Hamper McBee Buttons Up

Hamper McKee Button on Drag City

Go ahead and Google, “Hamper McBee.”

You’ll see this button and The Good Old-Fashioned Way album for sale on the Drag City website, some recipes for moonshine, along with spoken-word videos online.

If you’re looking for his SonicBids page or Twitter, you’re out of luck.

The late Hamper McBee was a, “moonshiner, carnival barker, and ballad singer of legendary proportions.”  His, “prodigious talent and personality won him admirers not only in his native Smoky Mountains but throughout the folk music world, where his wholly unique approach told-time ballads and lyric songs struck like revelations,” according to VentVox.

“In 1978, Director Harmony Korine’s father Sol Korine shot a film about Hamper called Raw Mash. Sol spent six months in the Tennessee mountains with Hamper McBee and says that McBee drank 24 cans of beer a day and never got drunk.”  Click here for the full article.

A classy button for a classic guy!

Click here for the Hamper McBee button souvenir from Drag City.  Click here for the button company that makes them.

Seks Sells

Seksi Spam Buttons made by BusyBeaver.net

Some people take life’s lemons and make lemonade.  Busy Beaver and Floyd Hayes take comically mangled spam e-mail subject lines and turn them into Seksi Spam Buttons!

You can thank the person who coined the term “guerilla marketing” for this project that donates money to health charity Seicus.  You might also remember Floyd from Twipple, which spreads kindness through Twitter.

Have you seen the press about these buttons?  It’s awesome!

Buy Seksi Spam buttons here.

Twipple Button Magnefitti

Twipple Magnets used as "Removable Grafitti"

When Floyd Hayes sold “voicevertising” to Hall’s Fruit Breezers, he made quite a splash in the marketing world.  These days Floyd causes a stir on Twitter through encouraging random acts of kindness, called Twipple.  The Twipple logo reflects the Butterfly Effect, founded by Edward Lorenz:

The idea was that if a butterfly chances to flap his wings in Beijing in March, then, by August, hurricane patterns in the Atlantic will be completely different.

Is it possible to achieve this phenomenon with kind acts?  Twipplers encourage each other to plant seeds, compliment a stranger on their jeans “without sounding creepy,” and give gifts as a way to improve society at large.  Floyd chooses Busy Beaver Button Co. to make his custom Twipple magnets and buttons:

They’re fun to put around too. Less “aggressive” than paint, pens or stickers. They just lift off – how can anyone get cross at that?

Floyd leaves them at New York bars, distributes them to Twipplers, and sticks the them unsuspecting light poles (see photo).  Have you Twippled lately?

Join Twipple

Visit Floyd Hayes’ Blog

<<Hang out www.BusyBeaver.net