Hasta La Creative!

Amazon has taken some heat for offering T-shirts with extremely offensive, upsetting slogans—"Keep calm and rape a lot," "Keep calm and grope a lot," "Keep calm and knife her"—from a merchant called, appropriately enough, Solid Gold Bomb. The T-shirt maker apologized profusely and deleted the shirts, claiming the phrases were automatically generated by a computer script from thousands of dictionary words. It's tough to fathom how language referring to raping and groping could find its way via algorithm onto $20 T-shirts playing off England's "Keep calm and carry on" World War II mantra. Yet I doubt the company would try such a boneheaded stunt for publicity. (After this fracas, it might not survive.) Most media coverage has portrayed the episode as a complex, cautionary tale of technology gone awry, pointing out the need for greater human oversight in our age of cost- and labor-saving automation. Fair enough. It's not like the machines could comprehend such phrases. But if they could, it would mean only one of two things: it's their idea of a sick joke, or they're taunting us about the rapey, knifey tech-mageddon to come.

For girls

For boys

A Danish commercial, from Fleggaard, a store in G|ermany, by the border to Denmark.

There’s an interesting personal story embedded inside this New York Times article on Apple’s mastery of the retail space.

Two years ago, Isobella Jade was down on her luck, living on a friend’s couch and struggling to make it as a fashion model when she had the idea of writing a book about her experience as a short woman trying to break into the modeling business.

Unable to afford a computer, Ms. Jade, 25, began cadging time on a laptop at the Apple store in the SoHo section of Manhattan. Ms. Jade spent hours at a stretch standing in a discreet corner of the store, typing. Within a few months, she had written nearly 300 pages.

Not only did store employees not mind, but at closing time they often made certain to shut Ms. Jade’s computer down last, to give her a little extra time. A few months later, the store invited her to give an in-store reading from her manuscript.

Apple stores generate sales at the rate of about $4,000 per square foot a year, and now account for 20 percent of the company’s revenue.

Apple’s stock is up 135 percent for the year. By contrast, high-flying Google is up about 52 percent, while the tech-dominated Nasdaq index is up 12 percent.