You’ve got mail… a-hole!

…like NEVER AGAIN!

This stuff is so funny/sad it has to be real. The writer should have their own show. I just don’t know how one would put this stuff on TV, it’s so… so intrinsicly E-MAIL!

See: http://dontevenreply.com/

And of course there are always commenters:

Moms (2009-07-08 04:12:18)
You shouldn’t mess with people like you do. It’s not funny. This guy tries to sell its fridge. He obviously has something better to do then answering your e-mails.

My comment: CAUTION to the ultrasensitive… this is the new ’sick’ humor. And thanks to Brian for the tip!

White lines!

But wait, there’s more!

This is a reminder that this blog is about observations, outrage and fun!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/09/craig-ferguson-and-his-pu_n_228506.html

My comment: ROFLOL. I’d wait ’til home from work to play this, unless you have an office with a door. Put on your headphones and work it baby!

The audio sounds better here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYyy1VUFav0

Trouble brewing for bottled water?

Imagine a sea of bottles as big as Texas.

What’s In Your Bottled Water?

By Dan Mitchell

Posted Wednesday, July 8, 2009 – 12:17pm – Slate.com

Two new reports are calling for bottled water to be labeled with as much information as municipalities disclose about tap water. Meanwhile, demand for bottled water continues to shrink, thanks to the recession.

The reports, from the Government Accountability Office and the Environmental Working Group, both note that people know (or can easily find out) much more about what’s in their tap water than they do about what’s in their bottled water.

Before the recession hit, sales of bottled water were growing at double-digit rates every year. Between people coming to the realization that they can get water from their kitchen sinks and policy changes requiring large organizations to limit use, demand is now flat or sinking, according to the Associated Press.

Consumers are increasingly troubled not only by the insane amount of plastic used to make the bottles but also by the fact that bottled water often contains more contaminants than tap water does—or at least by the fact that they don’t know what bottled water might contain. And many consumers still believe that bottled water, simply by virtue of its being bottled, is safer than tap water.

A subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing today on regulating the industry.

Bottled water is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, while tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency as well as state and local governments. Water quality standards are about the same for both, but the FDA, as usual, is toothless when it comes to enforcement, a fact highlighted in the GAO report.

Richard Wiles, senior vice president for policy and communications for the EWG, told the AP that if “municipal tap water systems can tell their customers this information, you would think that bottled water companies that charge 1,000 times more for this water could also let consumers know the same thing.”

Industry officials contend that we should just believe them when they say their product is safe. Joseph Doss, president and CEO of the International Bottled Water Association, actually testified that if consumers want to know what’s in their water, they can contact the company that makes it.

Dan Mitchell has written for The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and Wired.

My comment: Maybe George Carlin (RIP) was right. In one of his bits he said that he had determined that the Earth wants plastic. That’s the reason humans were put here, to make plastic for the Earth. And that when the Earth gets enough plastic buried in it, there will be no further need for humans, and we will be shaken off like… well, you’ve probably seen the performance. In much of George’s writing he found an edge of truth where only he could stand. He went to the scary, truthful places and made us laugh (nervously sometimes) about it. It’s one of the best methods of teaching, you know.

And yeah, I just got the report of the analysis of our city’s tap water. It’s pretty dense going and I’m still trying to decipher it. Our water has tiny amounts of stuff I’ve still got raised eyebrows about. Should I ‘google’ all those scary little compounds and toxins, call a chemist, or just trust that my town’s water engineers know what’s safe to injest and what’s dangerous in the long run?

And if you do buy bottled water (hopefully spring water) I assume you do recycle the plastic bottles, right? Every time you take a sip, think of your bottle resting in a landfill for thousands of years, or floating in a state-sized collection of plastic crap on one of our oceans (it’s happening now!)

And, for a fresh view on the unsustainable consumer treadmill, see: http://www.wimp.com/thingswork/

Sex news from the world of biology

What about the person in the middle?

We’re all intersex

The author of “Between XX and XY” on people born neither male nor female — and why everyone’s a little bit of both

By Thomas Rogers

July 7, 2009 | In the fall of 1998, Lisa May Stevens, a 32-year-old from Idaho, went on a camping trip. Stevens had been told for most of her life that she was a boy, but in her 20s had discovered the truth about her sex — that she had been born a hermaphrodite, and that doctors had conducted surgeries on her genitalia as an infant. After learning the news, she consulted her priest, who said that while God usually condemns suicides, for her he might make an exception. A decade later, on the third day of her camping trip, she put a pistol under her jaw and pulled the trigger.

Gerald N. Callahan, an associate professor in the microbiology, immunology and pathology department at Colorado State University, uses this heart-wrenching anecdote to open “Between XX and XY,” his new book about people who are born neither male nor female (at least in the traditional sense of those words). They are better known as “intersex,” an umbrella term that includes people with a tremendous number of genetic conditions, from those born with an extra X chromosome to those with overdeveloped adrenal glands.

Stories about intersex people have had some cultural currency — from Jeffrey Eugenides’ “Middlesex” to urban legends about Jamie Lee Curtis’ hermaphroditism — but their experiences have yet to attain widespread recognition or become widely understood, something that Callahan hopes to change. As he describes in the book, many children born with these conditions have been surgically (and often arbitrarily) assigned a gender shortly after their birth — but as his interviews with intersex people and doctors show, early surgical intervention has often had disastrous repercussions on patients’ later lives. Many never fully fit into their assigned gender and don’t learn about their reassignment until well into adulthood, with understandably traumatic results.

“Between XX and XY” combines the personal narratives of intersex people, semi-lyrical (and occasionally overdramatic) descriptions of the sexual development process, and examples from the natural world to argue for a less invasive approach to sexual reassignment for intersex children. More boldly, Callahan also attacks the “myth of the two sexes,” arguing that most humans don’t exist as purely “male” or “female,” but somewhere in between.

Salon spoke with Callahan by phone about the diversity of the intersex world, what hyenas can teach us about gender, and why we shouldn’t forget that sex ought to be fun.

Given that you work in the field of pathology, intersexuality isn’t exactly your immediate area of expertise. How did you end up writing this book?

The area I’m most involved with within pathology is immunology, which on one level is the study of how we manage to distinguish ourselves from the rest of the universe. I was preparing for a course when I came across an article that mentioned that 65,000 children are born of indeterminate sex each year. I thought that was amazing — because that was a much higher number of individuals than those afflicted by many diseases I was very aware of — and I began to wonder why I hadn’t heard about them.

Given that transgender issues have been getting so much more attention in the past few years, why haven’t we heard about intersex people?

They haven’t had movies like “Transamerica” to bring their issues to the fore. But I also think that intersex is something that makes people a little more uneasy [than gender dysphoria], because it makes us question these things we like to take more or less as God given, which is the sanctity and the gravity of sex.

Then you think that this polarized distinction — between men and women — isn’t accurate?

There’s no other place where we so quickly divide humans into two categories as sex. When I started doing research on the biology of sex development, one of the things that I realized is that the process is controlled by a series of enzymes and the reaction may be more or less complete. It’s not just two poles where that whole process can end up. In between what we call the ideal biological male or ideal biological female, there’s a whole range of other possibilities that don’t differ from our basic preconceptions to the extent that we have names for them or call them a disorder. Just like with every other human trait, there are an infinite number of possibilities.

So in essence you’d like for people to think of sex in the same way that we think of hair color, or eye color, or other sorts of physiological traits.

Exactly. We might say two people have brown eyes but that doesn’t mean that they’re brown in exactly the same way, or what is seen through those eyes is the same.

Before reading the book, I was familiar with a few intersex conditions, like Turner Syndrome, in which people are missing an X chromosome, but I was honestly shocked by the sheer diversity of what you described.

The more I looked into it, the more I was amazed by the range of possibilities. My sampling of it is small at this point — otherwise my book would have been encyclopedic. There’s XO, XY. There’s non-disjunction during fetal development, so someone loses an X chromosome. Sometimes they get lost later on during cell division, so people can end up being mosaics, in which some of their cells have XO or XY or XX and their body can contain two or three different chromosomal cell types — and whether they appear physically as a man or a woman depends on which of those cells ends up in the developing gonads.

One of the people you speak with in the book claims that “Will & Grace” was good for intersex people, which I find interesting because I don’t think many people think of them when they think of gay and lesbian culture, much less “Will & Grace.” Do you think the community should be lumped in with the gay and lesbian movement?

I don’t claim to speak for intersex people, but I think no. I think that they have a different sense of their world than people who are gay or lesbian. Sexual preference is completely different in my mind from biological sex. Gay and lesbian people can fairly easily identify with the classic binary of male and female, and intersex people for the most part cannot. They have to me a much more complex and graduated series of events they need to deal with [than do gay and lesbian people]. I think that people have a tendency to group all of that together — sexual preference, gender dysphoria, transgender, intersex — and they’re really in my mind very separate sorts of things.

In the book you argue that we need to think of sex as being fun — and not just for reproduction. What does that have to do with the intersex?

We have mutilated thousands of children a year [through genital surgery], and parents and physicians have felt the drive to do that because their No. 1 goal is to maintain reproductive function. If we think the sole function of genitalia is reproduction, then nonreproductive genitalia is, in some sense, a bad thing and something needs to be done about it. If we think that genitals serve a lot of functions beyond reproduction, maybe we wouldn’t feel like it was so necessary to try to make people look alike.

But don’t these doctors also do these procedures to allow their patients to have a normal sex life?

I realize that on behalf of parents and physicians there’s an enormous motivation to try to offer to this child as many opportunities as possible. But Dr. Alice Domurat Dreger [an associate professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine], whom I quote in the book, had interacted with an enormous number of intersex people, and she had met only one person who was pleased with the surgery — most thought they had lost, not gained, something.

So how do you think these decisions about surgery should be made?

This idea was introduced to me by Joel Frader [professor at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine], but I think the best situation now is for the parents to be involved, for there to be a team of physicians — a surgeon, an endocrinologist, a psychiatrist — to be involved and for them to try to explain to the parents the most they can do in the most realistic way. In this world it may not be possible to raise a child without a gender, but that doesn’t mean that surgery has to be performed. The ideal situation would be that, at a later date, the child could participate directly in the decision that might involve irreversible surgery.

You spoke with a number of intersex people in the book, most of whom have very moving stories. I imagine many of them were uncomfortable talking about their experience. How did you get them to open up to you?

It took me months to establish relationships where people finally acquired enough trust and were wiling to share with me. I’m amazed in hindsight that it came together as well as it did, because my own stupidity at the outset alienated nearly everyone.

At first I put out an ad saying I was doing research for a book, without establishing my credentials, and I got several negative comments from people saying, “Here it goes again.” A couple of people remained hostile to me after that — I think they’d just been burned. One of them had participated with an author before, and the author had ended up writing a book claiming, “Here’s what intersex people think, and this is what it feels like to be intersex” based on a fairly small amount of information. Another person had been involved with someone who’d basically written something about how “weird” these people are.

You also go to great lengths describing how some other animals, like hyenas (whose females have penislike appendages) and fish (some of which can spontaneously change sex) reproduce in unconventional ways. It seemed like an arbitrary comparison to me, given that the natural world has such a diversity of reproductive strategies. Why do you think that it’s helpful to look at other species’ sexual reproduction?

Many species have evolved different ways of dealing with sex. It suggests the classic relationship of the male-female binary just doesn’t fit very well with the real world. If that female-male division is true of humans, which as you know I don’t believe it is, that would make us the biological exception rather than the rule.

But those adaptations you described have an evolutionary purpose, while most intersex conditions don’t — at least to an immediate observer.

I didn’t mean to suggest that intersex is a biological adaptation that will somehow further the species. The persistence of intersex reminds me that there’s a continuum, that we isolate people in the middle and say they have a problem because they’re reproductively incompetent or don’t look right or whatever. None of us meet the criterion of being the perfect male or the perfect female. We are all intersex. — from salon.com

My comment: Yikes! Well, in an odd (targeted or chance?) placement of online ads, I thought the irony was much too satisfying… so I left in the ads for the new HBO series, “Hung”, that were displayed when I viewed this article on the Salon site. Yes, the show is about what you think it’s about.

Last of the ‘best and brightest’?

McNamara, from “The Fog of War”, an excellent documentary by Errol Morris, made in 2003

Robert McNamara and America’s Tragic Memory Loss

Will Bunch

Author, “Tear Down This Myth” – Posted: July 6, 2009 10:55 AM

Robert McNamara died today at age 93. As Secretary of Defense for Presidents John F. Kennedy and more notably Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s, it was McNamara who oversaw America’s tragic military buildup in Vietnam. That made McNamara — right up until today’s news — a vivid anti-icon to those Baby Boomers who opposed the war — and I think you can make the case that his death is that of the most historical significance of the slew of recent “celebrity” passings, no matter how many millions of people are gathering outside the Staples Center to remember the Gloved One.

Bob McNamara was not a great man. He was a man with great intelligence that didn’t prevent him from executing a plan that led to the unnecessary slaughter — for reasons that remain hard to fully comprehend — of tens of thousands of Americans and many more Vietnamese. He spent next four decades trying to come to terms with the banality of evil, with the horror of what he and those around him had done, but even his unusually candid apologies never seemed to go far enough:

The secretary of defense was a key figure in decisions to escalate the war between 1961 and 1965, and he readily concedes that the assumptions upon which he and his colleagues acted were badly flawed. They approached Vietnam, he recalls, with “sparse knowledge, scant experience and simplistic assumptions.” Victims of their own “innocence and confidence,” they foolishly viewed communism as monolithic, knew nothing about Indochina, and were “simple-minded” regarding the historical relationship between China and Vietnam. They badly misjudged Ho Chi Minh’s nationalism and consistently overestimated South Vietnam’s ability to survive. Regarding the key decisions of 1965, he admits he should have anticipated that bombing North Vietnam would lead to requests for ground troops. He concedes there should have been a public debate on the July 1965 decision for war. Over and over he acknowledges that he should have examined the unexamined assumptions, asked the unasked questions, and explored the readily dismissed alternatives.

The life of Robert McNamara was a personal tragedy, but it was also an American tragedy, our tragedy — because even after McNamara spelled out everything that went so horribly wrong in Vietnam, he lived long enough to see a new generation of the self-appointed “best and brightest” in Washington pay absolutely no mind to the lessons of our recent past.

In Iraq, as in Vietnam, our policy-makers knew nothing or cared little about the long history and convoluted ethnic and religious politics of Mesopotamia’s Fertile Crescent. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, there was no plan for the proper military follow-up to a period of “shock and awe” bombing. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, we totally misjudged the “nationalism” of the people who lived there and how they would react to a long American occupation. And perhaps most importantly, In Iraq, as in Vietnam, there was no real “public debate” as we marched headlong and foolishly into 2003 — with way too many “unexamined assumptions,” “unasked questions,” and “readily dismissed alternatives.”

I actually spoke, very briefly, on the phone with McNamara in early 2003 in an effort to interview him for the Philadelphia Daily News, where I am a reporter. Like a few other journalists in that critical hour, I was hoping some of his tragically acquired wisdom might infuse the tepid pre-war discussions, and like all other reporters in those pre-war months, he told me he was holding off on commenting (as noted in the link above, he had a lot to say in 2006…when it was too late). That was a damned shame — even though I can’t imagine it would have tipped the rigged scales.

Regardless of your religious or spiritual beliefs, it’s hard not to imagine there wasn’t some higher purpose to McNamara’s longevity. You could argue that it was a cosmic punishment, of sorts, to live so many years with the searing memories of so many who died so horrifically because of his misguided decisions from the comforts of his big desk at the Pentagon. Or you argue that he was still here in the early 2000s as a kind of a warped prophet, a flesh-and-blood monument to the folly of militarism. If that is true, then the fact that America refused to pay any attention is Robert McNamara’s greatest tragedy of all.

See Errol Morris’ film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/

Johnson and McNamara, during a strategy meeting about the Vietnam war.

My comment: Thanks to Will Bunch for saying so well what many of us are likely feeling today.

And if you wish to get a whiff of that, I refer you to the commenters who read the NY Times:

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/us/07mcnamara.html

Something useful, at last…

…you may say.

This is mistake #1.

Yes, after all the Brunos and Lindsays and Mileys and other such pop entertainment drivel, Athensboy decided to bring you something helpful and useful. Looking through my card files I decided that most business logos (at least in my collection) are pretty terrible. Most make at least one of the following mistakes. Hey, it’s MID-summer! What better time to have a fresh logo designed? Even Nabisco and Pepsi changed you know.

10 Common Mistakes In Logo Design

By Gareth Hardy, June 25th, 2009 in How-To | 247 Comments |

The article is from Smashing Magazine:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/25/10-common-mistakes-in-logo-design/

My other comment: A fresh, well-designed, appropriate logo for your business is even better than all fresh new white teeth for your smile… and costs less in most cases, actually.

Did Bruno cross the line?

‘Bruno’ and tiny co-star

North Texans say Brüno crossed the line with fake talk show

10:19 AM CDT on Sunday, July 5, 2009

By MICHAEL GRANBERRY / The Dallas Morning News

mgranberry@dallasnews.com

Susan Leseman describes herself as a “fairly liberal, fun kind of girl.” But a year ago, the limits of her open-mindedness got put to a test by none other than Sacha Baron Cohen.

Leseman found herself among hundreds of North Texans lured to an office park in Carrollton to serve as audience members for what was billed as a new television talk show on “family values.” They would even be paid – $50 cash.

What they didn’t know but soon discovered was the meaning of the verb “punked.” They contend they were set up for ridicule by Cohen, who appeared at the show as Brüno, the flamboyantly gay Austrian fashionista whose new movie opens Friday.

A year has passed, but Leseman, 52, an administrative assistant for a Plano-based corporation, is still seething.

“I feel very violated,” she says, “by being led to believe that this would be a talk show on family values … and having it turn out to be what it was.”

As aggressive as the Brüno team was in making the movie, they have been unusually quiet in defending it. Efforts to get their response to anger stirred by the Carrollton talk show drew only a terse “no comment.”

But “production notes” released Thursday by NBC Universal, the studio releasing the film, offer insight into Cohen’s methods. They speak glowingly of “guerrilla-style filmmaking” targeted for the purpose of “exposing shocking hypocrisies of Western culture.” The release touts Brüno as “the gutsiest, craziest and most dangerous comedy to be released in mainstream theaters.” The risk, the producers say, was to “keep their star and creative force both out of jail and alive until the end of the shoot.”

When it comes to feeling upset by the methods used, Leseman is hardly alone. Cohen’s movie has already provoked one lawsuit, by a California woman who alleges that she was badly injured in a fracas that ensued when the 37-year-old actor showed up at her bingo game wearing provocative clothing and using what she called “vulgar and offensive language.”

But Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt, as the movie is titled, has done much more than that. Cohen’s tactics have raised questions about the nature of contemporary comedy and how far it’s acceptable to go just to get a laugh. Or even to make a larger, more compelling point about society itself.

Brüno, for instance, explores issues of sexuality much in the way that Cohen’s 2006 movie, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, used ambush humor to comment on racism. Borat, according to the studio’s press release, “earned more than $260 million at the global box office and set a new standard of risky provocation.” It also won Cohen a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination.

Comedian Dean Lewis, 46, who teaches a class on comedy at the Improv in Addison and who appears each weekday morning on The Jagger Show on 105.3 FM, is among those who find Cohen outrageously funny.

“I would say he’s 40 percent genius and 60 percent bold,” Lewis says. “George Carlin once said that it’s a comic’s job to find a line – and then cross it. And Cohen consistently does that. I love the guy. He’s very smart, and very bold, to try these kinds of things.”

But Robin Lovin, 63, the Cary Maguire university professor of ethics at Southern Methodist University, worries about the ante that Cohen keeps upping in Da Ali G Show on HBO, the Borat movie and now Brüno.

“Humor, when it’s used as a moral tool,” Lovin says, “is a way of getting us to laugh at ourselves and see the limitations of our own convictions. But here’s the problem: It’s not clear to me that there’s a whole lot of moral difference between exploiting somebody like this and the kind of violence he’s trying to expose.”

It’s one thing, Lovin says, to target such powerful public officials as former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich – as Cohen did in Da Ali G Show – and quite another to go after ordinary citizens.

In the lawsuit filed in Lancaster, Calif., plaintiff Richelle Olson alleges that Cohen established more than “30 fraudulent corporations that set up Web sites and mission statements to mislead individuals from discovering the true identity and purpose of the requested appearance” by Cohen.

Olson, who says the incident with Cohen left her using a wheelchair, alleges being approached by one such shell corporation for the purpose of making a documentary that would be shown on the Discovery Channel or PBS.

NBC Universal has called the lawsuit “completely baseless.”

Amy Wheaton, 41, a market media analyst who lives in West Plano, attended the Carrollton taping after hearing about it from co-worker Leseman, who describes Brüno’s spin on “family values:”

He brought out a black baby that appeared to be about 18 months old. The baby wore cowboy boots on the wrong feet and a T-shirt with the words “GAYBY” across the front. He told the crowd that the baby ate sushi and guzzled Starbucks lattes and was taken often to all-night parties.

“He said that, if the baby wanted to have a sex change when he turned 18, he would support him wholeheartedly,” Leseman says, “but if he turned out to be straight, he would disown him.”

Brüno told one man he had “some friends he would like him to meet,” to which the man replied, “The only friends of mine you’re going to meet are Smith and Wesson.”

Brüno showed slides from a family album, such as the baby wearing shackles to symbolize the slavery of his ancestors, being attacked by a swarm of bees and – this is the one that prompted Leseman to walk out – the baby on a cross.

Wheaton says that, at one point, Cohen had so outraged the crowd, she feared for the baby’s safety.

“The baby starts to stand up in the carriage,” Wheaton says, “and Sacha is not paying a bit of attention to what the baby is doing. My friend leans forward to grab the baby, and when she does, Sacha starts cursing at her, really violently.”

It was this incident, Leseman says, that prompted her to file a complaint with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. A spokeswoman for the agency acknowledged to The Dallas Morning News that such a complaint was filed but declined further comment.

“They told me they investigated,” Leseman says. “They said the baby was an identical twin and that they alternated these twin babies over the course of several tapings.”

Leseman’s hope for Cohen is that “he tanks … I hope they run him out of Hollywood.” She contends that Brüno is most offensive to the very audience whose antagonists it seeks to humiliate. “I have many gay friends who wouldn’t find it funny at all to have a child exploited like that,” she says. “So, in my opinion, the guy failed – miserably.”

My comment: I don’t know anyone who was at or involved in the filming of the fake TV show in Carrollton. However, I would think one would have to be kind of ‘out-of-it culturally’ to get there and not realize that you were at a Cohen spoof. What amazes me the most is that he always provokes some American to threaten him with a gun. Cohen always appears so deeply ‘in-character’ as to be almost schitzophrenic. What he does is very difficult. I plan to see the movie even though I don’t enjoy seeing people being made fools of and I am always upset when babies are used in movies.

The thing is, ‘Hollywood’ takes advantage of babies all the time in movies, with the parents completely willing to cooperate. A good friend of mine who had been a script supervisor (’script girl’) for productions for years ended up quitting ‘the business’ after her experience with a director of a well-known movie made here in Dallas in 1998. During the filming, a very young baby-child was made to run from a house into a freezing cold winter’s night (crying) take after take after take. My friend (a mother herself) told the director (also a female) that she had a good ‘take’ already and heatedly questioned the sanity and safety of subjecting the little tyke to such abuse in the bad weather. Of course, the director prevailed. No mention was ever made of this upsetting event. The movie went on to wide praise and the leading actress won the Oscar. It was shot on a tiny budget of about $2 million and made over $12 million. I don’t recall if the ‘baby scene’ made the cut and was in the movie, or not.

That director has made one movie since that time, with a budget of $25 million that has grossed about $12 million at last report, according to imdb.com. Movie-making is a risky business and most movies never make back their budget. The studios & distributors rely on the big hits to cover their losses on the audience clunkers.

What I can guarantee you is that any movie made for a budget of about $18 million (Borat) that earns over $260 million around the world, that star and filmmaking team will continue to be ‘greenlighted’ for as many films as they wish to make, until they have a big failure. Bruno had a budget of about $42 million and opens in U.S. theaters on July 10th.

British comedian/movie star – Sacha Baron Cohen

The power of dreams…

…is that many think they are real.

See: http://www.wimp.com/dognightmare/

And after you see this doggy dream, have a look at some crazy Norwegians: http://www.wimp.com/basejumpers/

A fjord in Norway.

Happy 4th of July, Americans!

Let us celebrate and cherish the vision and courage of our founders and all the people who have sacrificed to keep our country, the United States, independent and may we find liberty and justice for all. Let’s enjoy our own pursuit of happiness and not limit the pursuit of happiness of others, except by the rational rule of law which protects everyone from idiots.

Happy 233rd birthday, America!

Declaration of Independence, John Trumbull (oil on canvas, 1819)/Courtesy Independence Hall Association

July 4, 1776: Preserving the Declaration

By Tony Long  July 2, 2009

1776: The Declaration of Independence is signed. It will take 127 years before someone gets around to saying, “Hey, maybe we should preserve this thing.”

The Declaration of Independence can be fairly said to stand alongside the Magna Carta and Bill of Rights as the most important documents in the history of democracy. Its significance was understood from the moment it was signed, so one is left to wonder why its preservation was ignored for so long.

During the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence was rolled up and toted around like a Thomas Bros. map, although, given the vicissitudes of war, that’s perhaps understandable. Less understandable is what came later. Water was spilled on it while it was being copied in 1823. Then it was tacked up on the wall at the U.S. Patent Office for about 40 years, where it was subjected to a strong northern light.

Finally, the suggestion was made in 1903 that maybe it shouldn’t be exposed to sunlight and, oh, by the way, maybe it should be kept dry, too. The latter turned out to be a bad idea because the Declaration, which was written on parchment, actually needs a bit of moisture to keep from cracking

It wasn’t until 1951 that the first modern preservation efforts began. The document was sealed inside a bronze, bullet-proof glass case at the National Archives building in Washington, D.C. Humidified helium replaced oxygen to prevent further erosion, and the glass was filtered to cut down on light exposure.

Beginning in 1987, using camera equipment developed for the Hubble Space Telescope, preservationists were able to monitor the Declaration for even the most minute signs of fading or flaking ink.

The measures proved effective, so much so that the Declaration outlived its original protective case. After undergoing careful inspection for further erosion in 2003, the document was resealed in a titanium casement filled with inert argon gas. Similar preservation techniques are used to protect the Bill of Rights and Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence remains on display in the rotunda of the National Archives, where it is seen by roughly 6,000 tourists every day. At night, when the crowds have all gone home, the case is lowered 22 feet into a vault.

Salaries of the White House staff

The West Wing, with the White House in background.

After years of watching The West Wing TV show we all know about many of the positions on the President’s staff– just the high profile ones, as it turns out. What we didn’t know is how many there are working there and how much they make in dollars for doing their jobs.

Now we do. (See link to the .pdf list.) I’m amazed at how many people serve The President directly and even more amazed at how little many of them get in salary— which ranges from $0 to about $172,200. It’s a 29-page list!

http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/documents/July1Report-Draft12.pdf

My comment: With this many people jockeying for his time, I’m surprised the President ever gets anything accomplished. If it is Rahm Emanuel’s job to manage most of this staff, well, good luck to the little Chicago pit bull/border collie. For a bio of ‘Rahm-bo’, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rahm_Emanuel

The man in the music

Quincy Jones

WISEGUY Q&A: QUINCY JONES’ FONDEST AND WEIRDEST RECOLLECTIONS OF MICHAEL JACKSON

The hit-making producer behind the King of Pop’s rise discusses Michael Jackson’s life, death and love of chemical peels.

By Jeff Gordinier

For the interview, see:

http://men.style.com/details/features/landing?id=content_9937

Quincy, the man with the ear and the beat.

Do you avoid chuggers?

Charity Muggers: I avoid street canvassers for do-gooding organizations. Does that make me a jerk?

By Sandy Stonesifer – Posted on Slate.com, July 1, 2009, at 7:00 AM ET

Do you have a real-life do-gooding dilemma? Please send it to ask.my.goodness@gmail.com and Patty and Sandy will try to answer it.

Dear Sandy,
I regularly see chirpy, T-shirt-wearing representatives of social-service and environmental organizations soliciting donations on the street. They often approach me with lines such as, “Do you have a moment for the environment?” or “Can’t you spare five seconds to help battered women?”—with the obvious implication that if I don’t talk to them, I am so insensitive as to be unwilling to spare a moment for (insert cause here). Even though I often share their convictions, I find this approach incredibly off-putting and, because of this, never stop to talk to them.

Am I wrong to avoid them? Does this marketing approach really make an impact? Isn’t there a better way to spread the message about worthy causes?

—Jessica, Boston

Sandy: I once answered a newspaper ad for a job as a “community outreach worker” and found myself in a horrible daylong group interview to be one of those chirpy, T-shirt-wearing, clipboard-holding streetwalkers who annoy you so much. I snuck out during a break and spent the summer baby-sitting for 3-year-old twins instead. I’m almost positive it was easier.

That experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Now I, like you, tend to sneak away by crossing streets or donning headphones when I see them approaching. And apparently we’re not the only ones. More than two-thirds of Brits admit to crossing the street to avoid what they call “chuggers”, short for “charity muggers”. A solicitor for the ACLU said that of the thousands of people who pass her every day, only 30 stop to listen and a measly five donate. Which raises the question you ask, Jessica: Does this approach really do anything besides annoy people?

My first answer is that it must. Why else would charities spend money to hire them? Most street solicitors aren’t volunteers. In fact, most aren’t even employed by the charity directly but by an agency contracted to fund raise for them. One company, Dialogue Direct, claims to have pioneered “face-to-face fundraising” in Austria. The company allegedly recruited 260,000 “long-term committed donors” for their clients, whom they call “charity partners,” in the past year.

Not all organizations that employ street solicitors are for-profit companies. A 501(c)(4) that does the same work, the Fund for the Public Interest, is based in your hometown of Boston. They say they’ve “gathered over 20 million petition signatures over the past 25 years and raised over $20 million for [their] partner organizations in the last year alone.”

So, if they raise money for good charities, why am I still so queasy? The first reason is the unsettling amount of buzz around these organizations’ labor policies. Until a class action lawsuit was filed against the Fund for the Public Interest, it regularly paid canvassers who didn’t hit their quotas below minimum wage. There are also claims that canvassers’ push to unionize led to the firings of union supporters and the eventual closure of a fund office. I wouldn’t donate to a charity that violates fair labor standards, so why would I support their partnership with an organization that does?

My second reason for not donating through street solicitors is efficiency. According to Charity Navigator, for-profit fundraisers actually keep 25 to 95 cents of every $1 they collect. A Portland Tribune article says that Dialogue Direct is paid $180 per new donor enrolled. And this (painfully slow) YouTube video shows a “dialoguer” explaining how she is paid an hourly rate plus bonuses per person she gets to donate. On her third day of work, she made $700 by signing up nine new donors. Past canvassers for the Fund for the Public Interest say that their work with Save the Children was commission-based, and employees received 15 percent of the donation for “one-off” supporters and 20 percent for “Lifeline Sponsors.”

While I’m happy to hear that at least some canvassers make a living wage, commission-based pay seems counterproductive. Charities rely on long-term, committed donors, and a harried canvasser trying to meet a daily quota doesn’t seem like the best person to foster that relationship. If you are thinking about making a donation, make sure to ask how much of your pledge will go to the fundraising organization versus the charity. If the number seems inappropriate to you (whatever amount that is), then go home and donate directly.

As long as street fundraising enrolls new donors and makes money, charities will continue to do it. So if you don’t like it, don’t give. As long as you aren’t rude, I see no reason why you should feel bad about avoiding them.

My comments: I believe my city may have ordinances restricting sidewalk solicitation. Panhandlers can actually be fined here! I’m not sure because I’m almost never walking downtown. Dallas is not a pedestrian friendly town; it’s just not laid out that way. But occasionally charity solicitation may happen near a mall or in front of a supermarket. Usually, they actually use the cashier of the market (approved by the store chain management) to solicit a dollar or so which is just added to your grocery tab. Many ‘disease research’ foundations go this route; there’s no long explanation necessary and no cash needed either. It’s a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no, thanks’ situation. I usually say ‘no thanks, I give to charities already, where I can prove a tax deduction’, which is true.

Where I get caught walking on the sidewalk and maybe act like a sap is when I’m out of town visiting (business or pleasure) a big city like, say, LA or San Francisco, where there may be a “chugger” every block or so. I almost always stop and talk to the solicitors, hear their pitch, and yes, usually donate $2 to $10, and/or sign a petition. That’s something I would never do at home. It has to do with a superstition I have about getting home safely. I figure if I’m going down in an airplane, god forbid, a nice last thought I might have is, “well, at least I gave to the ‘crack heads summer camp & rehab center’ or the ‘mammograms for homeless dog bitches’ or some such cause. And with that thought I relax a bit— “I was an OK guy, I did my share”, I’d like to think, although in a real emergency I’d probably be saying The Lord’s Prayer and diving toward those little scotch bottles they keep in back (Actually I don’t drink booze anymore, but I haven’t flown since I stopped.)

And after one of those landings that I was sure would explode all the tires on the plane or when I see the plane wing get hit by lightning? I figure, as I walk shaking up the exit ramp, “ha, it only cost me $100 bucks or so on the streets to ensure my (and others) safe arrival back home!” And that’s pretty cheap isn’t it?