Today Mark Mayerson turned me on to a new website called Ad Verbatims. It invites commerical professionals to send in some of the stupider notes or critiques that they've received from clients. Very funny and chillingly familiar to any of you who've ever had to deal with client notes. For anyone whose ever heard " I don't know what I want, but I don't want that!" Here's an example:

#383- "It needs to EXPLODE off the page! It needs FIREWORKS and COLOR! LOTS of colors! And exclamation points! Be creative. I could have done what you sent me on my own computer. The 14pt type is so small. I mean, you guys are the experts..."


The site boasts that recently ADWeek Magazine listed it among the TEN GREATEST OFFICE TIMEWASTERS on the web.

http://adverbatims.blogspot.com

Enjoy!

Birthdays: Victor Herbert, Langston Hughes, Renata Tebaldi, Clark Gable, John Ford, George Pal, Terry Jones, Jim Thorpe, Sherman Helmsley, Lisa Marie Presley, Garrett Morris, Boris Yeltsin, Pauly Shore, Sherilyn Fenn

Welcome to February from Februarius, named for Februus, a Sabine god of the underworld called the Purifier. There's another theory that this month is named for Febis, the Latin for fever, this being a time in the Roman climate when fevers were most common.

1887- California land Developer Harvey Wilcox takes out a county deed for a new ranch he calls 'Hollywoodland' after the name of an estate his wife admired back in Connecticut. It gave its name to the new Los Angeles town- Hollywood.


1893- In New Jersey Thomas Edison and his engineer W. K. Dickson build the FIRST MOTION PICTURE STUDIO in New Jersey. It was covered with black tar paper and nicknamed"The Black Mariah" because that was the nickname of police paddy wagons that it resembled. When Edison invited cartoonist James Stuart Blackton to film his lightning sketches in the Black Mariah, it also became the first Animation Camera Settup.
It's debatable how much of the inventing effort was more Dickson than Edison. Edison was only marginally interested in the movies. He was more concerned with the problem of how to extract New Jersey iron ore from rocks using electromagnets. Dickson worked himself into the hospital to make the studio work, resenting Edison’s apathy. Finally he started experimenting on his own. When Edison found out, he fired him.

1915-The Fox Film Company formed (Later Twentieth Century Fox).

1964- Indiana Governor Matthew Walsh declares that the Rock & Roll song “Louie-Louie” by the Kingsmen was pornographic and should be banned. The FCC investigated and their conclusion was that the “lyrics are unintelligible at any speed”. The song remained a major hit. In the 1980’s several schools in Northern Cal held Louie-Louie Marathons-96 straight hours of Louie-Louie played by Punk bands, polka bands, string quartets, folk trios and marching bands. Whoah whoah, Me gotta go-yo,yo yo yo.

1990- Siegfried & Roy open their exclusive show at the Mirage Casino in Las Vegas. They and their white tigers have performed for Hollywood stars, presidents and Pope John Paul II. One Vegas columnist notes: “When Elvis performed in Vegas there were some empty seats. But there are nothing but full houses when Siegfreid & Roy perform.” The act was finally ended by Roy’s being wounded by a tiger in 2003.

2004- At a Superbowl live halftime show pop star Justin Timberlake pulled the bra cup off of singer Janet Jackson exposing her right breast with a starburst stud on it . Named “the Wardrobe Malfunction”, the incident sent America into another one of its periodic paroxysms of Puritan outrage, that the rest of the world finds so amusing.