Bibendum – the Michelin Man,

12/14 2004 – I’m reading William Gibson’s latest novel, Pattern Recognition, and it takes me forever. It’s not the dreamy, sleepwaking pace of the main character Cayce Pollard that sets my mind adrift, but rather all the ideas that surge through my head while reading. I get t-shirt ideas, ideas for new articles, thoughts on how I should rebuild websites and what to do with my life… Just the way a good book should work.

This is how Pattern Recognition is presented at Gibson’s official website:

Cayce Pollard is an expensive, spookily intuitive market-research consultant. In London on a job, she is offered a secret assignment: to investigate some intriguing snippets of video that have been appearing on the Internet. An entire subculture of people is obsessed with these bits of footage, and anybody who can create that kind of brand loyalty would be a gold mine for Cayce’s client. But when her borrowed apartment is burgled and her computer hacked, she realizes there’s more to this project than she had expected.

www.williamgibsonbooks.com/books/pattern.asp

So what has all this to do with the Michelin Man?

Cayce Pollard’s nack of recoginizing a good brand is due to some kind of allergic reactions. She gets physically ill when seeing some well known, and overly exposed brands. Her worst reactions are to the Michelin Man, whose name, we learn in Gibson’s book, is Bibendum.

Cayce Pollard, is at one point in the book exposed to both the name Bibendum, and the graphic image of the Michelin Man, and reacts as an asthmatic person would to a room full of cats and cigarr smoke.

If you would like to add to the over exposure, by wearing a Michelin Man t-shirt. Visit RadRowdies.com. Here is a link directly to the Bibendum t-shirt page:

http://www.radrowdies.com/vt/asp/…/tv/buyA.htm (no longer there I’m afraid).

But don’t stop there. Get the t-shirt, and also the book. Read it. Build up your own reaction.