On the recent "California Condor" joke/story I posted where a friend of mine said that he made it up all by himself, a reader rebutted:

The condor/eagle/owl story was surely not made up by your friend. I saw that in Maxim I belive about 2 years ago, I think it was even joke of the month. I looked on the net, and I see the first posting of it was in September 1992.

Faithful reader went on to say that my friend is a "liar", but later asked that be changed to "liar face". So noted.

And, of course, that's the reason I had said that my friend said he made it up -- by way of expressing that I was dubious of the claim, but allowed that I was giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Regarding my post on the marketing genii at Qwest, faithful reader noted:

Qwest has been around for a "long time", since 1996, when all the long distance deregulation stuff was in its heyday. It was not a renamed company -- that's when it actually started. It was pretty successful, and eventually sucked up LCI (you might remember their 5 cent per minute commercials), and US West (one of the baby Bells).

Another faithful reader had kindly posted a similar comment as to Qwest's origins. In my defense, I'll point out that most of the current telecommunications giants in the US were formed by the so called Baby Bells recombining. Thus, Bell Atlantic took over Nynex and GTE to become Verizon, Southern Bell and Bell South merged and then took over just about everyone to become Cingular, and T-Mobile emerged from the ashes of VoiceStream and a few other telecom companies. So please don't judge me too harshly for thinking that Qwest was similarly a new name for combined entities.

I love the comments. It's cool to see that some people are actually reading my ramblings here. My original point, however, about the dubious intelligence of the marketing minds between Qwest's campaign stands. In fact, I'll point out that Liberty's marketing gurus have jumped into the fray by ending their ads thus:

"And that's insurance in action."

That's just what I need, Liberty: insurance inaction. Where do I sign up?!

This profligation of "in action" tag lines is the best stupid trend I've seen since a former employer of mine inadvertantly named their operating system for hand-held devices "WinCE". This led to a series of software products made "for WinCE".

Oy.