Archive for September, 2007
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Live BloggingAhadminejad
September 24, 2007
Iranian President Ahadminejad is revealing his new weapon against the West: deadly boredom.
Posted in Ahadminejad | Leave a Comment &;
Does business own thelanguage?
September 21, 2007
Trademark symbols have started popping up on ordinary words; I saw it first on a NY Times story about an &;Envoy&; (a representative of a foreign power) that was stupidly trademarked when it appeared on line, as in the GM Envoy.
Today I saw the headline below. It&;s of a piece with the LA Time&;s insistence on capitalizing the word Realtor, who are a very powerful advertising constituency in real estate-crazed Los Angeles.
Do these examples representative the sad demise of the copyeditor, or the triumph of corporate capitalism?
Either way, it&;s riduculous.
The New York Times
Guards™ Shots Not Provoked, Iraq Concludes
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Justin Timberlake Takes the HighRoad
September 20, 2007
It&;s always tempting to bash a competitor or someone you were close to, especially when they&;re down. But when I do media training, I always counsel spokespeople to take the high road, even when the reporter brings up a competitor by name.
First, don&;t mention that company or person by name, second, acknowledge your rival in a positive way, as in &;the company you mention is certainly a worthy competitor, but what makes us different is&;&;
Justin Timberlake just did this in his interview with Oprah. Oprah asked Justin what he thinks is happening to his former girlfriend Britney Spears.
He said he didn&;t know, but added, &;What I do know about her is she has a huge heart, and she is a great person.”
Knowing when to take the high road about a former friend now in trouble, instead of taking the cheap shot like so many others, shows Justin Timberlake has a good heart&;and is destined for a long career.
Posted in Britney-Spears, Justin-Timberlake, Media Training, Oprah | 2 Comments &;
Political Correctness: Picasso Locked in theBasement
September 19, 2007
One of the world&;s greatest collections of modern art is locked in the basement of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in Iran. And it&;s not &;just the Picassos &; the Kandinskys, the Miros, the Warhols. The Monet, the Pissarro, the Toulouse-Lautrec, the Van Gogh. Possibly the best Jackson Pollock outside the U.S.&;
The art has been locked up almost 30 years, as the mullahs who run Iran don&;t want the people to see such &;degenerate&; art&;too dangerous and corrupting. It&;s yet another point of agreement for them with Hitler, apparently.
The good news is that the Iranians haven&;t (yet) destroyed the art as the Taliban did the historic Buddha statues of Afghanistan; probably too valuable.
Posted in Iran, Picasso, political-correctness, Taliban | Leave a Comment &;
Political Correctness Bans LawrenceSummers
September 19, 2007
Over the weekend I saw Third, the last play written by Wendy Wasserstein, in which an aging feminist professor (an excellent Christine Lahti) accuses a blonde preppy student of plagiarism&;because she simply can&;t accept that he could have written his ground-breaking King Lear paper.
In the Bush/Fox News/right-wing blogosphere era, I thought such &;PC&; politics were a relic of bygone years.
Unfortunately, vindictive political correctness lives on. Lawrence Summers, who was forced out as Harvard president for publically doubting whether females were as strong in math and science as males, has been vindictively denied the right to speak at the University of California at Davis, thanks to an online petition. The petitioners, led by Davis biology Professor Maureen Stanton, said Summers had &;poor relationships with women and underrepresented minority faculty&; at Harvard.
But UPenn president Amy Guttman got to keep her job after her delight in shooting this image with a terrorist wanna-be on Halloween.
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Joe Francis: Let JoeGo
September 19, 2007
It&;s September 19&;do you know where your Joe Francis is? Not going too wild; he&;s been in jail since April, first in Florida, now in Nevada. As in the old Billy Squier song, &;everybody wants you,&; Joe.
Has he killed anyone? Has he robbed or kidnapped anyone? (Hello, OJ!)
OK, he&;s obnoxious and egotistical. He&;s a strong persuader&;hence the Florida under-age girl lawsuits&;and maybe not so detail-oriented&;hence the tax evasion charges.
And yes, not only is he a former squeeze of fellow jailbird Paris Hilton (she of &;I stepped in AIDS&; ignorance fame), but he also offered formerly squeaky clean Vanessa Hudgens of High School Musical $500,000 from jail &;to join the Girls Gone Wild brand and lifestyle.&;
But five months in jail? How much time has Larry Flynt, Bob Guccione or the Hef himself spent behind bars? Joe, get some new lawyers. Or find some new friends&;outside the graybar hotel.
With Girls Gone Wild, Joe Francis gave America what it wanted, including the girls , who liked the attention going wild got them. Now America is giving it to him.
Posted in Bob-Guccione, Girls-Gone-Wild, Hugh-Hefner, Joe Francis, Larry-Flynt, Paris-Hilton, Vanessa-Hudgens | Leave a Comment &;
Lenin was Right (thistime)
September 17, 2007
&;The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,&; Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin is quoted as saying.
That&;s what came to mind last week, when oil hit $80 a barrel&;and the traders in the NYMEX pit were wildly cheering &;Go go go!&; like lemmings ready to fall over the cliff&;and lead the West with them.
Posted in Lenin, oil-at-$80 | Leave a Comment &;
Tom Cruise: Germans Do the RightThing
September 15, 2007
Tom Cruise doesn&;t need any more free publicity, but the German government gave him and the movie Valkryie plenty of it when they refused to let them film the saga of anti-Hitler plotter Claus Van Stauffenberg at the Bendlerblock. It&;s now a memorial and part of the German Defense Ministry&;but it was where the generals who rebelled against Hitler were tortured and executed in 1944.
Guess what? As we advocated here, the German government had a change of heart and the filming is OKed. From a PR perspective, if an artist wants to tell the story, the government should try to help make it happen&;even if that artist is a &;wacky Scientologist.&;
The German government finally realized what a PR disaster it was to look like they were denying Cruise filming rights because of his religion. We know where that goes.
Posted in Colonel-Claus-von-Stauffenberg, tom-cruise, Valkyrie | Leave a Comment &;
9-11 andRemembrance
September 11, 2007
Have we forgotten, as Anna Quindlen charges?
I don&;t think so. Even on the most superficial level, 9-11 has become a &;where were you on&; day like the Challenger explosion of February 1986, President Kennedy&;s assassination in 1963, and for an older generation, Pearl Harbor in 1941 and VE and VJ (victory in Europe/Japan) days in 1945.
And in terms of how many Americans (and people worldwide) remember what they saw that day, the absolute numbers of those who remember are probably bigger than any of the other &;anniversary&; days.
9-11 isn&;t just a &;media anniversary&;, like two years since Katrina or 15 years since the LA Riots. Even if the media didn&;t remind us, we&;d remember.
But memories do fade. We saw that with the 10th anniversary of Princess Diana&;s death&;I remember quite well it was the summer of 1997, probably August, but I&;d be hard-pressed to say what day. (August 31, 1997, for the record; I had to look it up.) And already, many challenge her legacy.
But artists are starting to make 9-11 their own, like Don DeLillo with Falling Man and Paul Greengrass&;s absorbing United 93. This is an encouraging development for continuing and expanding memory, even if they run the risk of trivializing 9-11, as with the Holocaust.
The challenge is continue to honor the 9-11 dead and their families, find ways to memorialize them going forward, and learn how to say &;never again&; and make it mean something. One size doesn&;t fit all here, and soundbites about &;sacrifice&;, &;helplessness&;, &;revenge&; and &;justice&; don&;t say much more.
Posted in 9-11, Don-DeLillo, Los Angeles Riots, media-anniversaries, Paul-Greengrass, Princess-Diana, United-93 | 1 Comment &;
Britney Bombs, Eat HerNow
September 10, 2007
From Beijing to Brooklyn, the verdict is in: Britney Spears is over. Not only was she dazed, sluggish and confused on the &;prestigious&; Video Music Awards, where even her lip-synching was off, but most unforgivably she was fat.
Meanwhile General Petraeus wants 6 more months of maximum troops in Iraq, the credit and stock markets are melting and Osama Bin Ladin says he won&;t try to kill us all&;if we convert.
But Britney&;s a train wreck and we&;re pushing her over the cliff as fast as we can; will her children understand? So let&;s concentrate our fire on this poor girl and serve her head on a platter, like her fellow dancing girl, Salome, did.
Posted in Britney-Spears, Osama-Bin-Ladin | 1 Comment &;
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