Bloomingdales is selling a candle for $48.
Burberry has a scarf for $495.
Blagojevich is demanding at least half-a-million-dollars for a Senate seat.
Do any of these marketing geniuses understand there’s a recession going on out there?

This week’s recommended reading from your friends at Blogenberg…

• Shaq’s gotten on board with Twitter, and his tweets are a must-follow. He even called a Twitter-doubter to prove it was really him.
• Seth Godin explains the new rules for the Pulitzer Prize.
• Mozilla, the group behind the highly regarded Firefox browser, is taking aim at iTunes with its new Songbird application.
• Anil Dash documented his overnight stay at the Guggenheim in the Revolving Hotel Room.
• With recent findings that most corporate blogs aren’t trusted, Jeremiah Owyang offers a checklist of sorts for building a trustworthy corporate blog.
• Behind the scenes (and after all the nasty campaign rhetoric) the Bush and Obama staffs are working together behind the scenes to smooth the transition, or at least that’s how it appears here.
• This is a super-cool promo-trailer for a documentary on New York Street Games featuring celebrities discussing how important these games were to growing up in New York City.

Shutting up is one of my most difficult skills. Not talking and listening to others is a skill set that I was not born with. I have had to work at it. I tend to be a talker and storyteller (and I’m usually entertaining though I recognize I am at times obnoxious and self-centered). I have to make a conscious decision to listen to other people’s stories. But I do because I’ve learned that, one it can be interesting, two, it makes people feel good to have you listen to them, and three, making people feel good makes me feel good and, it is, after all, all about me feeling good!

When I do media training I tell participants that shutting up is a strategic skill. When I give talks about communications I tell people it’s important to know when to shut up.

This past Friday night I hosted my wife’s big 50th birthday bash. I realize I did more talking than listening. I’ll excuse myself though, since I was in the hyper host mode (though really having fun at it).

But the more Blogenberg remembers to shut up, the better communicator Blogenberg will be.

Friday night was my wife’s big birthday bash. It was the first party that a dear friend of ours has attended since getting a new kidney. It turns out that the donor of her new kidney had never drunk alcohol. When she and her husband arrived, I swear I heard the new kidney singing Kool and the Gang: “Celebrate good times, come on! There’s a party goin’ on right here!”

We had a beer and wine bar at the party. My friend and her new kidney visited the bar. I was never so happy to have contributed to the delinquency of a kidney!

This week’s recommended reading from your friends at Blogenberg…

• Proctor & Gamble’s director of interactive strategy argued recently that consumer generated media isn’t really media at all. After we stopped laughing, we realized that he makes some very good points that center around respecting the conversation.
• Church of the Customer gives its opinion on how the “BigThreeAutoMakers” should frame their request for a Government Bailout.
• The New York Times shows that a good way to make friends on Facebook is to ask the right questions.
• As per usual, Apple is elusive about reporting data. This time, it’s data on iPhone applications. Of course, they get away with it by putting out a great product and letting the developers tout their own success.
• We here at Blogenberg like wine. So why not explore the intersection between the wine industry and social media?
• Terra Cycle is a cool business figuring out how to make any kind of waste into something useful.
• A story out of New York about preserving an old church illustrates the tension between economic development and preservation of a community’s character and heritage.
• As if we needed more evidence of the need for a college football playoff, Kimberly Maul points to the PR and lobbying efforts by Northwestern University to get its football team into a good bowl game and the related efforts to get credit for “style point” wins in the Big 12.

Definition of a true optimist: A 55-year-old man with a prescription for daily Cialis.

In business, success and failure are the flip side of the same coin, and the coin is very thin. Most people who don’t own businesses have no appreciation for this fact.

Parenting is a mix of pretending that you know your big decisions are correct, little things you know that you screw up, and prayer that those quiet moments with your kids, when they recognize you love them, will make it all work out.

I have started to tell media training participants that one of the most important skills is knowing when to shut up. Invariably, when I tell a woman that “you do good shut up,” she responds, “Would you please call my husband and tell him that?”

I’ve been approached about doing an Internet Talk Radio show. I don’t know if people would want to listen, but it would allow me to compact all of my whining and complaining into one-hour blocks. That could make my life more efficient.