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December 22, 2005
Happy Etc.
I'm retiring to my lair with many, many Lucia buns and a big bottle of glögg. Hope you and yours have all the booze and board games needed to survive the next couple of weeks. See you next week. Hope any holiday you choose to celebrate this season is a good one.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:20 PM | Comments (0)
December 21, 2005
Bribes R Us, Jewelry Division
"Her failing grade on the licensing test everyone must pass to teach in Massachusetts was a big problem for the aspiring Haverhill teacher. But Department of Education clerk Terrance Yancey Jr. was allegedly ready with a solution." Hmm, a helpful state bureaucrat, what are the odds?
"Yancey, a clerk in the DOE's licensure department, was arrested after an undercover investigation by state police from Attorney General Thomas Reilly's office. Yancey, 36, is accused of taking bribes between $1,500 and $1,700 to provide fraudulent licenses to three other would-be teachers. He was captured after a brief foot chase near his house, authorities said."
I can handle corrupt politicians, pundits and even state bureaucrats. But the story below, my friend, is the last straw.
"The secretive world of diamond dealing has been rocked by a bribery and corruption scandal that has shattered the authority of the Gemological Institute of America, the body responsible for grading and valuing the world’s most precious gemstones," according to the London Times (and any number of other places).
"The GIA, which values almost all diamonds on the market from the giant Hope Diamond to the quarter carats in a pair of earrings, was accused in a lawsuit of issuing false valuation reports for two stones bought for $15 million (£8.5 million) by a member of the Saudi royal family and an associate. After an investigation, the GIA found that at least two clients were paying bribes to four GIA staff members to issue false valuation reports on stones worth millions of dollars."
Good thing I chose pearls. The ad claims a diamond is forever, but a diamond valuation? Better not to ask.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 09:45 PM | Comments (1)
Conservative Punditry Pays (As Usual)
"As Tom DeLay became a king of campaign fundraising, he lived like one too. He visited cliff-top Caribbean resorts, golf courses designed by PGA champions and four-star restaurants - all courtesy of donors who bankrolled his political money empire.
"Over the past six years, the former House majority leader and his associates have visited places of luxury most Americans have never seen, often getting there aboard corporate jets arranged by lobbyists and other special interests.
"Public documents reviewed by The Associated Press tell the story: at least 48 visits to golf clubs and resorts with lush fairways; 100 flights aboard company planes; 200 stays at hotels, many world-class; and 500 meals at restaurants, some averaging nearly $200 for a dinner for two."
It's entertaining to read embittered AP writers carp about Tom DeLay's lavish lifestyle but it shouldn't come as a shock. Rulers are supposed to exist on a higher plane than the mere mortals who elect and support them. That's one of the reasons Time magazine was so relieved to see the last of Jimmy Carter's cardigan and embrace Ronald Reagan's imperial presidency. It was a long time ago and my memory may be going but I vividly recall reading an exceptionally gushing article about Reagan's stylish inauguration. The subtext was obvious: Washington breathes sigh of relief as low-rent peanut farmer and spouse slink home, replaced by classy, more appropriate power couple.
So Mr. DeLay represents business as usual, allbeit cranked up a notch or two compared to some of his peers. Apparently paying columnists--at least, conservative ones--is business as usual, too. Even more than I realized.
"A senior fellow at the Cato Institute resigned from the libertarian think tank on Dec. 15 after admitting that he had accepted payments from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients. Doug Bandow, who writes a syndicated column for Copley News Service, told BusinessWeek Online that he had accepted money from Abramoff for writing between 12 and 24 articles over a period of years, beginning in the mid '90s."
How'd I miss that gravy train? Nobody offered me a bonus for my columns at Fortune.com or FamilyPC. Damn, I should have interned with the National Review instead of Mother Jones in college.
" 'It was a lapse of judgment on my part, and I take full responsibility for it,' Bandow said from a California hospital, where he's recovering from recent knee surgery." One is tempted to hope the surgery came after a kneecapping by indignant members of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Or Jon Carroll even. But that seems unlikely. As Dave Barry once noted, working journalists tend to have poor do-it-yourself skills.
"Bandow isn't the only think-tanker to have received payments from Abramoff for writing articles. Peter Ferrara, a senior policy adviser at the conservative Institute for Policy Innovation, says he, too, took money from Abramoff to write op-ed pieces boosting the lobbyist's clients. 'I do that all the time,' Ferrara says. 'I've done that in the past, and I'll do it in the future.'
"Ferrara, who has been an influential conservative voice on Social Security reform, among other issues, says he doesn't see a conflict of interest in taking undisclosed money to write op-ed pieces because his columns never violated his ideological principles."
You know the punchline: That's because he doesn't have any.
"Ferrara's boss has a very different take on the Abramoff op-ed writing than did his peers at Cato. 'If somebody pinned me down and said, Do you think this is wrong or unethical? I'd say no,' says Tom Giovanetti, president of the Institute for Policy Innovation. Giovanetti says critics are applying a 'naive purity standard' to the op-ed business. 'I have a sense that there are a lot of people at think tanks who have similar arrangements.' "
I'm beginning to get that sense myself. I'm lovin' the logic here. Other people do it, so it's okay. I'd write it anyway, so it's okay. I truly believe it, so it's okay.
If these payments are on the up and up, then why weren't they public knowledge to begin with? Why were there no disclosure statements so the poor saps who read the columns and watch these guys preen during TV appearances and listen to their self-important utterances over the radio know exactly where the pundits get their paychecks?
And if payments on the side are such a fine practice, if they are simply rewards for doing what the pundits would be doing in any case, then why aren't other people getting them? Why aren't you getting a little extra from those nice lobbyists for the good job you did last month? Why isn't the grocery clerk getting a little extra for her great bagging skills? Or your doctor? (Oh, right. Maybe she is getting a little something extra, although not from Abramoff.)
There's a term of art for people like Bandow, Ferrara and Giovanetti but sleaze doesn't entirely do them justice. These folks aren't journalists or editors but they play them on TV. As a result, their slimy dealings taint actual journalists and editors. Which sucks for a lot of reasons, including the fact that we're plenty capable of screwing up on our own. So guys, give it a rest.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:03 PM | Comments (1)
December 19, 2005
Pharma Marketing No Threat?
An editor at a medical education company says the WSJ article I blogged about last week probably won't hurt the freelance medical ghostwriter quoted in the story. The editor doesn't seem to believe that industry marketing, at least marketing from medical education companies, is a threat to, well, anything.
"There's really not that much they can do to cook the data, since the study reports are already on file with the FDA. If any cooking is going on, it's before the FDA filing, and the medical writers for those are employed at the pharma companies.
"It's true [pharma companies] want their marketing messages in the articles, but marketing messages tend to be things like 'steroid-sparing' or 'low incidence of injection-site events.' Not really too exciting."
Dullness take my hand. At least there's real money exchanged. Unlike a big chunk of the dubious gigs available on Craig's List ("Put as much of your work on the JuiceCaster Network as you wish on any subject you want – for free"), medical companies don't expect writers to take their pay primarily in glory.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 09:42 PM | Comments (0)
December 16, 2005
Strictly Optional: Chewing Gum Edition
Words of wisdom. "Success is like gum. It is fine till it's in your mouth but if you swallow it, it'll lead to indigestion."
Guess what crime you commit if you're a 34-year-old Australian twin suffering from anorexia? "Earlier this year, Clare received a two-month jail term for stealing chewing gum, a soft drink and a blender."
Too much information. "Cheryl Ankrom had set aside a minimum of one week for hospital recovery after her colon resection last August. Thanks to chewing gum, though, she headed home after four days. 'My intestines started working almost immediately,' says Ankrom."
Up next: pomegranate-flavored sausage, no kidding. "Ford Gum & Machine Co., Inc. of Lincolnshire, IL recently introduced Pomegranate Power Sugar Free Chewing Gum, a pomegranate and wild blueberry flavored gum made with natural pomegranate extract."
Americans gum up the works. "The Irish Business Against Litter group is seeking Government action to tackle the problem of chewing gum on Ireland's streets. ...The Government had planned a number of years ago to introduce a plastic-bag-style levy on chewing gum in an effort to combat the problem, but it abandoned the move following lobbying from US Ambassador James Kenny on behalf of the Wrigleys corporation."
In news beyond gum-chewing circles, it appears that Google has a worthy rival at last. From today's New York Times: "President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials. Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States..."
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:34 PM | Comments (0)
December 15, 2005
The Ghostwriter in the Machine
"Last week, the New England Journal of Medicine admitted that a 2000 article it published highlighting the advantages of Merck & Co.'s Vioxx painkiller omitted information about heart attacks among patients taking the drug. The journal has said the deletions were made by someone working from a Merck computer. Merck says the heart attacks happened after the study's cutoff date and it did nothing wrong." Merck should have tried a more fashionable excuse and claimed, say, that a company editor mistook the study for a Wikkipedia entry.
Merck's not the only one suffering. Poor Michael Anello. Tuesday's front-page story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) probably didn't much help his freelance writing career. "Ghost Story" leads by describing a 2001 article in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases that was ostensibly written by one Alex J. Brown, an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Why then was it included as one of Anello's writing samples on his business web site? Because he wrote it. Most of it, anyway. The pharma companies have plenty of spinmeisters on hand for the pesky press but Anello is a solo practioner. Imagine picking up the phone and having a WSJ reporter on the other end. Yikes!
Anna Wilde Mathews writes about ghostwriters as the "open secret" of medical publishing. "Many of the articles that appear in scientific journals under the bylines of prominent academics are actually written by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies. These seemingly objective articles, which doctors around the world use to guide their care of patients, are often part of a marketing campaign by companies to promote a product or play up the condition it treats."
A handy chart illustrates how pharmaceutical companies fund medical researchers to study their products, then hire medical marketing and communication companies to oversee the production of articles based on those studies and bearing the name of those researchers as primary author even though, in some cases, they may not have added so much as a comma. (The comma example is mine, based on a conversation I had with a friend in the industry.) Talk about your closed system: it's sheer genius at work and the WSJ has excerpts from various documents to prove it.
The bad PR about Merck and the New England Journal of Medicine is probably just a brief hiccip for this smoothly humming marketing machine. As Wilde Mathews points out, ghostwriters help scientists (it's easier to author lots of articles if you don't have to actually write them all), journal editors (it's easier to edit clear, professionally written articles than amateur prose) and the pharmaceutical companies that underwrite them. You can bet pharma cos pay for approved marketing messages and approved marketing messages only, no matter what the companies claim publicly. I mean, would you pay to be trashed in print, even if the damaging facts were true?
Me neither.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 09:19 AM | Comments (0)
December 14, 2005
Occupation: Gumbuster
"Britain has a gum-control problem. Look down at any well-trodden pavement and you'll see thousands of white and grey discs flattened across the stone. Each marks the scene of a crime, the moment when a gobbet's minty charm wore off for one idle chewer, who then decided that they couldn't be bothered to wrap it up or wait for a bin and just spat it out where they stood.
"This would be just a minor nuisance - unimportant, even - were it not happening on such a vast scale. It is estimated that three quarters of the British population chew gum regularly. They buy 980m packs a year, and spit out more than 3.5bn pieces - most of which they dispose of 'inappropriately'. The result is millions of little blots on the country's urban landscape, mapping out quite clearly the population densities on each street: great stripes of spots wait outside railway stations, tacky penumbras gather round bus stops, not to mention the hidden horrors of the bus seat and the handrail."
Despite the one-they disagreement, I'm in love with The Guardian's Leo Benedictus. He had me at "gobbet's minty charm." The piece is packed with unexpected statistics and hands-on reporting. Read it.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:27 PM | Comments (0)
Foreskin Follies
How did I live so very long without Strange New Products? Thanks to Steve Johnson I'm now hip to "SenSlip," a new product "being marketed as 'the world's first ever artificial retractable foreskin for circumcised men.' " No, I don't get it either but Steve says a (presumably educational) video is available on the maker's web site.
Yuck.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 07:30 PM | Comments (1)
Five Comforts in a Chilly Season
1. Côte d'Or Noir Amandes. It remains a mystery why a friend in Germany could find these luscious chocolate bars easily but I've had zero luck in Stockholm. Maybe Santa will come through on this one.
2. Miss Snark. This hard-boiled literary agent may not be female, literary or even an agent but she's damn fun to read.
3. Hostility toward pitifully performing CEOs. It's the new, fun craze nearly everyone can enjoy!
4. Ice skating in downtown Stockholm.
5. A nice, warm cuppa. Tea is good, say Swedish researchers. Time to go make another mug. You, too.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2005
Class Struggle: Grade School Edition
In Sweden, at least in our local grade school, the same group of kids stay together from the age of six to eleven. Woeful is the lot of any late arrivals who have to fit it several years after the class dynamics have been established. The kids are ten this year and the queen bee of the class was absent from school when it started this fall after being accepted into some kind of art or music school. Her absence has created a vaccum in the coolest-girl department and has sparked a power struggle that, months later, is still being played out.
The former queen's power was undeniable: she was tallest, thinnest and had modeled clothes in a catalog for a department store. Virtually all of the girls in this class are attractive and many, including my child, are beautiful. But none have the departed queen's credentials, as it were, and another girl's attempts to claim the throne--which, as far as I can tell mostly consists of demanding the right to boss the other girls around--are being rebuffed. One day at dinner my kid announced that a friend I'll call A had defected from a recess club my daughter had started to the wannabe queen's group. "They wear makeup," she said scornfully. "Why would A want to be with them?"
My kid responded to this perceived betrayal by asking another girl, B, to join her club. B accepted, my kid told me, so now A couldn't be in the club even if she changed her mind and wanted by in. Why not, I wondered. "Because there are only three members," my kid said, and ticked off herself, another good friend, and B now that A was gone. Why only three, I asked. "Because," she said, and started laughing. "Just because." Whenever the wannabe queen tries to boss her around, my kid said, she just tells her to shut up. "She doesn't like it very much."
I know my daughter is torn. Although she says she doesn't want to be one of the popular girls--it's not her style, she claims--she says this as though it were a prison sentence or a birth defect. She has dubbed me, rightfully, a dork, and wonders why I can't wear makeup or shave my legs more often or at least get trendier clothes. She asks me if I was ever popular. When I tell her I was the head of the drama club in high school and had plenty of friends in college, she's disappointed. That isn't the kind of popularity she means. She means the kind of popularity enjoyed by the former queen bee in her class. And the kind of popularity portrayed in movies like Mean Girls and Bring It On, in which the most popular girls are enshrined as Bitch Goddesses who can do anything and say anything and basically get away with it because they're Popular.
I never got the girlie look down, despite experiments in eighth grade with frosted blue eye shadow and mini skirts. It's not my style and it's not a problem. Not anymore. It used to matter. It used to matter a lot. Now I watch my daughter gaze at the scantily clad women on billboards and see music videos and ask, out loud, why women are always taking off their clothes in these things and men aren't. She parrots our discussions about sexism like the good little student she is. But I don't think sexism troubles her in the slightest, I don't think it really registers as anything but the world she's in, like water to a fish.
So she's torn because some of her classmates are wearing make up and crop tops and trying their hardest to look like sixteen-year-olds at ten as part of the popularity sweepstakes. Her dad and I don't let her do that. That limitation is partly a relief and partly infuriating. Given a choice, my daughter would choose the MTV-inspired sexy femme style over mom's dorky style any day of the week. (She doesn't understand yet that there's a choice between the two.) At the same time, she doesn't really want to grow up. Not yet. Not in the way those clothes imply.
I hate the way commercial culture has embedded itself in my daughter's consciousness, that she views herself though its distorted lens and finds her wonderful, thoughtful, beautiful, creative self lacking and lacking greatly.
Today Swedes celebrate Lucia. There's no better time for a festival of lights. The sun set more than an hour ago, at 2:47 pm.
That breaks my heart.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:11 PM | Comments (1)
December 12, 2005
Late to Wikki Mudslinging
I am so late to the Wikki mudslinging festivities. I had no idea Adam Curry had been buffing his image on Wikkipedia by judiciously editing a post on the history of podcasting. But since anybody gets to be an editor, why not?
Which means he's probably not the only one. As one wag claims (gotta scroll way down), "In related news, a bearded Al Gore has been holed up in a log cabin in Tennessee, wearing only a pair of tattered boxer shorts, where he has been secretly editing Wikipedia entries to make sure he gets props for inventing the Internet."
Poor Al, stuck with the myth that won't die.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)
Wiki Author Apologizes, Would the Tabloids?
The guy who posted "false and scandalous entries" about a journalist on Wikkipedia as a joke has not only apologized for his unfortunate behavior but also resigned from his job. This is part of the scandalous entry, now excised from Wikkipedia: "John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven."
There's more, all of it nonsense, about the journalist's move to the Soviet Union, starting a PR firm (no, that wasn't the scandalous part), and other phony tidbits. Seigenthaler was Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant and one of the pallbearers at Kennedy's funeral so the 78-year-old was angry and horrified to discover that the lies in Wikkipedia had spread to Answers.com and Reference.com. It didn't make him any happier to discover that it might be impossible, without a lawsuit, to discover the hoaxster's identity.
The responsible party came clean without any prodding by a lawsuit and appears to be a stand-up guy in several ways. "Brian Chase, 38, a manager at a small delivery service in Nashville, presented a letter of apology Friday explaining his role to the journalist, John Seigenthaler, a former editor of Nashville's Tennessean and a founder of the First Amendment Center there," notes the piece in USA Today. "Seigenthaler urged Chase's boss, James White, not to accept his resignation."
Here's the baffling part: Brian Chase voluntarily identified himself as the author, apologized in writing, then resigned from his job over this incident, which appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with his employment. Zip. Nada. Noll. Meanwhile, media professionals (let's not call them journalists) over at the National Enquirer made hay on Friday over the alledged overdose and collapse of Michael Jackson, everybody's favorite future dead celeb. I know about this only because my kid voraciously reads the lurid front pages of the Swedish tabloids every chance she gets. On Saturday, as we stood in line to pay for our groceries at a local market, she kept darting away to read a little more from the Expressen's front page, which featured a huge pic of Jackson and a screaming headline: "Michael Jackson Found Lifeless After Overdose." (Here's the web version.)
Because I only saw the headline, I thought Jackson was a goner. Later, when I read the piece online, it claimed that the guy was basically in the hospital fighting for his life, "according to several American media" (my translation) but not, as it happens, Wikkipedia. I kept reading, and discovered that "several" apparently meant two: the National Enquirer and the Drudge Report. Now anybody who pays attention knows that Matt Drudge mostly links to celebrity news and does not usually constitute a source in his own right. (Sometimes he breaks a story but rarely and he's not regarded in the industry as the most reliable source.) In this case it's very clear that Drudge linked to the National Enquirer's report, which promptly got yanked. Traces of the story remain but I can't locate even a Google cache of the original. It wasn't hard to find a story disputing the claim.
Jackson is one sad, scary, messed-up guy. I wouldn't want him in my house or near my neighborhood. But his character is not the issue when it comes to accurate reporting. Jackson's spokesperson has denied the overdose report. That hardly resolves the issue. No offense intended to Jackson's mouthpiece but it's not unknown for press handlers to misspeak on occasion. If the National Enquirer's report turned out to be bogus, I wonder what would happen. Would the upstanding media professionals at the Enquirer and Expressen demonstrate as much honor as Brian Chase, media amateur, by apologizing and then resigning?
I think we both know the answer. Not a chance.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)
Web Notes: PDF Files
Please stop assaulting me with unidentified PDF files. Hell, with PDF files generally. Not you, gentle reader, those other folks out there. Those web wieners who've decided that PDF files are so darn swell there's no need to identify links that lead to them. Which means that innocent visitors looking for more info click hopefully on what appears to be a normal html link and then blam, there's yet another unwanted PDF file on the ground. That, my friend, is crappy marketing and the result of anal-retentive management.
Here's the thing: I want to know that there's a PDF file on the other end of the link *before* I click on it because PDF files require both time and space, items that are often in short supply here at Casa Branscum. It is true that web wieners are not committing rape, robbery or arson in this case, merely thoughtlessness, but it's annoying nonetheless.
Speaking of annoying, why is so much perfectly innocent information, especially info provided for the press, in PDF format anyway? Why must I download a PDF file to get background info on an executive instead of quickly checking an html page with that info? In Adobe's case, it's because the company developed Acrobat and the format. But a supposed global leader in Internet media and market research doesn't have that excuse--and by the way, Nielsen/NetRatings, time to start labeling those Latest Breaking Press Releases as PDF files, doncha think?
There are many fine uses for the PDF format. But it is not the universal web solvent and not an appropriate format for press releases. I'm not the only critic of this practice. It's just dumb, so stop already.
In unrelated news, I'm happy to report that grillz is now a more popular search term for enticing people to Stuffola than amputee. What a relief that Stuffola is finally attracting a less disturbed group of visitors (not that Stuffola has a problem with being disturbed). Welcome!
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:03 AM | Comments (0)
December 08, 2005
When Bipolar Turns Deadly
According to the BBC News and the CNN report I watched this morning, the American shot by air marshals in Florida after claiming to have a bomb was mentally ill, probably suffering from bipolar disorder.
As Rigoberto Alpizar "ran down the aisle of the plane, a woman assumed to be his wife shouted for him to stop. Witnesses interviewed after the shooting described how Alpizar's companion tried to tell fellow passengers or air marshals that he suffered from bipolar disorder, or manic depression.
" 'I did hear the lady say her husband was bipolar and had not had his medication,' said Mary Gardner, another passenger.
" 'I saw the woman... she was hysterical.'"
No wonder. I'm no expert but it seems that people with severe cases of bipolar disorder may become reckless, impulsive and/or violent during certain phases of the illness. That's never a good combination and sometimes turns deadly. Family and friends may be assalted by an ill person or an ill person may commit suicide or be killed. If Rigoberto Alpizar was bipolar, he's certainly not the only bipolar person to be killed by law officials in Florida.
I'm not questioning the actions of the air marshals. All I really want to point out is the hell that mental illness creates for sufferers and their families. A friend has coped, many years now, with an ill spouse incapable of parenting or anything else. My friend works full-time, raises the kids and tries to stay sane in the face of enormous challenges that include utterly inadquate medical treatment from the family's HMO and callous indifference by society at large.
When it comes to mental illness, America is practically in the dark ages still. Study after study after study demonstrates that crazy people are crazy for a reason that has nothing to do with character or moral fiber or class or education. But not so very deep down, we don't want to believe that brain chemistry can be faulty and create an illness that affects thoughts and emotions, those intimate experiences that seem to define our very being. We prefer to think that crazy people and their families some how asked for their condition. We ignore them, whenever possible, and allow insurance companies, the medical establishment and society at large to treat mental illness as a faux illness and mentally ill people as second-class citizens who don't deserve the respect and treatment accorded to those suffering from more familiar, less scary illnesses such as diabetes.
What will it take to remove the stigma from mental illness so people can get treatment (and acceptance) as a matter of course? I wish I knew. My heart goes out to the family of Rigoberto Alpizar, to the air marshals who shot him and to the airplane passingers who witnessed it. The air marshalls didn't mean to kill an ill, unarmed man. They were protecting the passingers by doing what they were trained to do. I don't know how this particular tragedy could have been prevented. I do know that other, less visible tragedies are being enacted each day in homes all across America because mentally ill people--and their familes--aren't getting the help they so desperately need.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)
December 07, 2005
Strictly Optional
"The Integra Total Facial System is an invention which would not look out of place in The Jetsons, the animated portrayal of domesticity in an interplanetary age. It is Mr Campbell's hope that within a year men and women across the country will sit with it in the evenings pressing two prongs against their faces. These emit micro-currents of electricity which exercise muscles beneath the skin and slow the ageing process." Of course they do. Clearly Mr. Campbell's spent a fair amount of time with something pressed up against his brain.
"It took nearly running over a young girl on a pony one night for Lee Annie Kelly to act on an idea she'd had for quite some time: headlights for horses." Fine but where's the beverage holder?
"Mobile Assets Corp. announced today at the conclusion of its annual strategy review that it will continue its primary commitment to developing predictive intelligence applications and add a new complementary technology initiative that may revolutionize the mobile communications industry." No word yet on the company's commitment to developing intelligent PR applications.
Last but certainly not least, "ExxonMobil has introduced a new line of proprietary gourmet breakfast sandwiches at its 680-plus On the Run(R) convenience stores in the U.S. ... The sandwiches are made with a premium mild white-cheddar cheese; an extra-thick smoky bacon round; a higher-profile egg; and a premium sausage patty that has a flavor unique to the On the Run Cafe brand." I find it *so* easy to believe that ExxonMobil's sausage patties have a unique flavor. Don't you?
I didn't find any of these items via Strange New Products but if you're a glutton for punishment--and there's no On The Run store in your neighborhood--it's a great place to find many more items that are strictly optional.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 08:36 PM | Comments (1)
December 06, 2005
Hello, New Job for You
Gentle reader, because I live in Sweden I cannot take advantage of the fabulous job offer below. It was mistakenly sent to me--twice--so I'm sure there are many many openings for smart self-starters longing to start a career in the glamorous field of international shipping. Especially for individuals wanting to acts as hubs for sending mysterious packages from unknown persons to other strangers who may be using stolen credit card numbers to buy lovely consumer goods for themselves and their loved ones. So good luck with your application (below) to rue, er, RuAmerica Trade Company.
Date:Mon, 5 Dec 2005 6:50:54pm
From:hansiain catherin
To: Deborah Branscum
Subject: Hello, new job for you
Hello
My name is Mark Birman I'm job manager in RuAmerica corporation.
We're searching for new partnerships in continental USA.
Let me say few words about our company.
We're working for several years worldwide, providing the best
service in Shipping and Transporting. We work with European
countries for 4 years. Our partners are USPS, FedEx, DHL, Ebay, Amazon and many
other shipping companies and shops. We're providing financial services too.
Let me say about the position we offer.
It is called Correspondence Assistant/Representative. It is new
position for us, and it is very valuable now. In August 2003, many
European countries changes their rules for customs and taxes for
merchandise, sent from countries, that don't belong to EU. This
means, that package that is sent from a company - will be a subject
for VAT in Europe, but the package that is sent from a person -
doesn't have VAT. Because of that, prices for shipping services
grow, and we try to reduce them. And we need YOU.
Your task - to receive packages that will be delivered to you, and
redirect them, following our instructions.
Packages will be delivered by courriers to your location.
Then you will be given money for shipping fees.
Your fee is 35 USD per package you receive.
No start up fees! No out of pocket fees! Nothing to pay!
IMPORTANT. We put names of our customers on the packages, so names will be different from yours.
We will inform you about incoming packages. We pay you via PayPal,
wire transfer, Check, Money Order or Western Union. Your
commissions will be paid every two weeks.
We will make agreement which you will sign and return back to us.
In this document all responsibilities and duties will be conrirmed.
If you are interested in this offer, or have more questions
please fill application form.
Thank you for your time.
Best regards, Mark Birman
Tel/Fax : (910) 401-1021
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)
December 02, 2005
Spinning Iraq: Immoral, Ineffective or Both?
Why am I not surprised to discover that the U.S. military is paying a contractor to manufacture pro-U.S. articles that Iraqi publications are secretly paid to publish? That's right: Because the administration did virtually the same damn thing here in the United States. As you may recall, the main difference is that the secret beneficiaries of taxpayer largesse here in the U.S. were freelancer (or freelancers, who knows?) and columnists rather than newspapers and radio stations. (Speaking of largesse, The Hill notes that many of the former colleagues of bribe-glutton and ex-Republication Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham "are mulling what to do with tens of thousands of dollars they received in campaign contributions from Cunningham’s co-conspirators." Hey, life's a bitch.)
"As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq. The articles, written by U.S. military 'information operations' troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times."
Kudos to LAT reporters Mark Mazzetti and Borzou Daragahi for their scoop, although you gotta wonder if it was practically handed to them given one clearly pissed-off anonymous source: " 'Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq. Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we're breaking all the first principles of democracy when we're doing it,' said a senior Pentagon official who opposes the practice of planting stories in the Iraqi media." He or she must be late to the party. All the reigning rulers plant propaganda.
The lucky contractor churning out what the LAT calls "basically factual" but one-sided news stories is the Lincoln Group. The unsurprisingly closed-mouth company "won a $100 million contract with the Special Operations Command to assist with psychological operations," according to GovExec.com, which covers the Lincoln Group's sketchy history and the founder's Republican ties. (You just know the author got carpel tunnel trying to google the company into submission.) The 30-something founder, it turns out, has a Silicon Valley connection. Hey Dan Gillmor, know anything about Christian Bailey? He apparently moved to SF in the late 1990s, started an e-commerce company called Express Action in 1999, sold it, and moved on to better and clearly bigger things.
There are a couple of amusing items in the LAT piece.
"The military's effort to disseminate propaganda in the Iraqi media ... comes as the State Department is training Iraqi reporters in basic journalism skills and Western media ethics, including one workshop titled 'The Role of Press in a Democratic Society.' Standards vary widely at Iraqi newspapers, many of which are shoestring operations."
Even though many of them are enormous profit-making enterprises, standards must vary widely among U.S. newspapers as well. How else to explain this nifty new reward program? (In the U.S., government propaganda is bad, while corporate propaganda is simply business as usual.) Then there's the following quote, which made me chuckle.
"Daniel Kuehl, an information operations expert at National Defense University at Ft. McNair in Washington, said that he did not believe that planting stories in Iraqi media was wrong. But he questioned whether the practice would help turn the Iraqi public against the insurgency. 'I don't think that there's anything evil or morally wrong with it,' he said. 'I just question whether it's effective.' "
That is the question that has always haunted the people who pay PR practioners, covert or not. But that's not an issue for the Lincoln Group. The client is always right, and the Lincoln Group has 100 million reasons not to question the project. As it happens, I have a real flair for news headlines, especially in Arabic. Just holler, Chris, if you need another freelancer.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:35 PM | Comments (0)