On Oct. 6, 1845, when the first organized baseball game was played in Hoboken, N.J., (the game was three innings, and the final score was 11-8), no one envisioned the multibillion-dollar sports rights deals that are common place now. For reference, NBC paid $1.2 billion for U.S. broadcast rights to last year's London Olympics.

One of my favorite "Portlandia" sketches last season showed the "Dream of the '90s" being alive in Portland. That sketch wasn't about the 1990s, however; it was about the 1890s and featured hipsters with foot-long beards and wool vests, hand-hammering their ice from a block. There may have even been a monocle. While they clearly were mocking one pocket of Portland's diverse crowd, there absolutely is an emerging trend whereby men take their style cues from previous generations, as reported in our study, The Acumen Report (44% of men looked to prior generations for inspiration on style). Marketers and brands …

Last week I discovered this beauty: a print ad that recharges your cellphone. It's a magazine tip-in, with a solar panel and a USB port, produced by Nivea skin care and DraftFCB in support of a communication objective: "You never have to leave the beach," i.e. even to charge your phone. The ad is a brilliant use of cutting-edge technology that provides real nontrivial value to consumers. Wow! Even without the copious Brazilian bikini model eye candy, this is serious moment of fave stuff.

Way, way back in the early 1990s, there was a brief period of time when the most popular player in the NBA - okay, besides Michael Jordan - wore a flower-print housedress and a pillbox hat, and answered to the name "Grandmama." Believe it or not, I'm not referring to Dennis Rodman. Grandmama was actually the alter ego of Larry Johnson, a (relatively) short power forward who won the Rookie of the Year Award in 1992 and helped the previously woeful Charlotte Hornets make a couple of playoff appearances.