Okay, but how do I get him to respond to me?

I’ve pretty much abandoned Twitter, so as not to use up my lifetime allotment of words before I exit my 20s, but I’m almost tempted to go back. Why? Because Isaiah Mustafa, aka the Old Spice Guy, aka Nicole’s Future Husband, sometimes responds to people. Now, looking at the usernames, you’ll see that these people are all celebrities (of both the Real and Internet varieties). It almost makes me want to write my brilliant novel years ahead of schedule, just to bring me to the notice of the Old Spice people, so that I’d get my own personal message.

Almost.

A real good idea

Who doesn’t like free stuff? That (and the realities of garbage collection) is pretty much the idea behind curb shopping/dumpster diving. Somebody tosses out an item that is no longer needed, and if another person who wants it sees it before it’s collected by the trashman, it’s fair game. (Although, randomly, a few weeks ago I ran across this online discussion as to whether this practice is allowed by Jewish law.) I guess this practice might seem strange to people who live in places where this just isn’t done, but know people in the New York metro area who’ve gotten really nice items (coffee tables, bookcases, etc.) this way. I myself am always on the lookout, though I’ve yet to see anything on the curb that I wanted to take home with me.

So I thought it was cool/creepy/cool when I heard about the Blu Dot Real Good Experiment. Product by the Mono advertising agency for Blu Dot, a furniture company, the idea was to leave 25 of their Real Good Chairs in various NYC locations. They put GPS monitors on the chairs, and the approached the people who took them to ask why they had. My first exposure to the project came via the video below, which was a bit twee for me (the British woman’s voiceovers and fake interview questions especially killed me), but still seemed cool. I did think it was weird and intrusive to put the GPS in the chairs without notifying the curb miners (not EVERYBODY who took a chair knew beforehand what was going on), but it seemed that enough people didn’t mind it for the experiment and documentary to go on.

Then I read this article in the New York Times, which managed to clarify details of project. It did seem interesting to me that so many of the chairs seemed to go to artsy or well-to-do people. Obviously, a lot of New Yorkers fit either or both of those descriptions, but there were only 25 chairs…I thought it was disappointing that the video made no reference to tweeting the chairs’ locations, or to the lengths to which some people went to try to get one.

Blu Dot Real Good Experiment from Real Good Chair on Vimeo.