No Rest for the Wicked
 Over in South Korea, a documentary about an elderly romance between two 70-year-olds has people coughing into their kimchee. "Too Young to Die" is a love-at-first-sight story with cross-generational appeal but the Korean censors want to excise the steamy bits as being "unfit for public viewing." The issue seems to be a long sex scene with mondo wango and if they let this go, they figure everybody's going to be doing it. "More power to 'em" is the concensus and censors and critics are fighting to keep the film intact. The man in the street concurs:
- Interviews with elderly men gathered in several parks in South Korea's capital Seoul found strong support for the idea of sex after 70, and men well into their 80s saying they were still up to the task even without Viagra.
That had to be a fun assignment, walking up to old guys in a Seoul park and quizzing them about their sex lives. Probably doesn't happen every day.
- But the men said women were less supportive—evidence of the continuing sway of Confucianism, they said. "My wife is not willing to do it—she agrees only if I plead for it, not often though," said 83-year-old Myong Sah-oh, who lives with his 74-year-old wife.
Isn't the pleading part of the fun?
Lexicographers Get Booty, Too
Yes, really. Merriam-Webster has just added the posterior sense of booty to the corpus, along with hottie and noogie. Oughta liven up a few games of strip scrabble.
- Although Webster was said to be a stern and humorless man in life, perhaps he would be pleased to see that Americans today honor his work, by adapting their language constantly.
No. I don't think he'd be pleased about this at all. "Prithee Noah, add the rude 'bootie' as a locution for the buttocks in thine orthographie." The man would have had an apoplectic fit.
The Sweet Spot
Time was, if you could hard code HTML in a text editor you were all set. You could go to a bar in Silicon Valley, scribble an idea for a Website on a cocktail napkin, and angel investors would shower you with millions. Which brings us to our next installment of Where are they now?:
- Instead of returning to the once safe and secure path of corporate America, Foydl has decided to start her own business—Doodie Duty, a service where she scoops up and disposes of dog doo for clients in the Sacramento area.
Yep. You shoveled it for 'em in the boardroom, and now we're takin' it to the streets.
- "In the corporate world you walk in every day and you're not sure what you're going to face," she says. "I know exactly what I'm going to face when I come into work now.
Seems almost too good for a dot-commer. And James Phillips who lost his cush gig at AT&T? Now he's selling advertising space—on his forehead.
- Phillips has been unsuccessfully posting auctions on eBay offering to tattoo a message or logo on his forehead to the highest bidder. One potential buyer put in a bid for $75,000, but later reneged.
Agreed. The market won't bear 75 large. Disney doesn't have to pay anything. Wait, let's look at the next one about Karyn Bosnak, the gal who's PayPalling her way out of debt with savekayrn.com:
- "If you have an extra buck or two, please send it my way!" her site reads. "All I need is $1 from 20,000 people, or $2 from 10,000 people, or $5 from 4,000 people ... Together, we can banish credit card debt from my life!"
Not only can she do math like a college graduate, she's managed to net over $10,000 like this. Why, we could start our own Website to raise money for Foydl's Doodie Duty so she can pay the 75 big ones to get her logo on Phillips's forehead. Everybody wins!
You Could Have Thought of This
 Craig Wolfe is on the road to wealth beyond his wildest dreams with his Celebriducks. For awhile now, he's been making these boutique bathtub duckies which really annoys me because I've been looking all over for a William Shakespeare rubber duckie and here he's been selling the damn things since 1998.
- Wolfe did not think they could actually be used to promote anything. "We were below the radar," he says, "with mostly a cult following."
A cult of rubber duck collectors. Anyway, the Philadelphia 76ers commissioned Wolfe to do an Allen Iverson duck early this year as a stadium handout trinket and people went berserk trying to get them. Wolfe starts gaining momemtum.
- The producer of the MTV program "The Osbournes" requested four prototypes of Ozzy and his family.
You can see he's got a Beanie Baby here.
- "Celebriducks represent the market's high end," according to Wolfe. He "spent two years perfecting the ducks' squeaker. Skeptics said adding one would cause the ducks to sink in water."
"He's mad! Mad I tell you! Everyone knows you can't put a squeaker in a floating duck!" There's more:
- The Allen Iverson duck is adorned with Iverson's trademark cornrows hairstyle and arm tattoos. The attention to detail has redefined rubber duckmaking. "Who's ever done tattoos on a duck?" asks Wolfe.
This means that after we get Doodie Duty tatooed on Phillips's head, Wolfe can do the duck version. Now, you ask yourself, couldn't anybody start making these things and cash in on the bonanza? Wolfe explains that it's not that easy. "Even if you had ducks of Mick Jagger and Marilyn Monroe, you still couldn't make a statement unless you had a breadth of ducks."
This man thinks like an entrepreneur. You can't compete with him because he's the guy with a breadth of ducks.
7:49:42 AM 
|
|
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
