Groupon founder Andrew Mason takes responsibility for America's lack of a sense of humor and Christopher Guest can go search for a better place to ply his comic genius.
The Chicago Tribune, Groupon's hometown paper, quoted a New Yorker who said he felt like he'd been "punched in the face" when he saw the Tibet ad.
Ah! The power of comedy! How horrible to actually feel punched by a punchline.
AND: Here's the Tibet ad. Watch it before it disappears:
AND: I know I'm being played. Mason's statement is a well-done strategy to make the video viral in a new way. Notice that he doesn't really apologize. There's a sop to the people who were offended, but a cue to people who want to think we have a sense of humor to give it a cult following. We're the special people who get it and who respect Christopher Guest and laugh at the oversensitive twits, etc. etc. I know!
ALSO: At the Althouse Super Bowl party, we got the joke in real time.
‘‘Soldier Field is a sacred Chicago landmark that honors our veterans and, as mayor, Gery would be very careful to protect that,’’ said Brooke Anderson, spokeswoman for candidate Gery Chico. ‘‘He would be open to exploring creative ideas that could attract sponsors while preserving the Soldier Field name and stadium to give soldiers the respect they deserve.’’
But Rahm Emanuel, Carol Moseley Braun and Miguel del Valle are adopting the same hard-line stance as Mayor Daley, who insisted the stadium name remain untouched for his support of a $587 million renovation of Soldier Field in 2003.
Teams with stadiums names like "Giants Stadium" and "Cowboy Stadium" are in a much better position to cash in. But maybe it's better to have a name that can't be swapped for a sponsor's name, like Lambeau Field. Then you're not tempted to scramble for the money and end up with a horrible name like "Mall of America Field at Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome," which really is the name of the place where the Vikings play. You're Vikings. That's your image. Legendary conquerors... traipsing around the mall with Hubert Humphrey. What a picture!
And I love this grandiose term "metrodome." There are metrodomes, stadiums, and fields. Notice the inverse relationship between grandiosity and greatness.
ADDED: I'm just noticing that Minnesota inserted "field" into its ridiculous new name that still contains "metrodome." Make up your mind. Interesting that the big corporation wanted to associate itself with the old-fashioned charm of "field," while the politician's name is stuck with the overinflated term "metrodome." And I do mean overinflated, because remember how it collapsed? And it's a good word to associate with Hubert Humphrey, since he had quite a large dome of a head.
It has nothing to do with football, but on the subject of Hubert H. Humphrey — Hubert Horatio Humphrey — and names, this is always hilarious:
And as long as I'm descending into Humphrey-related YouTube hell, there's this:
The network refuses to comment on claims it has rejected an ad, so all you've got is a company with an immense self-interest in lying about it. You know, I'm not even going to link to the news website I'm talking about, because the answer to the question in the post title is that the news site is whoring for traffic. The private company would like to promote its product without forking out the millions needed to buy air time on the Super Bowl, and the news site would like to be the go-to place for ad, which isn't clever enough to go viral without the boost of the banned-from-the-Super-Bowl claim. Moreover, the product is shoddy and not worth talking about. Don't be a sucker.
According to Forbes. These are actual commercial brands. Not political stuff ... like the GOP.
“Consumers are not as optimistic,” says Miriam Quart, president of ad agency Madison Avenue Consortium. “They are looking back at the ‘good ol’ days.’ It’s a great time to work the nostalgia angle in advertising.” Instead of positioning traditional products as aspirational, several marketers hope to reconnect consumers with forgotten comfort brands.
And, supposedly, we feel like washing our hair with Pert and chowing down on Little Debbie cakes and Planter's peanuts.
The two, signed typescript pages that set out the 13 rules were drawn up by the sport's Canadian founder, James Naismith, in 1891....
Naismith had written the rules to set up a new winter sport for boys at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he was a physical education teacher.
The school had given him two weeks to come up with a new sport and he finalised it the day before the deadline, pinning the rules on a gym bulletin board.
Oh, and by the way...
At the same auction, President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which declared the freedom of slaves held in southern states during the Civil War and was owned by ex-Senator Bobby Kennedy, fetched $3,778,500.
But that's not the original handwritten proclamation, which is in the National Archives. The Bobby Kennedy document is "one of 48 printed copies signed by Lincoln." Bobby paid $9,500 in 1964 for $9,500. Who knows how much of the $3,778,500 comes from the infusion of Kennedyosity.
A live, potted tree is delivered to your house and, later, removed, to be kept, potted, on a lot, and tagged with your name, so you can be sure to get the same tree year after year.
We're told this arrangement appeals to "eco-minded consumers seek a natural tree without the possible guilt of dumping it curbside later." But — hello! — trucks have to drive around delivering and picking up these things, and growing them and preserving them in pots takes some doing. Possible guilt. What nonsense! Why not buy a cut tree and have it ground up into mulch in the end?
But "eco-minded consumers" are people with money to spend on their own good feelings about themselves. It doesn't matter what's really "green," only what they think is green. These people pay $100 a year for the scrawny tree. And how does said tree feel? Permanently pot-bound.
Here's a clue: Buy a nice artificial tree. It's totally eco-friendly, in an honest and non-self-indulgent way. You'll save hours of trouble every year. I wouldn't have done this myself. I thought you had to buy a real tree. Oh, the many years when I put up the real tree — often by myself, which is not easy — and once I got a husband who could help me, he — my horticulturist husband — pushed me into getting an artificial tree!
You can have your possible guilt. I've got my possible irony.
Not everyone, of course, is enchanted by Jagger’s business smarts. There are those who see the Stones’ transformation into a brand as an affront to the very spirit of rock ’n’ roll, a betrayal of the lawless, piratical impulse that once made them great. Such romantics are inclined to question whether a song like “Street Fighting Man”(“Hey! Said my name is called disturbance/I’ll shout and scream, I’ll kill the king, I’ll rail at all his servants”) can still be plausibly sung by an elderly knight who does sponsorship and licensing deals with Microsoft and Sprint.
These "romantics" just need to perceive the romanticism of capitalism. Capitalism could say "my name is called disturbance" — creative destruction and all — don't you think? By the way, Mick Jagger studied at the London School of Economics.
Speaking of romance, Jagger addresses the subject of marriage:
“I don’t really subscribe to a completely normal view of what relationships should be... I have a bit more of a bohemian view. To be honest, I don’t really think much of marriage. I’m not saying it’s not a wonderful thing and people shouldn’t do it, but it’s not for me. And not for quite a few other people too, it would appear... I just think it’s perhaps not quite what it’s cracked up to be. I know it’s an elaborate fantasy.”
That knife costs $139.95. I don't have a knife like this myself, but I assume the reader knew what he or she wanted. And my point — my sharp point — is that the reader didn't pay anything extra for that knife he wanted, but I'm getting $9.80 of that. Think how cool it is that you can compensate me for my writing here if you just remember — when you're going to Amazon anyway, to buy something that you want to buy — to begin your search at my blog:
You don't have to come back to this post to find the box. There's also an Amazon search box in the sidebar. I don't want to be too annoying doing posts like this, but I would really appreciate it if regular readers who want to encourage me had it in their heads to go to Amazon through this blog. It really does encourage me!
Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales....
[T]he owner of DecorMyEyes might be more than just a combustible bully with a mean streak and a potty mouth. He might also be a pioneer of a new brand of anti-salesmanship — utterly noxious retail — that is facilitated by the quirks and shortcomings of Internet commerce and that tramples long-cherished traditions of customer service, like deference and charm.
The linked NYT article begins with a story about a businessman who sounds like has crossed the line into making frauds and threats. The scheme fails if you get arrested! So strain out the vivid example that bulks up the article and imagine a business that just has crappy products and nasty customer service. Would that play Google so well? Should Google be saving these eyeglass customers from their own failure to check out the business before they order? They'd easily find the complaints.
Now, one reason the eyeglass business is playing this negative game so well is that people are Googling the brand names of eyeglass frames, and the negative comments against the company talk about how they believe they didn't get the brand they ordered. They say they got fakes. Let's think about what's going on here. Who buys expensive brand-name eyeglasses without trying them on? I bet most of these customers have tried them on — in local eyeglass stores. Then, instead of paying the price the shopkeeper wants, they go to the web to find a better deal. At that point, they are doing a search for a particular brand name. They see the price and jump at the notion that the local shopkeeper is cheating them. Aha! They think they're being smart when they are being very dumb.
If you read far enough into the (long) article, you get to the part where the reporter — David Segal — interviews the businessman — a guy named Vitaly Borker:
“Look,” he says, grabbing an iPad off a small table. He types “Christian Audigier,” the name of a French designer, and “glasses” into Google. DecorMyEyes pops up high on the first page.
“Why am I there?” he asks, sounding both peeved and amazed. “I don’t belong there. I actually outrank the designer’s own Web site.”...
Despite the fear he has inspired, Mr. Borker doesn’t regard himself as a terror. He prefers to think of himself as the Howard Stern of online commerce — an outsize character prone to shocking utterances....
“People overreact,” he pshaws, often because they’re unaccustomed to plain speaking, New York-style. Anyway, he adds, if somebody messes with you, and you mess back, “how is that a threat?”...
“The customer is always right — not here, you understand?” he says, raising his voice. “I hate that phrase — the customer is always right. Why is the merchant always wrong? Can the customer ever be wrong? Is that not possible?”
Bacteria, viruses, and everything else are all sterilized by the radiation. Ionizing radiation is used because it's high energy, and is extremely dangerous to living tissue.... [T]he food coming out the other end — be it bread, milk, meat, fruit, or cheese — is absolutely sterile and, if properly sealed, will last longer on your shelf than virtually anything else in the supermarket....
But Americans are too freaked out by it:
The circular green logo along with the words "Treated with irradiation" are so terrifying to much of the American public that the process has been put virtually out of business. Most Americans would prefer to accept a few E. coli deaths....
Even though there is absolutely no radiation in the food that we would buy:
Food irradiation... does not place radioactive material onto the food. The food is placed in the radiation field, and then it's removed. Run a Geiger counter over it, and it shows zero. Food that's been irradiated is not radioactive.
But we're too scared of this radiation to use it to protect ourselves from the very real bacteria in food that can kill us.
In April, four scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote a public letter to the White House warning that the government may have underestimated the dosage of ionizing radiation delivered to a person's skin from a backscatter machine by one or two orders of magnitude. The scientists, who have expertise in biochemistry, biophysics, oncology, and X-ray crystallography, pointed out that the government's estimate was based on radiation exposure for the entire body. During scanning, the majority of radiation will be focused on the surface of the body, meaning a more concentrated dose of radiation is delivered to the skin....
Ed Nickoloff, professor of radiology at Columbia University and chief hospital physicist at Columbia University Medical Center, says the data isn't yet clear either way. "At this point, until I knew more information, I'd tell people to take the pat-down," he says.
Is it that we are not only irrational, but we are also irrational in our choice of what to be irrational about? I don't think so. Food radiation was something that businesses were permitted to do, but they stopped because we avoided buying the product. The government isn't asking us whether we want our bodies irradiated if we want to travel by plane. It's not like going to the grocery store and picking one package of hamburger instead of another. We still get our hamburger. We don't have a choice of flying with radiation or without radiation. The only choice the government gives us is not to fly or to accept a groping.
The business model that is prostitution at luxury hotels.
As for Charlie Sheen:
Insiders were skeptical Sheen "stiffed" Anderson for $12,000. "The first thing they do is take an imprint of the credit card," one pro said.
What? They walk around with little credit card machines? "No, they're too bulky," the woman said. "The girls just roll their lipstick over the carbon paper to get an imprint."
Lipstick! Carbon paper! Come on. If they're wearing Chanel, you'd think they'd have one of these things:
It's fun watching that video about an iPhone Square and thinking about prostitutes using it. It's so everything-but-prostitutes.
... this was all so predictable. Spoilers after the break and — presumably soon — in the comments. I think the whole season has been soap opera. All dreams and journeys and men pushing back the strong woman and labeling her a bitch. You can see where the climax is on that story. It's a long hard struggle, but in the end, the climax belongs to the woman. On Lifetime. There were 3 gnomish little men and one giraffe-y woman, and the woman was stomped to the curb over and over. But in the end: Triumph!
[T]his was about Nina and Michael and in many ways that judging session was representative of an ongoing conversation in the fashion industry in light of the collapse of the economy. Namely, should the industry move away from a focus on theatrical high-priced luxury goods and fantasy clothes and should it embrace a more downscale, less complicated point of view?
I wouldn't leave Heidi out of that. She may have taken Mondo's part in the big fight over who should win the show, but look at her line of women's clothing at Amazon. It could hardly be more "downscale" and utilitarian.
It's a discussion worth having and there are points to be made in favor of each side, but the bottom line is, this is a design competition and something of a game show.
Yeah, Heidi kept saying it's a style show, but don't just hear what she says says. Look what she does. I'm talking about the oversized hooded ponchos she thinks will be snapped up by the Lifetime crowd.
... Despite the fact that they literally could not describe Mondo's collection without using the kind of language reserved for winning designers ("He's incredibly creative and talented.") the ONLY arguments made in support of Gretchen by Nina and Michael were "It's on trend" and "I can sell these garments." Pardon us for being purists, but what appalling arguments to be making. This is what happens when a show goes from ELLE Magazine and the Banana Republic accessories wall to Marie Claire and the Piperlime accessories wall. Project Runway was never cutting edge even on its best days, but the dumbing down of the brand has been a distressing thing to witness.... We think Gretchen is a talented designer and we think that there is a market and a customer for her work. We just don't think she'll be able to excite the public and interest the press the way that Mondo will....
I loved Mondo and assumed he would win, but in retrospect, I can see some problems. He was an extremely reserved person, and at the finale runway show, he seemed confused and close to breaking down. He seemed oddly numb. Also — I was willing to accept this particular man in shorts — but what sort of man wears shorts when he has big, scabby sores on his leg (as he did at the reunion session that preceded the judging)? Considering that he's HIV-positive, this was a disturbing showing of disrespect for other people. And listen to his confessionals: He was very self-absorbed. That was kind of endearing, but in the long run, you might not want that person to take on the work of carrying the banner of your brand name.
Finally, never forget that the show is edited to create a narrative and keep people watching. Gretchen won the first 2 competitions, and if that had kept going, the season would have been boring. The 3 guys — Michael, Andy, and Mondo — were selected as good foils for her, and the competitive tension was built around that. They pushed Gretchen around with criticisms and placement in the bottom 3 to wring melodrama out of her. They tried to make us love the 3 guys, and Mondo's rise to the presumed winner was the story they told as they beat Gretchen down. They put the reunion show before the final judging, which exaggerated her aloneness, while Mondo had his pals hugging him (despite his scabby leg). Gretchen got called a "bitch." Everyone out on the street, we were told, wants to know: Is Gretchen really a bitch? That was the narrative. And that narrative needs to end with victory for our heroine. Maybe it was too abrupt to be believable, but I think it was all in the script, perhaps from Day 1.
Of the 51 it has so far decided to hear, over 40 percent have a corporation on one side. The most far-reaching example of the Roberts court’s pro-business bias was Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. By a 5-to-4 vote, the conservative justices overturned a century of precedent to give corporations, along with labor unions, an unlimited right to spend money in politics....
The cases scheduled for argument in the next few months may appear modest. But if there is one lesson from the Citizens United ruling, it is that nothing — for this court — is inevitably modest.
By contrast, here's The Conglomerate, a stable, sober lawprof blog:
Looking ahead to the upcoming Supreme Court term, the pickings of corporate, securities, and financial regulation cases at first blush seem slim. We were spoiled last term by an amazingly rich set of cases in these fields, with Citizens United headlining....
The corporate/securities/financial cases generally look to be fairly specific to the industries involved. But, when you are dealing with the Supremes, you can never tell; the Court can unexpectedly uncork a broad, sweeping ruling. Moreover, thanks to the unceasing creativity of lawyers, even stray language in an opinion can have unintended ripple effects.
You decide if you want to read mainstream journalism or one of those crazy blogs.
"What causes such a destructive urge in so many otherwise sensible people? Why would anyone who has worked hard, saved money and often been successful in other fields want to pump his hard-earned cash down a hole that statistically, at least, will almost purely prove dry? Why venture into an industry with enormous fixed expenses (rent, electricity, gas, water, linen, maintenance, insurance, license fees, trash removal, etc.), with a notoriously transient and unstable workforce and highly perishable inventory of assets? The chances of ever seeing a return on your investment are about one in five. What insidious spongiform bacterium so riddles the brains of men and women that they stand there on the tracks, watching the lights of the oncoming locomotive, knowing full well it will eventually run them over? After all these years in the business, I still don't know."
Wrote Anthony Bourdain years ago, offered up now for insight into the 2 suicides by a chefs who appeared on the TV show "Hell's Kitchen." Bourdain wasn't writing about chefs who try to make it via TV show, and back when he wrote that, Bourdain himself hadn't leveraged his cooking into TV celebrity. So what is it — cooking or reality TV — that's more dangerous to the will to live? I'd guess reality TV. I think there is more delusion there and less likelihood of getting what you want.
It's totally eco-friendly, in an honest and non-self-indulgent way. You'll save hours of trouble every year. I wouldn't have done this myself. I thought you had to buy a real tree. Oh, the many years when I put up the real tree — often by myself, which is not easy — and once I got a husband who could help me, he — my horticulturist husband — pushed me into getting an artificial tree! 
