Catching up with our fellow Freaks

Ever since November 2004, when a dozen Adweek employees, in black robes and minotaur masks, with Kitaro music filling the darkened conference room, selected, via double-top-secret ballot, the name AdFreak for this blog, we’ve naturally been drawn to the other Freak properties on the market. The latest one we stumbled across, linked yesterday on TUAW, is Netflix Freak, which is some sort of supercharged Netflix queue-organizing program for the Mac. (That’s its logo shown here.) Among our other favorites out there: the A&E series Criss Angel Mindfreak (which admittedly we’ve never actually watched but which is rumored to be pretty damn freaky); JesusFreakHideout (“Jesus. Faith. Music.”); Vegan Freak (“Being vegan in a non-vegan world”); Freak Radio (“Get your Freak on!”—a line we use from time to time, too); and, of course, Edie the Salsa Freak. Wikipedia has a nice entry for freak that has this handy definition: “A freak is often considered an insulting term for an organism with an abnormality of some kind. Some opinions would classify so-called freaks into two groups, these being natural freaks and made freaks. A natural freak would, supposedly, be a mutant, and a made freak would be one who, though not born abnormally, experienced or caused a deliberate change sometime during their life (such as having surgical implants inserted).” The entry goes on to list the types of “body modification” common to “made freaks”: tattoos, punk hair, piercings, cosmetic surgery, sex-reassignment surgery and medical implants. Of these, the only thing AdFreak has is the punk hair.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

March 7, 2006 | Permalink