I’m sure that you’ve heard that Lindsay Lohan is suing E-Trade and its advertising firm for using the name “Lindsay” in one of their wildly popular TV commercials. The “actress” wants $100 million for “pain and suffering” because – her lawyer claims – she’s a “one-name celeb like Oprah or Madonna” and the TV ad… Continue reading Lindsay’s Slippery Slope
Category: Society & Culture
Laugh for the Day (or not)
If you work in the oil industry – or know anything at all about it – and are looking for a laugh, you might want to check out this article at a website called The People’s Voice. The author decries our economy’s continued reliance on fossil fuels, but implies that as long as we’re going… Continue reading Laugh for the Day (or not)
“When The Money’s All Gone”
Good time Charlie’s on the evening news The party’s gone public, grab your dancin’ shoes Pass it around ’til we all get stoned We’ll all come down when the money’s all gone. Everybody’s livin’, everybody’s high Everybody’s sellin’ so buy, baby, buy Everything’s had and nothing is owned Around it goes ’til the money’s all… Continue reading “When The Money’s All Gone”
Unique Local Haiti Relief Effort
Vicki Jay is the director of Midland’s Rays of Hope, a grief counseling resource for children (and an outreach of HospiceMidland). She leaves next week for Haiti for ten days as a part of a grief/trauma team working with children in a Haitian village that was devastated by the earthquake. That relief project could use… Continue reading Unique Local Haiti Relief Effort
Beck Fisks Huffington
Back in the Golden Years of Blogging, around 2001, a practice known as “fisking” came about, and it provided many hours of enjoyable snarkiness. If you’re relatively knew to blogging, or if you have an actual life, you may not be familiar with the term, which is defined on Wikipedia as: A point-by-point refutation of… Continue reading Beck Fisks Huffington
Forgetting J.D. Salinger
The media is filled today with stories about the impact that J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye made on impressionable [mostly] young readers. For example, the co-hosts of NBC’s Today Show shared their recollections of how the book affected them, with Matt Laurer stating that he remembered being proud that Catcher was his first… Continue reading Forgetting J.D. Salinger
“The intricate economics of terrorism”
Loretta Napoleoni is an economist, journalist, political activist, and author. Her professional specialty is in the financing of terrorist activity, and how mainstream economic activity is affected by that financing. I found [via Bruce Schneier’s blog] the following video of a speech given at the 2009 TEDGlobal Conference, and it’s quite fascinating. In a relatively… Continue reading “The intricate economics of terrorism”
Traffic Control Cameras: Ineffective…or Worse
Traffic control cameras are a lazy attempt to solve a real problem.
“Portraits of Power”
What do Muammar Qaddafi, Gordon Brown, Barack Obama, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Dmitry Medvedev, Hugo Chávez, and Benjamin Netanyahu have in common…well, besides that whole “head of state” thing? They each were photographed individually, along with forty other national leaders by Platon, staff photographer for The New Yorker, during a U.N. General Assembly last September. The results… Continue reading “Portraits of Power”
Brain Dead Man Not – Or Not
Update: Some instances of so-called “Facilitated Communication” have been scientifically debunked. Here are some media reports on those debunkings. Particularly damning is this one detailing the results of a double-blind test in which not one of 180 FC tests yielded the proper response. By now, you’d have to be in a coma not to have… Continue reading Brain Dead Man Not – Or Not