On today’s lesson of “What did we learn?” we examine one Ashton Kutcher – Twitter’s biggest cheerleader, short of Lady Gaga. A Twitter hero from the start, his eight-million followers boasts a mighty big audience. As I’ve said many times, for many, social media is simply a better way to screw up to a much larger audience in a much shorter amount of time. Ashton proved that last week, when he defended Penn State’s fired coach without knowing all the facts of why he was fired. Kutcher immediately took a ton of grief for his defense, and backpedaled, realizing what he did, and admitting that he screwed up. He did the complete and total right thing. He screwed up, he [...]

Today, I am simply NOT Mary F’ing Sunshine. One of the joys of running a small business (or having any kind of job, really) is that usually, you really like it. “Usually,” however, is the clutch. There are days when you just won’t like it. You’ll be in a shitty mood, either from work or something else, yet you still have to go in and smile like you’re the happiest person in the world, not a thing bothers you, and life is just a bowl of ripe, freaking peaches. See the problem? I’m having one of those days now. It’s a fun little combination of things. A fight with the fiancé. A bad workout, coupled with a trainer who weighs about [...]

I got no less than five invitations yesterday to try Google+, the new social network from Google (Nasdaq: GOOG). Unfortunately, I can’t use any of them. Why? Because I pay for Google. I’ll give you a second to process that. Yup. I use Google Apps to run shankman.com and all the shankman.com emails. Because of that, I have no way to link Google+ to my account, because you need a Google profile for it, and Google Apps (the thing I pay for) doesn’t support Google Profiles. Still with me? Not sure what kind of logical customer service it is to treat the people who pay for your service worse than the people who get it for free, but that’s apparently [...]

For just about three years, I’ve been a relatively happy lessee of a 2008 Infiniti FX35 Crossover. Living in NYC, it’s spent much more time in my garage than on the road, but when I needed it, it’s always been there, and always been a good car. No problems, no issues, and I’ve still got 12,000 miles left on the lease I’ve got to use before I return it in a few months. So I was more than bummed to find an email today from my local dealership, which I shall reprint for you below in its entirety, sans the person’s phone number and email address. Bolding, grammar errors and the like, all theirs. To: peter @shan…..com From: Steve C…, [...]

This post may or may not be NSFW, depending on your view of what “NSFW” is, which is the whole point of this freakin’ post. I was once in a long-term relationship with someone. We went out to dinner to meet two of her friends I’d never met before. About an hour into dinner, when everyone was loose and having a good time, and the male friend cracked a pretty ribald joke about sex. I thought it was hysterical, and had to counter. So I did, with the following: Two truck drivers are talking about a blown tire on the second trucker’s rig. The first one says “Hey, how’d you blow that tire?” The second one says “Oh, I ran [...]