Random Thoughts on a Cold Winter Morning

I always have a bunch of samples lying around on my computer desk, because I always need to be wearing whatever I'm writing about so that's where they usually end up, and then they just accrete. (I can see a dozen from where I sit: there are more in the drawer next to me.) I came home from work the other day and there was a post-it note stuck to the cardboard folder containing Fancy, which has a picture of Jessica Simpson looking sultry. Jim said, "I had to cover it with something because every time I looked over at your desk, all I could see was her staring at me with her dead eyes!"

This is what he chose not to see:

She is unsettlingly vapid, isn't she?

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This morning in the shower I used A*Men shower gel, and it occurred to me that the Mugler people wasted a perfect opportunity. A*Men is a fantastic name for a scent: it not only means "Angel for Men", it sounds like "amen", for that religious connotation also present in "Angel".

And what did they call their follow-up? B*Men, which is not only meaningless but also irrevocably throws away another great name.

If only they'd called it D*Men! Then you'd have one scent called Angel (for Men) and one called Demon, and it would have been a perfect pair. But if you've called the second scent B*Men, then you're stuck, because you can't call the third one C*Men, for reasons that I hope are obvious if you say it out loud, and you can't just skip over that one and go straight to D*Men, because then people will say, "Hey, what about C*Men? Oh!....", which is almost as bad.

Way to screw it up, Mugler marketing people.