ing and that I had set the tem­per­a­ture on high. As soon as I slapped the bread into the pan, it stuck to the bot­tom of it like glue and left behind a burnt toast-shaped imprint.

After dous­ing the pan in vine­gar and an esti­mated 20 min­utes of furi­ous (elbow grease) scrub­bing it looked close to as good as new.

Eat­ing Bugs for Protein

I’ve often thought about and won­dered why cer­tain tribes eat bugs for pro­tein. Ask a tribe mem­ber and he or she will tell you it’s for nour­ish­ment, good health and vital­ity or, sim­ply, that it just tastes good.

I once ate a hand­ful of chocolate-covered ants and thought it was one of the most dis­gust­ing things I had ever eaten, taste and tex­ture wise. Ask your­self this ques­tion: Would you ever eat a bowl­ful of cock­roaches for $1,000,000 dol­lars? The money aspect is tempt­ing, but could you endure just how utterly dis­taste­ful that would be?

The Inven­tor of the Slow Cooker (a.k.a. Crockpot)

Who­ever invented the slow cooker, thank you, from the bot­tom of my “I really didn’t feel like spend­ing a great deal of time prepar­ing din­ner” heart. Who­ever you are, you’re right up there with the inven­tors of Silly Putty (NASA, I believe) and water-expanding, insta-grow dinosaurs.

If you’re ever in a bind for time; cut up some round steak, toss in a can of stewed toma­toes, sweet pep­pers, a drop or two of Red Hot and switch to ‘High’ and in 5 – 6 hours you’ll be enjoy­ing pep­per steak.

Choco­late Shell Ice Cream Topping

On a sim­il­iar note to the above snugget, thanks to whomever came up with the choco­late shell top­ping. If you’ve never tried this, it’s basi­cally the same choco­late solu­tion that you would get in a real ice cream shop, that hard­ened choco­late coat­ing on an ice cream cone. In this case, it’s for home use and makes a bowl of vanilla ice cream that much more tantalizing.

That’s it for this round of snuggets. If you’d like to add your own, please per­suse the com­ments because we all love tid­bits of what some would call use­less bits of infor­ma­tion, but what I like to call Snuggets.

« Older Entries
SEO Company, Directory Submission, Phone Cards, Calling Cards, International Calling Cards