Archive for March, 2007

Don’t go to church on Sunday
Don’t get on my knees to pray
Don’t memorize the books of the Bible
I got my own special way
Bit I know Jesus loves me
Maybe just a little bit more

I fall on my knees every Sunday
At Zerelda Lee’s candy store

Well it’s got to be a chocolate Jesus
Make me feel good inside
Got to be a chocolate Jesus
Keep me satisfied

Well I don’t want no Anna Zabba
Don’t want no Almond Joy
There ain’t nothing better
Suitable for this boy
Well it’s the only thing
That can pick me up
Better than a cup of gold
See only a chocolate Jesus
Can satisfy my soul

When the weather gets rough
And it’s whiskey in the shade
It’s best to wrap your savior
Up in cellophane
He flows like the big muddy
But that’s ok
Pour him over ice cream
For a nice parfait

Honestly, what’s the big deal about the image above? Is it worse than the one below? One is a sculpture, intended to be looked at and thought about, the other is a bit of candy, intended to be snacked on.

Tags:
Art,
Sculpture,
Religion,
Jesus,
Chocolate

I found this via TechCrunch: it seems that when Great American ex-Maverick John McCain’s campaign put together his MySpace page, they used a template created by Mike Davidson, the founder and CEO of Newsvine. That’s ok, though. Davidson allows people to use his template gratis, as long as they credit him. McCain’s people didn’t credit him. Not good. But they took it a little further than that: they hotlinked images from Davidson’s server. That’s really bad form. You don’t do that to people. Apart from the fact that it’s rude, it’s also unsafe.

All Davidson had to do was create a new image, give it the name of an image McCain was using, and voom — the new image was on McCain’s page. Now, he could have stuck a goatse picture up there if he wanted to. It’s his server, after all. But he was far more gentle about it:

As Davidson put it, “The Straight-Talk Express isn’t just for straight people anymore.”

I did something similar a few years ago when some schmuck selling watches on ebay thought he could get away with hotlinking images of my friend Anna on his pages. I run Anna’s site, so I renamed the picture he was using and replaced it with an image of text reading something like, “Don’t buy watches from people who steal pictures from other people’s sites.” And the image stayed up there for about a week before the schmuck noticed it.

Let this be a lesson to rude webmasters the world over. Don’t steal from people who know what they’re doing.

Tags: McCain MySpace Hotlinking

Branding is difficult enough. You come up with a product name after brainstorming and testing, you get it trademarked, you promote it, and you hope the buying public is going to relate to it the way your tests indicated.

Some products seem to go an extra step. You’ve got the brand name and you’ve got some special formula, or secret ingredient. For example, Scope® has T₂5®. What’s T₂5? I don’t know for sure — probably just some combination of flavors, but it’s branded and trademarked.

Clorets comes with Actizol and Chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is the pigment plants use for photosynthesis. Everybody knows that. What’s Actizol? Beats the hell out of me.

The latest one I’ve seen is one of those skincare products being hawked on the eye of hell by Victoria Principal, as part of her Principal Secret line. (By the way… Victoria Principal, Principal Secret, Victoria’s Secret… I wonder if anyone has a problem with that.) Vic is pushing the Reclaim system, with “Argireline,” also known as Argireline Molecular Complex™. Not only that, but the line also utilizes Principal Secret HydraMoisture Technology® and Age Braker® benefit boosters. What more could you need?

So what’s the point of coming up with a secret ingredient and giving that a name as well? Is it a hope that if the product name is forgotten at least the secret ingredient name will be remembered? That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Is there some belief that “X with Y” is somehow easier to remember than just “X”? Are customers at the skin care counter at Filene’s, after getting slathered with some age defying goo saying, “Well, this is nice, but do you have anything with Argireline Molecular Complex, HydraMoisture Technology and Age Braker benefit boosters?”

Tags: Marketing, Branding, Trademark, Secret Ingredient, Scope, T₂5, Clorets, Actizol, Victoria Principal, Argireline, HydraMoisture, Age Braker

This is pretty cool, if you find information about trademarking cool. Those of us who deal with domain names and company names need to be up on this trademark stuff. The original name I had for my company was far cooler than the one I’ve got, but even though the domain name was available at the time, somebody owned the trademark on it, so I had to punt.

Anyway, this page features a countdown of lists of things to keep in mind regarding trademarks:

• 10 Steps to Registering a Trademark
• 9 Types of Trademarks
• 8 Ways to Pass the Confusion Infringement Test
• 7 Ways to Determine if a Mark Is Too Famous to Fool With
• 6 Places to Search for Existing Trademarks
• 5 Types of Marks You Cannot Register
• 4 Ways to Protect a Descriptive Mark
• 3 Ways to Create a Distinctive Mark
• 2 Ways to Invalidate an Incontestable Trademark
• 1 Way to Define a Trademark

Tags: Trademark, USPTO

Dear Capt. Priceline Negotiator Kirk,
As an example of how Priceline can save people up to 50% off the normal rate on a hotel room, we get to see you working your magic (and ooh la la, what magic it is) on a woman working at a four-star hotel in San Francisco — and you’re not even wearing a flower in your hair. Gutsy! You truly are Kirok.

Anyway, you manage to talk her down from $200 to $99, and it just leaves me wondering… did anybody think to do the math?

Tags: Priceline, Shatner, Mathematics

Remember when Paul McCartney sold a piece (or maybe all) of his song catalogue to Michael Jackson and Beatles songs started showing up in commercials on the eye of hell? I’m not a fan, but I thought it was kind of sad. Of course now, you’ve got Dennis Hopper shilling for Ameriprise to the hippy sellouts with their hippy sellout music in the background. This is to be expected from that generation. They were born to sell out.

Apparently, I’m now old enough that the music of my youth is starting to show up in commercials. For example, this spot for the video game Major League Baseball 2K7:

What’s that song playing in the background? Why, it’s “Breed” by Nirvana. Courtney Love has taken on Larry Mestel as a “strategic partner,” which basically means she sold a percentage of the rights to the Nirvana catalogue for about $50 million. As she put it,

We’re going to remain very tasteful, and we’re going to [retain] the spirit of Nirvana and take Nirvana places it’s never been before.

Right, Courtney. Do you really think Kurt had a collection of men scratching themselves and spitting in mind when he wrote

I don’t care
I don’t care
I don’t care
I don’t care
I don’t care
Care if it’s old.
I don’t mind
I don’t mind
I don’t mind
I don’t mind
Mind. I don’t have a mind.
Get away
Get away
Get away
Get away
Way, way from your home.
I’m afraid
I’m afraid
I’m afraid
I’m afraid
Afraid, of ghosts!

If you have…
Even if you need…
I don’t mean to stare.
We don’t have to breed.
We can plant a house,
Or We can build a tree
I don’t even care.
“We could have all three,”
She Said…

I don’t pay a lot of attention to baseball, but does it really involve quite that much angst?

Naughty, naughty, Courtney.

Tags: Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Music, Marketing, Baseball, Video Games

Alright, so Bush has a “reasonable” proposal and he’s giving up an “unprecedented” amount of information. He doesn’t want “show trials” or “fishing expeditions” with “klieg lights”. So how about a compromise: bring in Rove and Miers, put them under oath, in public, live on C-Span, and give them hell when they purger themselves, but Leahy will promise that there will be no klieg lights. Bush seems overly concerned about them. He mentioned them twice.

They can just do it in the daytime.

Tags: Bush, Rove

Who is Tom Foreman? Come now, everyone knows who Tom Foreman is. He’s that hot, steamy hunk of broadcast journalist man meat who leaves CNN viewers in need of fresh underwear each time he gives us his hard, hot and heavy reportage.

Did you see his report on Friday’s Anderson Cooper 360°? He got to the real story of Valerie Plame’s testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform the way only a hot stud like Toothsome Tommy can:

On a cold, wet Washington Friday, the kind that makes lawmakers just want to get out of town, they were nailed to their chairs by a blonde with a secret and a story to tell.

Yeah, you tell ‘em Tom. Nailed to their chairs because they couldn’t stand up, right? ‘Cause she’s hot, right? Yowzah!

For a long time, most people in Washington had no idea what Valerie Plame Wilson looked like. Her husband, at one point, even said she would rather chop off her arm than be photographed or talk about what happened.

But she’s become a spy world celebrity, posing with her husband for Vanity Fair like Jane Bond with Mr. Moneypenny, turning heads in a white gown at a big reporters’ dinner, leaving Washington insiders breathless to see how this spy story will end.

Breathless from all the heavy breathing, right? Maybe next time she wears that white gown we should hose her down and see what that “40-something Alaska native and mother of twins” (exotic!!) has on underneath… if anything. Woo Hoo!

And let’s not forget what you got Anne Schroeder from The Politico to say:

Let’s be honest, Washington is known as the Hollywood for ugly people. And so, all of a sudden, you have this beautiful blonde walk in. She’s a spy. She also is a mother of twins and married to a former ambassador. The entire package is just completely, you know, awe — jaw-dropping.

Hummenah! You know what I want to see? I want to see Tom and Val going at it together! Yeah! But first, Tom’s going to have to fight John Gibson for the right to have his way with Valerie. News Hounds is reporting that Gibson called her “Spy Babe” tonight, so he’s obviously trying to rival Tom in journalistic integrity. They should probably do a naked Greco-Roman wrestling thing, so the winner will be good and sweaty when he’s ready to go at it with Mata Hottie. Now that’s journalism!

Tags: Plame, Journalism, Sexism

Mistakes were made. I take full responsibility. As the equivalent of a company’s CEO, everything that happens on my watch is my responsibility.

But please note that I didn’t do it, I didn’t know about it, it isn’t my fault, you can’t blame me, and the guy who’s responsible is already gone.

Now beat it before I have you rendered to Syria.

Tags: Gonzales, Attorney General, Justice

Henry Waxman is clearly loving his access to information now that he’s no longer in the minority. Here’s a chunk of a letter he sent to Rice today. You can read the whole thing, including the footnotes, as a .pdf file if you like.

Since 2003, I have been asking why President Bush and other top Administration officials used fabricated intelligence about lraq’s efforts to obtain uranium from Niger to justify launching the Iraq war. I first wrote to the President about this matter on March 17, 2003, two days before the start of the Iraq war. In my letter, I asked why the President had included the bogus Niger claim in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address, the most heavily vetted speech a president makes. I wrote:

In the last ten days … it has become incontrovertibly clear that a key piece of evidence you and other Administration officials have cited regarding Iraq’s efforts to obtain nuclear weapons is a hoax. What’s more, the Central Intelligence Agency questioned the veracity of the evidence at the same time you and other Administration officials were citing it in public statements. This is a breach of the highest order, and the American people are entitled to know how it happened.

To this day, however, I have not received an adequate explanation to my question. The President did not respond to my letter, nor did you respond to multiple letters I sent you about this matter.

Soon after the bogus Niger claim was exposed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, you appeared on national television and claimed that you were never informed of any doubts about the allegation. On Meet the Press on June 8, 2003, you made the following statement:

We did not know at the time - no one knew at the time, in our circles - maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery.

Similarly, when you appeared on This Week, you repeated this statement, claiming that you made multiple inquiries of the intelligence agencies regarding the allegation that Iraq sought uranium from Africa. You stated:

George, somebody, somebody down may have known. But I will tell you that when this issue was raised with the intelligence community … the intelligence community did not know at that time, or at levels that got to us, that this, that there were serious questions about this report.

After you made these assertions, I wrote to you on June 10,2003, asking for specific information to support your claims, including the identity of any individuals in the Administration who had expressed doubts about the validity of the evidence or who were made aware of any doubts, as well as other information. You did not respond.

In the weeks that followed, you and President Bush continued to claim that you had never heard any doubts about the Niger claim prior to the President’s State of the Union address. On July 13, 2003, for example, you made this statement on Face the Natíon:

[H]ad there been even a peep that the agency did not want that sentence in or that George Tenet did not want that sentence in … it would have been gone.

The next day, President Bush made a similar assertion. At a press briefing on July 14, 2003, the President stated: “Subsequent to the speech, the CIA had some doubts. But when they talked about the speech and when they looked at the speech, it was cleared.”

It was subsequently revealed, however, that the CIA had sent a memo directly to you and your deputy at the time, Stephen Hadley, raising doubts about the Niger claim months before the President’s State of the Union address. According to Mr. Hadley, the CIA sent a memo directly to the White House Situation Room addressed to you and him on October 6, 2002, that described “weakness in the evidence” and that stated “the CIA had been telling Congress that the Africa story was one of two issues where we differed with the British intelligence.”‘ Mr. Hadley also reported that the CIA sent a second memo to him a day earlier, and that George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, personally telephoned him to ask that the reference be removed from a speech the President delivered in October 2002.

Because these revelations directly contradicted your previous public statements, I wrote to you again, on July 29, 2003, seeking an explanation. I requested copies of numerous documents, including the CIA memo addressed to you and Mr. Hadley. I also sought information about what kind of investigation you initiated after you learned that the Niger documents were forgeries, and I asked what role you and your staff played in drafting the National Intelligence Estimate submitted to Congress on this issue. Again, you did not respond.

As a result of your failure to respond, the Committee still does not know what you knew about the fabricated Niger claim and when you knew it. We also do not know how the fabricated claim made it into the President’s State of the Union address. We continue to learn in a piecemeal fashion about other explicit wamings received by White House officials about this bogus claim. According to one recent press account, for example, CIA briefer Craig R. Schmall wrote a memo to Eric Edelman, Vice President Cheney’s national security advisor, warning that the “CIA on several occasions has cautioned … that available information on this issue was fragmentary and unconfirmed.” Yet we still do not know who at the White House kept resuscitating this claim after intelligence officials questioned its veracity.

I respectfully request a complete reply to my questions and document requests relating to the fabricated Niger claim by March 23, 2007.

Tags: Rice, Waxman, Niger, Uranium, Iraq, War, Investigation