This won't be much of a shocker for people who know me and know dwell magazine. I like to style myself a designey, modern, cool-stuff kind of guy (and I am, really), so I naturally thought dwell would be for me. I subscribed, cheap, and got a year's worth. This last week, I managed to read (flip) through the accumulated stack. All the design and homes and architecture are way too stark and modernist for me, but I actively covet a lot of the stuff in the advertisements. This is the kind of magazine that has ads from Room&Board, Porsche, and BDI, as well as a slew of fixture/kitchen/counter design companies I've never heard of, probably because I'm in the wrong tax bracket. Do you read and like dwell?

Thinking of Valentine's Day, I remembered this billboard I saw a number of years ago in Omaha. It's for a jewelry store in town, the world-famous Borsheim's, and it's the first jewelry ad I've seen that I find at all compelling. The imagery is greeting card trite, but the tag line, "Of this you are sure," is a relationship, a life leading to love, the uncertainty of everything else, all condensed into a nutshell of wisdom.

While on vacation in Florida, we passed a billboard that had a very cool car on it, at a downward angle, and the tag line read, "Real Cars are Powered by Gravity." In the corner was a Hot Wheels logo. I thought that was awesome. Then, a few days later I saw something pass by in my RSS reader about Line Rider, the game. And a moment of advertising synergy was born. Hot Wheels (nee Mattel) needs to license a version of Line Rider that uses a car instead of a sled.

I know, you're not all torn up about this. As a further refinement of my blogging efforts, I've decided to stop hosting ads on this site. Especially Google's context-sensitive AdSense ads. Turns out that a blog as eclectic as this one is a bad fit for contextual advertising. I'm open to ads in the future, if I find something that fits the blog better.

Just heard George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue on the radio, and I immediately wondered what a United Airlines commercial was doing on NPR. Seconds later I realized that it was a performance of the Gershwin piece, not an ad. I don't watch commercials anymore, with TiVo in the house, but United's campaign predated my TiVo by quite a bit (they licensed the song in 1976), and seems to have burrowed deep into my brain. Good on them, I am impressed.