The colon: its usage is evolving due to the internet, text messaging, and twitter.

Colonoscopy: It’s Time to Check Your Colons

Good article on the history of emoticons and whether some day they might be considered proper punctuation.  Must resist temptation to include emoticon in post…

The Very Long History of Emoticons

Great Flickr set from print magazine featuring punctuation use in graphic design.

?! on Flickr

South African Breweries has created a new type of beer can for the World Cup, in order to get cold beer into the hands of thirsty fans as quickly as possible.  No more of this open-the-beer-and-pour-into-plastic-cup business.  Just pop the entire top right off the can and go to town.  They call it “full aperture”, which sounds a lot better than “it opens like cat food”.

This is obviously a more costly solution than regular cans, but I’m kind of surprised we haven’t seen this before as a niche product.  People might want to use this for tailgates and other situations where bottles are no good, and you just can’t stand that it takes thirty seconds to drink an entire beer in a normal can.

I like how the article says the new can “provides an exciting alternative to traditional cans and glass bottles that are typically prohibited at stadiums and arenas around the world”.  Are they implying that regular cans would be banned for some reason, but this can wouldn’t be?

World Cup beer can designed to turn into a cup

First up this ad from Dodge that premiered during the USA v England match last week.  It seems targeted to air specifically during that game, and probably won’t be shown much after the game.  I know I haven’t seen it since.  I think it definitely pumped up the Americans, there’s just something about seeing George Washington driving a muscle car.

Next we have another ESPN commercial, but this is just a short commercial for SportsCenter.  SportsCenter has been using the “athletes in the ESPN offices” gag for years now, but they usually do a good job of keeping it fresh.  I’m not the biggest Landon Donovan fan, but he does fine here.

Lastly we have the most artistic/French commercial so far.  Narrow depth of field, washed out color, it feels like the beginning of a movie.  I’m curious to know who directed this one, but not really curious enough to try to look it up.  It might be entertaining to draw cultural comparisons based on this commercial and the Dodge commercial.

I don’t know how many new commercials will be coming out now that we’re into the tournament.  Maybe some companies are saving some special ones for the final rounds when they know they’ll  have a ton of viewers.  If so, expect more updates, otherwise we’ll see about a recap of the best and worst commercial of the 2010 World Cup.

I knew Rivers was a big USA soccer fan, and it’s great that they did this, put part of me can’t help but think it would have been so much better if Pinkerton-era Weezer did this.  Free download on iTunes for a week, starting tomorrow.

Aren’t I embarrassed.  In a previous post, I said I felt confident that I had already seen the best commercial of the 2010 World Cup.  Well I was wrong.  I’m not going to say that this is going to be the best one of the tournament, but it’s definitely the best one so far.  Here’s hoping someone tops this somehow.

Bonus link: Spanish soccer site Marca has posted a great interactive schedule of the World Cup.  Learn who’s playing who, when, and where.  I wish I had this a few weeks ago when I had to resort to printing out ESPN’s schedule of the games and highlighting the ones I want to watch.

Mundial 2010 en MARCA.com

Welcome to the highly anticipated third entry highlighting commercials leading up to the World Cup.  See the previous two installments here and here.  There are more and more commercials coming out, so I’m going to start filtering them a bit and just post ads worth watching, for better or worse.

When Louis Vuitton decides they are going to run some World Cup themed ads they don’t settle for anything less than the best.  So they get Pelé, Maradona, and Zidane together to play a couple games of foosball.

This Sony ad is surprisingly not as lame as it could have been.  I think the kids really sell the whole concept.

ESPN has decided that they are going to run the craziest ads.  Now we get an ad telling us that people love the World Cup so much it just makes everyone want to have sex with everyone else.  Although I do think I have heard that they have documented a significant uptick in worldwide pregnancies nine months after the World Cup.  Who did they get to narrate this one, Hugh Hefner?

Ok, I know there are still three weeks or so to go before the World Cup starts, but I think I’m ready to call a winner.  At a length of three minutes though, it’s more of a promotional short film than a commercial, so it’s a little unfair to compare it against the other ads featured so far.  I don’t really know where to start on this one, it packs in so much in those three minutes.

We start off with Didier Drogba, who is quickly becoming the face of World Cup 2010.  I like how throughout the entire ad they do a good job of capturing the essence of the culture for each country, like when Cannavaro saves Drogba’s shot and it flashes to Cannavaro enjoying la dolce vita back home in Italy.  Rooney gets the clearance but his pass is intercepted by Ribery.  Great little shot of Howard and Donovan enjoying Rooney’s downfall.  But Rooney decides he’s not going to go down like that and dispossesses Ribery.  Ronaldinho ends up with the ball and gets up to his old tricks.  Someone should have told Nike that Ronny wasn’t a sure thing for Brazil’s World Cup squad because, er, he didn’t make the team this year.  Cristiano Ronaldo is not my favorite player by a long shot, but he doesn’t annoy me here.  The Simpsons take was great, I feel like I’m going to call him Ron-al-D’OH from now on.

So the Nike Write the Future ad is taking top honors so far, and with 3 million views in 5 days most people reading this will have probably already seen the ad.  We’ll be back with part 4 once there are some new ads worth talking about, which will probably be soon.

Here’s a great infographic featured in this month’s Wired UK.  The infographic was created by Section Design from data by journalist Simon Kuper and economist Stefan Szymanski.

If you haven’t read it, I recommend Kuper and Szymanski’s Soccernomics.  In the book they outline the basic theory used in this infographic, along with a bunch of other interesting topics such as game theory as it pertains to penalty kicks.

One thing I noted when looking at this graphic is how they briefly mention that the formula they use rarely predicts a draw.  This is an important caveat, because draws are fairly common in soccer.  So in the group stages in this graphic, each group has a team with 3 wins, 2 wins, 1 win, and 0 wins.  This might simplify things for their calculations, but it does not reflect reality, where there will surely be draw games during the group stage.  We won’t see every group end up with a point spread of 9, 6, 3, and 0.  We’ll see teams with 4 or 5 points who move on, we’ll probably see some groups where there are ties in points and one team moves on due to goal differential.

This treatment of the group games is responsible for what I think is the strangest part of this whole graphic: Serbia in the final.  The graphic shows Serbia winning their group, which places them on the path shown to reach the final.  I think Germany will likely win that group, which mean that Germany and Serbia would switch during the knockout stages.  Whether Germany makes the final or not is a different story though.

But I’m just going with my gut and conventional wisdom, these guys have a lot of data to back up their claims, so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how close they are in the end.

The World Cup predicted

Some other boffins sorting things out: