One Red Hot Country Mama!

Does anybody remember Sissyfight? It was a multiplayer game in the late nineties or so, where girls ganged up on other girls in a fight to see who is the most popular.  Here is a short description from the game website:

SiSSYFiGHT 2000 is, like, an intense war between a bunch of girls who are all out to ruin each other’s popularity and self-esteem. The object is to physically attack and majorly dis your enemies until they are totally mortified beyond belief. You’ll never come out on top without making the right friends, so be careful who you’re nice to. Because in the end, only the shrewdest will survive with their social status intact!

So – basically there would be four players on the screen, and people would be able to say things in little bubbles. The object of the game is NOT to be the girl that everyone gangs up on, since then you end up in tears and out of the game. Although popular fiction seems to say that girls have more collaborative play than boys, I seem to remember a lot of sissyfight situations.

Anyway, I found a great new game through my iPhone called Sally’s Salon. It is a game about a female entrepreneur (yeah!) who owns a series of salons. The object of the game is to keep as many customers satisfied as possible – here is a description from the Podgadget Personal Technology for Women blog:

If you satisfy the customer by choosing the correct style, they’ll gain a heart. The more hearts a customer has by the end of the visit, the bigger the tip. Customers can also lose hearts if they’re kept waiting for too long or if you stick them with a style they don’t like, and will storm off in a huff if their heart count reaches zero.

I think a lot of women will relate to a game which is all about running around and pleasing people. Plus she gets to wear more styling outfits as you go up in levels. The game is only $0.99 on the iPhone, and available elsewhere for free.

A creative person I work with sent this to me today – it is a kind of Mr. Potatohead but for Picasso – go ahead and look.

Oh yes, I have wasted plenty-o-time tonight playing on this . Here is my rendition of Warm Soup. Enjoy.

A friend at work showed me these cutest-hamburgers in the world – you can find them here – yes, they are real . And you can work them off on the treadmill in about 2 minutes. 

Jargon – annoying isn’t it? Frequently, the people who use it are ones who want to appear smarter than others through using words that they don’t understand. It is also used by people who don’t really understand what is going on, so they repeat words that others have used before instead of communicating their own point. This runs counter to the whole point of communication – it should be inclusive, not made for only a specific group to understand. After all, communication should seek to elucidate, not complicate.

Excess Voice, a copy writing newsletter I subscribe to, created this hilarious Business Jargon Copy Contest where they asked readers to submit their funniest obfuscating jargon and put the winners on mugs. Here are some of the funniest entries, enjoy:

Shift my paradigm before I’ve had my morning coffee and I’ll core your competencies.

Our alliance stands alone in demonstrating the extensivity of integrated partnerships with other collaboratives.

You can take your bleeping paradigm to the next level and drop-kick it from 30,000 feet, pal.

We need consensus on the agenda ASAP — and I’m talking COB — or we’re DOA. Got that?

We appear to have begun an upstream shift while simultaneously experiencing a paddle deficiency.

Next time you are sitting in a meeting and hearing stuff like this, hopefully it will make you smile… and don’t worry if you don’t understand… the person using it might not understand what he is saying either.