Musings

This is the best successful viral marketing effort I’ve come across. From Mashable.com:

“So when Heineken staged a fake classical music concert at the same time as a crucial Real Madrid vs. AC Milan game on October 21, there was no chance that any real soccer fan would be there…except if their girlfriends, professors and bosses convinced them (by any means necessary) to attend.

What happens next is sheer hilarity, and a nice example of a high-budget guerrilla marketing campaign from Heineken. Suffice to say that more than 1,100 soccer fans got swindled, 1.5 million people saw their reactions on live TV, and Heineken received five million visitors to the site devoted to the event — and a great deal of news coverage for their troubles.”

From http://www.newzonfire.com

So I was driving on a freeway this morning to a client in San Diego and saw this Volvo…totally in plaid! Pondering about what kind of person I’d find driving, I passed, took a look and found some conservative looking heavy set middle aged man in a blue sport coat and dark framed glasses who I figured was the curator of his web site largely bannered across multiple windows. Of course I had to visit his site, so his ‘marketing’ worked….but after reading the ‘about’ story, it reminded me of a conversation I had many years ago with a psychiatrist.

So back in the 80′s when I worked at a private psychiatric hospital in Southern CA, Capistrano by the Sea, the hospital brought out a prominent psychiatrist, Don Rinsley, graduate of the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry, to speak about severely disturbed patients. Capo had put him up at a hotel in Laguna Beach and I had the pleasure of transporting him to the hospital. Dr. Rinsley was a very friendly and charismatic person, comfortably attired in his semi-cowboy wear; cowboy boots, big buckle, etc.

This guy looked and acted down to earth, something I would expect from a person based out of Topeka, Kansas. So as we drove down Pacific Coast Highway through Laguna Beach peppered with colorful people; tourist, transients, women in bikinis not leaving anything to the imagination, men who definitely had the metrosexual look down to an art, I had asked Dr. Rinsley about his impressions of Southern California. He responded with a chuckle and commented:

“Oh it’s great out here. It’s the largest open psychiatric facility west of the Mississippi.”

Yep, that summed it all up in a nut shell (pun intended). Chuckling…a plaid Volvo…

CIVIL Twilight is considered the period during which it is still bright enough to go about your business as if it were still daylight (for example, the streetlights are still off, you do not need to turn your headlights on when driving). Most laws simply use a “30 minute” time period after sunset. I guess that this is the time period you should use in planning your party. Thirty minutes after sunset, some of your guests will find it a bit too dark, if you do not have lights on.

However, the real time changes with the seasons and with your location (specially your latitude). The scientific definition is that civil twilight ends when the Sun is 6 degrees below the theoretical horizon. At that point, the Sun is still lighting up the tropopause (the tropopause marks the limit of the troposphere, the layer of air closest to the ground, that contains all the usual clouds).

NAUTICAL twilight is (or was) the time when the sky became dark enough for some stars to be visible, while the horizon (at sea) was still visible. This allowed the navigator to measure the altitude of stars, using a sextant. The navigator needs to see the stars (it has to be dark enough) AND the horizon (it cannot be too dark). The scientific definition of the end of Nautical twilight is when the Sun gets to 12 degrees below the horizon.

ASTRONOMICAL twilight ends when the Sun reaches 18 degrees below the horizon. Until that time, the Sun still shines on the upper regions of the atmosphere (mesosphere, for example). We can’t see it with our eyes, but astronomical cameras would still detect some diffuse light that would fog up astronomical pictures. Astronomers have to wait that long before they can take pictures of distant galaxies.