Sloganize Me!

• 01/01/08

An online podcasting tool doubles as a portal to self-rebirth.

ARE YOU THINKING WHAT I'M THINKING? Exactly—it's high time I get anew slogan. My old one just isn't supporting my mojo the way it once did:Weinstock…not so much. Droll self-deprecation doesn't quite leap off thebusiness card.

So where do you go when you need a slogan? After reading our story on podcasting tools, I found just the place: Sloganizer.net.

Sloganizer is an instant slogan creator. You punch in your keywords and it fires back with a punchy catchphrase. If you don't care for it, simply click for another one. It feeds you slogans until you land on one you like. Sloganizer: A land without writer's block. Hey, that's a darn good slogan right there!

I need something like what Willie Mays had. There was a guy with a worldclass slogan: Where triples go to die. Meaning the Say Hey Kid was so fast in center field, he could turn would-be extra-base hits into merely well-struck outs. I need something buoyant and expansive, that captures my best intentions, my best day's work. The idealized me. Me, starring David Beckham.

At Sloganizer, I cued in my Teutonic surname and waited for the new me to appear. Right off, Sloganizer showed our lack of familiarity, offering up Weinstock is our middle name! Actually it's Craig. A second try was likewise off-key: Weinstock—go for it! My interior voice is more circumspect; more like, Weinstock—look both ways. I liked 3…2…1…Weinstock! It had a nice momentum, but perhaps would create undue expectations. This one was just too eager: Weinstock if you love Weinstock. I prefer simply to honk.

It's no easy task to wrap a man up in seven words or less. There's a lot of ground to cover—I am large, I contain multitudes! We owe that line to Whitman. We owe this line to Sloganizer: Weinstock is better than chocolate

. More so, this may have been an unreasonable request of technology. I'm a sucker for the lightbulb moment, the sudden leap of understanding—I'm the kind of guy who takes wisdom from a chance cloud pattern. But there are still services we can't impose on the computer. Bill paying is one thing, personal regeneration quite another. At this, Sloganizer is no more discerning than a Magic 8 Ball. It's certainly tone-deaf to decorum. I'd sleep with Weinstock is a bit brash to hand out at conferences. That said, Follow your Weinstock isn't bad advice; on most afternoons, it will lead you right to the nearest Subway.

Funny, I was just about to click off Sloganizer when it delivered this: There's only one way to be Weinstock. Now here was something. It wasn't the thunderbolt I was anticipating, but it stopped me. It's a less graceful form of To thine own self be true. Sloganized maybe not, but I think I was epiphanized! There is only one way to be Weinstock. So I'll just get on to the business of being it.

-Jeff Weinstock, Executive Editor