If you’re a Firefox user (and if not, why not?), you’re probably familiar with one of the many browser plugins that have sprung up to entertain, save time and increase efficiency.

There are plugins for Outlook, too. I hadn’t tried any until I was looking for a way to batch-save email attachments. I found it in EZDetach from the folks over at TechHit.com. It costs about 30 bucks, but if you’re trying to tame an Outlook landscape with thousands of emails littering the horizon everywhere you turn, it’s money well spent.

(Disclaimer: I am not a buzz agent for TechHit, and I don’t know anyone connected with the company. I paid my 30 bucks like everyone else. But the plugin works so well, I wanted to pass along the tip. Maybe it’ll help you, too.)

Ever wonder how many official variations of the Google logo there have been? Here’s a complete gallery of all the “Google doodles” that have been created for various holidays and occasions through the years.

One week later, let’s see: GM is retooling their suicide robot ad, gay groups are condemning the Snickers ad and fast food workers are insulted by the Kevin Federline ad for Nationwide.

Yet nobody (relatively speaking) is paying much attention to Prince’s Penis Prank from the halftime show.

In the immortal words of Yakov Smirnoff: What a country!

Takeaway for marketers: In the immortal words of Sigmund Freud: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Every year the complaints get stronger about Christmas-related marketing creeping earlier and earlier into the calendar. Thanksgiving used to be the dividing line (no Christmas marketing before turkey day). Then it became Halloween. Now it seems like Labor Day is the green light in many quarters to break out the trees and Santa hats.

If my email inbox is any kind of a canary in the coal mine, though, we may soon reach the 365-day Christmas marketing cycle.

Amid all the email for Valentine’s apparel and candy and jewelry and teddy bears, there it is: a subject line that says, “The perfect Christmas gift.”

Egads.

What’s going on here? Does the Christian Children’s Fund think that Christmas in February is the right message? Did the email servers over at Adknowledge spit out a project three months late?

I don’t know the answers, and I don’t have time to think about them right now. I gotta get over to the mall and beat the crowds.

“Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.”
—Robert Hunter