The Moonlight Sonata of Beetovan Blatz

A mennonite folk play in low german dialect was all I knew of The Moonlight Sonata of Beetovan Blatz going into this play. It turned out to be a delightful, funny, and insightful story of a mennonite couple, their odd house guest and the complications of mennonite life on the farm.

The play put on by Theatre Projects Manitoba (TMP) was written by Armin Weibe. Weibe is a Manitoba writer who's work includes many novels about Mennonite life, but this was his first play. It started out as a book, he says, but over the years and through the experience of working the idea in a playwriting class, he developed the idea into a play.

His writing translates beautifully onto the stage. The dialect and characters were all so well developed and engaging to watch. The actors did a fantastic job of bringing the characters to life. Everyone on stage was fully committed to the reality of the play and made this quirky world believable.

The music played live on stage by the Russian houseguest, Beetovan Blatz, added to the feel and atmosphere of the show. The actor playing Blatz did an excellent job of creating this strange and complicated character.

I personally enjoyed the quirky, slapstick ending of the play. It ended as oddly as it began and tied the story up with a cute storybook ending.

This was the best play I've seen at TPM, a company that regularly puts on interesting new works by Manitoba play writes. I hope this isn't the last time that Armin ventures into the world of playwriting.

My Buddy & Kid Sister Commercial

The song in this commercial has been stuck in my head since the 80s.

Hot Drinks

This Wendy's training video from the 80s is really funny.

Social Media - Facebook & Twitter

Social media is growing phenomenon in both the personal and professional world. In the professional world, Facebook and Twitter have much to offer in changing the way we communicate. These social media outlets can be used to create and maintain contact with clients, competitors, and the general public with a speed and efficiency that was not possible  just a short time ago. For the younger generation Facebook and Twitter are second nature. They use them to communicate with friends, post photos and keep in touch. This makes them natural social media experts and a hot commodity in the workforce - where people are still operating in the archaic style of sending emails and making phone calls. These methods of communication will always be around, but Facebook and Twitter open up greater opportunity for widespread, interactive with the public.

For those who use Facebook for personal reasons it's an outlet in which to create their own personal online profile. They can use it to keep tabs with friends, share pictures, make new social connections and find old friends and family that they have lost contact with. It's also a place to creep on ex-boyfriends, and find out more than you needed to know about your long lost bff from kindergarten. It can be a bit of a time suck leafing through pictures of people you hardly know, but it's also a way to stay in touch, share videos and photos and have fun with friends.

Professionally Facebook is a great way to get information out about your brand or organization. It allows you to connect to a community of people and get information out to your public. Facebook allows you to create events pages and invites and to quickly and easily get your message out to a large number of people. It also allow you  to track people visiting your site by following the likes and responses to invites. Twitter by contrast will send users in many different directions, but Facebook invites people to spend some time with your site and engage with your brand.

Twitter is a great way to stay abreast of current trends and create a personality for your brand or organization. The people and trends you choose to follow help to define your message. It allows you to get your message out fast and provides an opportunity for people to interact with your brand. For personal use, Twitter allows people to get information as it happens and find information and trends on almost any subject imaginable.

The Flintstones smoking

Advertising from the 1950s

I like ads from the 1950s. This one looks like a piece of art. Too bad TVs don't still look like this, maybe people wouldn't watch everything on their laptops.

1940s Advertising

We Can Do It! Rosie the Riveter

This poster is a popular image that came out of the women's movement
into workplace during World War II. This ad made it's debut in the 1940s and is still an image we are familiar with today. During the second world war while men where overseas fighting women took over their jobs back home. Women began to doing work that they did not traditionally do. When the men returned from war, many of the women returned to the home and to more traditional jobs. But some remained in the positions they had grown to enjoy during war time.

Dropping Money from the Sky

Pseudo Events
Creating News

A pseudo event is an event that is staged in order to create news and bring publicity to an organization or person. Tung Desum Waringin is an Indonesian businessman and motivational speaker, who is famous for his publicity stunts. In 2005, he rode through Jakarta on horseback dressed as a well known war hero in order to promote his first book. Then in 2008, he created a publicity stunt to draw attention to his book, Marketing Revolution. This event involved dropping 100 million rupiah from an airplane, over the city of Serang.

I think that his publicity stunt was a clever and successful way of promoting his book. The book's message is how to "increase your wealth by 2000 percent within six months-or less-with marketing" and this stunt shows that he knows what he's talking about. Instead of spending millions of dollars on the promotion of his new book, he was able to draw international attention in a short time and with less money. The story was covered in the Jakarta Post, on CNN, and is all over the internet, on blogs and websites.

The stunt also drew world wide attention to the poverty in Indonesia, where most people live on less than $2 per day. During the event grown men were snatching money from the hands of small children. 100 million rupiah is only about $10, 740 American dollars and does not exactly put a dent in the poverty that is faced in Indonesia.

His book became a best seller following the event, proving that the attention he drew was positive and his stunt was a success.