Alexandra Watkins is the Founder & Chief Innovation Officer at Eat My Words, a San Francisco based creative naming agency known for creating unforgettable brand names. The following post originally appeared in her blog and is reposted here with her express permission.

Announcing the most frightful brand name of 2011… the Head Scratcher of the Year goes to…

Ironically, the global search for Eat My Words’ annual Head Scratcher of the Year winner produced the disastrous mash-up of those very two words global + search: Glearch. This trainwreck of two perfectly good words is without a doubt, the worst brand name of 2011. Honorable mention goes to Qwikster (died a quik death), Helishopter (what the heli were they thinking?), and Fooducate (so similar to fornicate, it sounds like something you could be arrested for if you did it in the aisle of your local Safeway).

The unanimous response to Glearch is it conjures up terrifying images of Lurch, the freakishly tall and ghoulish manservant from the Addam’s Family, who never spoke, using only grunts, sighs, or simple gesticulations. This is never a good thing. Glearch also reminds people of the word, lurch, which has many unfortunate definitions. And it’s hard to spell… Glerch, Glurch, Glurruch… you shouldn’t need a search engine to find Glearch. Duh.

We admit that Glearch is actually a pretty cool tool. It lets you search by country, language, and/or by search engine. Clearly someone very smart created it. Unfortunately they were not as skilled when it came to creating the name. As with past Head Scratcher winners, including Xobni, Speesees, Shwowp, and Shryk, we suspect Glearch was the result of a drunken Scrabble game. Tip: Just because a domain name is available on GoDaddy for $9.95 does not mean that is what you should name your company.

As the winner of Eat My Words’ 2011 Head Scratcher of the Year award, Glearch will receive a freakishly tall gold plated trophy. (We’re also happy to give them some complimentary name consulting should they decide to glearch for a new name.)

Special props go to super sleuth Charles Knight, of AltSearchEngines, who tipped us off to the name Glearch, along with dozens of others clunkers, over the past few months. Charles suggested a new definition for Glearch: a verb meaning, to turn something wonderful into something terrible. We submitted “glearch” and its new definition to the Urban Dictionary, where you can now find it listed.

Please continue to send us bad names for our 2012 Head Scratcher contest. And if you want to make sure the next brand name you come up with doesn’t win that freakishly tall trophy, take the Eat My Words SMILE & SCRATCH name evaluation test to see if your name sucks. Of course, please contact us right away if your name does indeed suck. Operators are standing by.

Here’s wishing everyone a Happy Holiday with the sincere wish that clients or managers at work don’t try your patience in the ways shown in these two hilarious videos.

Do either of these creative challenges resonate with you?

Viewpoint Creative – Holiday Card from Viewpoint Creative on Vimeo.

I help edit SPEAKER Magazine for the National Speakers Association (NSA). Each month I curate the Relevant Resources column – a list of time-saving tools and technologies.

The December edition listed a variety of gifts suitable for clients, speakers’ bureau contacts, colleagues, friends and loved ones. Whether the recipient is a foodie, science geek, chocolate lover, adventure seeker or bookworm, this selection is sure to get your gift-giving wheels turning.

Get a Life

Give the gift of nostalgia with a copy of the actual LIFE magazine published the week your recipient was born or during a key event that took place in their lifetime. Pick a date from 1936 to 2000 and add a beautiful easy access hinged wood display frame for $35. Prices vary by date of issue.

Achieve Stardom

There are billions of stars in the sky, but only one with your (or your loved one’s) name on it. The Name a Star gift box is a unique and romantic gift that comes with naming instructions, a wall map, astronomy booklet and personalize pen. Once the recipient submits a name, he or she will receive a certificate, unique information about the star and a guide to locate it in the night sky. $40.

Keep It Classic

They say all professional speakers should have a book. U Star Novels let’s you star in a personalized edition of your favorite classic alongside your friends, family members or colleagues. The plot remains the same, but you choose the cast and decide who follows the White Rabbit down the hall in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and who gets to be Tom Sawyer in the Mark Twain classic. $24.95.

Rev’d Up

Give your adventure junkie friend the ultimate adrenaline boost with a Race Car Driving Experience gift from Cloud9 Living. Choose from locations nationwide and numerous racing packages, including stockcar racing, Indy car racing, formula racing and dragster racing. Whatever you choose, it is sure to fulfill the need for speed. Prices vary.

Choc-o-Lot

Everyone knows a chocolate lover or two. Give them the ultimate gift that keeps on giving-membership with the Chocolate of the Month Club from Amazing Clubs. Each month, they’ll receive a one pound selection of premium chocolate made by leading chocolatiers across the nation. Membership plans are offered in three-, six-, and 12-month periods. Prices vary.

It Figures

Surprise clients or loved ones with a fully customized figurine from Sculpteo. Simply upload a headshot and profile picture, describe the clothes and accessories you want your figurine to have, approve the model and receive it in the mail in just 10 days! Go conventional or eccentric, and select from a variety of themes and careers including fireman, pilot, doctor, sports aficionado. $75.

Spell It Out

Like to D-I-Y? Letter Perspectives lets you design your own unique framed letter art using a name, unique phrase or word that is special to the recipient. Create a masterpiece by entering letters, choosing your theme ( nature, sports or rustic), selecting from black and white or sepia photo tones, and picking the perfect mat and frame to match. Starting at $160.

Feelin’ Hot Hot Hot

Spice things up in the New Year with a personalized gallon jug of Tabasco – everyone’s favorite hot sauce. Nothing says “I’m a TABASCO lover” like one of these sitting on the kitchen counter. Available in all the flavors you love: Original Red, Green, Chipotle, Garlic, Habanero, and SWEET & Spicy. $44.95.

As You Wish

Need a little R&R after the holidays? SpaWish gift certificates and cards can be used at thousands of day spas and beauty salons across the country for services like manicures, pedicures, haircuts, hot stone massages and tanning. Print a personalized gift certificate at home, have it delivered via e-mail or shipped in a gift box for as low as $4.99. Prices vary.

Next to Napa

Dinner at Thomas Keller’s famed Napa Valley gourmet restaurant (voted one of the top 10 restaurants in the world) costs around $300 a head, and reservations need to be made six months ahead. Why wait? Treat someone to The French Laundry Cookbook and dine in style over the holidays. $30.

Help Haiti

Give a gift with meaning, purpose and passion. The Lambi Fund of Haiti provides boats, fishing equipment, pigs, goats, honeybees, tree seedlings and irrigation canals that can be purchased in a friend or family member’s name. With these special gifts of life, families in Haiti are provided with numerous opportunities to grow and generate income. Prices vary.

You can subscribe to SPEAKER magazine on the NSA website.

I’ve blogged about ways to represent large numbers that uses images of a trillion dollars stacked on pallets. Now, thanks to Kostas, my financial adviser, here’s a fascinating chart that’s all about money.

To view, be sure to click on the ‘+’ symbol in the upper left of the screen a few times until you can see the chart detail. There’s graphical representation of the value of dollars, thousands, millions, billions and trillions. It’s all here, from the cost of buying the world a Coke – and teaching the world to sing – to the value of $1000 invested at 5% over time:

Given the focus on the 1% that the Occupy movement has, this part of the chart shows that they might want to narrow the focus to the top 1/500th percent:

Elsewhere in the chart it shows that the 1.6 million US households which make up the top 1% claim a fifth of all household wealth ($2 trillion) while the next 9 million households share the next $2 trillion, down to the 63 million households making up the bottom 50% who earn below $55,000 annually. That, together with the chart showing the hourly income of CEOs today compared to production line workers, makes for some compelling infographics to paper the walls of your tent in Zuccotti Park.

Round and round it goes
Round and round it goes
– Spandau Ballet

I recently heard a startling NPR report on Roundabouts in the USA.

The report highlights that, over the past decade, the number of roundabouts in the U.S. has increased dramatically, from the low hundreds up to the thousands. Traffic circles (as roundabouts are known Stateside) clearly cut down on commute time and pollution.

Traffic engineers in Los Angeles estimate that at just one intersection

…more than 100 hours of cars just sitting there wasting gas will be saved every day after the retrofit. That calculates to a reduction in tens of thousands of pounds of greenhouse gases every year.

So, with improved traffic flow equaling less wasted time and less pollution, what’s not to like about roundabouts?

Plenty, it seems to some.

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt

NPR reports that roundabout projects have been defeated all over the U.S. by people who think they’re dangerous. LA resident Isabella McNeil’s comments are typical:

“Oh my gosh, I see people literally like, there’s nothing there, they just keep going, and I’m stuck going, ‘Uh, I think it was your turn to yield?’ ”

An educational campaign that communicates the advantages of roundabouts seems key to overcoming American resistance to changing their approach to intersections from stop and go to going with the flow.

I’ve blogged before about the peculiar aversion to clotheslines exhibited by many Americans. Add an aversion to roundabouts together with a love of green jelly as a side dish to a Turkey Dinner at Thanksgiving and you have a unique trifecta of likes and dislikes in the Land of the Free.

On Sunday I invited my daughter to the Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley for the opening weekend of Tiffany Shlain’s latest film Connected. Since we both work at Cisco, and the movie trailer promised a discussion of internet and connectivity, I thought we’d both find it interesting and relevant to our day jobs. “It’ll be a nice Father-Daughter afternoon out,” I mentioned to Emily.

I had no idea.

Tiffany Shlain is the daughter of Dr. Leonard Shlain, a Renaissance man who was a surgeon, inventor and author. In May 2009 he passed away after a two-year battle with brain cancer. This film is an emotionally raw account of her father’s life and death; of his influence on her and the ideas on language and the brain he developed in his book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image; of
her own struggle to conceive a second child and of her eldest child’s brush with a life-threatening medical emergency.

She started work on the film five years ago, at that time her Dad was one of her principal advisers on the script. His passing both challenged her ability to complete the film and offered an opportunity to make her autobiography a point of departure for a wide-ranging consideration of the effect of the internet, connectivity and collaboration on society today.

Tiffany has been involved in the promotion of the web as the founder of the “Webby Awards” as well as an early proponent of distance learning.

The film uses animated timelines to span developments in science, technology and innovation from the Big Bang to the present day. She focuses on historical figures such as Einstein, Marie Curie and James Lovelock to detail the evolution of ideas from the era of the printing press to the web. The decline of the honeybee is seen as a leitmotif for the many threats to the planet that patriarchal, left-brained thinking has led to.

However, Tiffany takes an optimistic view of the potential for the interconnected world we inhabit to discover a way out of the crisis. By focusing less on linear text and more on pattern recognition and images, she suggests the Web might begin to undo the centuries exaltation of the masculine, left-brained approach to problems.

As Adi Da Samraj has written in Not-Two Is Peace, Only everybody-all-at-once can change the current chaos. Tiffany’s stunning autobiographical film holds hope that the interconnectivity made possible by the network will indeed become a platform for a sensible resolution to the challenges we all face.

Coming to Theaters

Connected is currently playing at selected theaters in San Francisco, Berkeley and Mill Valley, CA. Over the next six weeks it opens in Portland, OR; Monterey, CA; Los Angeles, CA; Seattle, WA; New York, NY and Denver, CO.

Speechwriters are the coming thing. In fact, this is a profession that is more talked about, and more written about, than ever.

Want proof?

According to the Google Ngrams database of millions of terms from their vast collection of digitized books in American English, “speechwriter” is an increasingly common word. Here’s the results for the the period 1950 to 2008:

(Click here to enlarge.)

The Financial Times marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, in May 1611, with a review of a wide range of books on the topic.

This King James Bible is clearly, to date, the most read book in the English language. It was translated from prior Latin, Greek and Hebrew versions by a committee of scholars meeting in London.

What I find remarkable is the impact of language of this version of the Bible on common English. Phrases which originated in the King James translation include:

• apple of his eye
• clear as crystal
• how are the mighty fallen
• fat of the land
• fell flat on his face
• fly in the ointment
• lick the dust
• man after his own heart
• rise and shine
• rod of iron
• signs of the times
• sour grapes
• sweat of his brow
• wheels within wheels

Public speakers from the 17th to mid-20th Century drew on people’s intimate familiarity with the King James Bible and similar sources (Shakespeare’s plays, hymns) to create a bond through commonly accepted touchstones that matched their assumptions with those of their audience. Modern speechwriters, lacking audiences who would respond to overt Biblical references, nevertheless might find some of the phrases listed resonate unconsciously as they echo down the centuries.

I’ve just finished reading an astonishing well-written novel by the Irish writer Tana French. The Likeness is a police crime story set in modern Ireland. Published in 2008, it foreshadows the collapse of the Irish economy in an orgy of property speculation.

Tana French’s novels are set on the edges of Irish society. Her third novel Faithful Place, was located in The Liberties, a marginalized working-class area of Dublin. The Likeness is a murder mystery located in the Wicklow mountains, in the fictional village of Glenskehy “a scatter of houses getting old around a once-a-month church and a pub and a sell-everything shop, small and isolated enough to have been overlooked even by the desperate generation trawling the countryside for homes they can afford.”

Maeve Binchey meets The Big Chill

The tone of the book is part Celtic Deliverance – a insular rural community intent on giving urban sophisticates a hostile reception; part Maeve Binchey with an attitude; part college-friends extending adolescence over lost weekends in the style of The Big Chill, topped off with a dose of Law & Order.

The plot thickens

Before you pick up this book, be warned that it requires a superhuman act of suspending disbelief in the most unlikely of coincidences: a murder victim just happens to be a totally unrelated identical twin of the undercover cop, who assumed the false identity the police constructed for a failed sting operation that went nowhere years before. ‘Nuff said, buy into the premise, it’s worth it.

The Social Construction of Reality

Tana French trained as an actress and I enjoyed the many ways this novel is an extended riff on Method acting. What does others’ belief in our identity depend on? How do they know we are who we say we are? Actions? Memory? A shared set of social experiences? It’s the challenge faced by the salesperson looking to win a deal; the con artist riding the knife-edge of the lie as he bleeds a mark; the adulterer pulling a fast one on a trusting mate; the undercover cop. Friends and lovers place us close to the center of their social world because they believe our identity is what we claim it is. The closer those who betray us, the greater the hurt. French plays with these risks, up to and beyond the point of betrayal by a kiss. It makes the book a real page turner.

Indeed, her premise is that the social construction of reality can be faked, giving the lie to the claim that “…the individual can live in society with some assurance that he really is what he considers himself to be as he plays his routine social roles, in broad daylight and under the eyes of significant others.” (Berger and Luckmann, p.101)

A terrible beauty

Tana French writes lyrical prose that will haunt your dreams. She captures the mood of intimacy among friends who share evenings of poker and Jazz; communal meals and dangling conversations. Her words conjure up relics of ould dacency; college life; boreens; office politics; waifs and strays; angst and anger.

Quote:

I wished I knew more about Australia. I thought of red earth and sun that hit you like a shout, twisted plants stubborn enough to pull life out of nothing, spaces that could dizzy you, swallow you whole.

Quote:

…if I had any sense I’d be scared, but all I could feel was every muscle loosening like I was eight years old and cartwheeling myself dizzy on some green hillside, like I could dive a thousand miles through cool blue water without once needing to breathe. I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.

Purely by accident, I’m reading Tana French’s novels in reverse order. Next up, her first novel, In the Woods.

I can hardly wait.

Executive communications professionals increasingly work with video. They range from simple Flip videos which tell winning stories to full-blown studio productions with panel discussions, remote participation via TelePresence and pre-recorded transition or interstitial segments.

The challenge is to not only to research, script, edit and produce the content, but to do so in as creative a way as possible — capturing those lean forward moments when the video engages viewers emotionally and connects with the audience.

I’ve recently started watching high-quality creative video in order to see the outer limits of what’s possible onscreen. It’s fascinating to see what others have done. Corporate video won’t ever look anything like this, but watching these videos unleashes my imagination. What’s more, I find that creative videos approach storytelling from a totally different perspective from that which I’m used to. Because storytelling is such a key skill in transmitting information, the more we learn how to tell stories creatively, the better we’ll become as communicators.

Here’s three creative videos I’ve enjoyed recently.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass

This video has been seen by 24 million people on YouTube. It’s infused with a Merry Prankster, anarchic geek spirit:

Watch it a second time and you realize the smashed television sets piled against the wall and paint-splattered overalls indicate a number of rehearsals — nothing this good would have been created in one pass. Now, you might not get away with with lining up four VP’s against a wall and shooting paintballs at them; but people won’t forget variations on Rube Goldberg-like routines if you had the courage to work them into the CEO’s next keynote. Talk your product demo guys into a pinball triggering a golf club that knocks a baseball down a ramp and presses the on button that starts the demo (that lives in the house that Jack built.)

Metronomy – She Wants

This is a music video from Metronomy, an electonica /pop band from the UK. But it’s not just any music video. It creates the surrealistic atmosphere of the dream state in hypnotic detail. An homage to Buñuel, the video is the work of French directors Jul & Mat who have a movie called The Science of Sleep, which I’ve not seen, but is apparently filled with dream sequences:

METRONOMY – She Wants – by JUL & MAT from JUL & MAT on Vimeo.

I loved contrast between the dreamer and the dreamed (your executive and her staff?) and the sequence where she rotates through 360 degrees as does the camera (with stage hands dressed in black supporting her). From the moment she leaves her bed, with feathers flying in reverse motion, to the point at which she loses her dance partner at 3:28, the story-line builds. When the party-goers collapse the scenes unravel, the characters she met betray her, and the alter-ego she pushed down pushes back. A graphical a representation of the business cycle as you’ll ever see.

Just the thing to try and pull off for your next All Hands video, as long as Mary in Accounting doesn’t blink when the camera pans across.

London Time Lapse from Brick Lane to Primrose Hill

I was impressed by Anatoleya’s video taken on a Flip Ultra HD (with image stabilization software included). Speeding up the frame rate in the editing phase creates an engaging stop motion effect of a walk through this London street market:

London Time Lapse from Brick Lane to Primrose Hill from Anatoleya on Vimeo.

I can’t wait to use this effect for the opening sequence at a corporate conference – shooting the room as it fills with people.

Or how about the cafeteria from 11:45 – 1:15? But everyone already eats their lunch too fast. It might be amusing to make one video in a company cafeteria in Europe, one in Asia, one in the USA and play “spot the cultural differences”.

Or how about a stop motion video in the lobby from 6:00 am – 9:00 am
… or one corner of a sea of cubicles
… or a call center
… or one person at their desk for a couple of hours
… or technicians installing a new rack in a data center
… or the janitors at the end of the day, moving from floor to floor.