I don’t give a hoot about golf (much to the chagrin of my in-laws, no doubt) but I did see a clip of 21-year-old Irish phenomenon Rory McIlroy, who tied a record at the British Open today.
I also saw who sponsors him, Dubai’s Jumeirah Hotels and Resorts (as seen in this clip from ESPN):
I guess he won the Dubai Desert Classic last year, as well. Huh.
It wasn’t a great concept – is it for kids or for drunk adults? – but it’s still sad: “Disney to close 5 ESPN Zone restaurants.”
They’re keeping the one at Disneyland’s Downtown Disney and one near the Staples Center in LA.
I was kind of surprised there wasn’t much on the internets about New Coke’s 25th anniversary the other day. The one story I saw was ESPN Page 2: “New Coke: the gift that keeps on giving analogies.”
Key funny:
They set out to provide Pepsi in a red can. They ended up giving us so much more. Twenty-five years ago Friday, the product and brand management masterminds at Coca-Cola introduced New Coke — a cola-formula-changing misstep so profound, so epochal, so mind-numbingly misguided that it quickly transcended the realm of mere marketing blunder and became something else entirely: a lasting, pitch-perfect, near-Shakespearean metaphor for colossal, foolhardy failure poured from a 12-ounce can of corporate hubris, sipped through a straw of not leaving well enough alone.
For that, I’m so very, very grateful.
While I guess the signs have been changed for some time, today’s the official relaunch of Walt Disney World’s Disney’s Wide World of Sports Complex as the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex.
Even though I’ve been to WDW several times since the complex opened in 1997, I’ve still never seen it.
Maybe next time …
Josh finally lives in Maine again
after four years at Boston University, a stint in Southern California with
Walt Disney Feature Animation,
and two years in Dubai, UAE,
where he created and wrote
Newlywed in Dubai.
