Category Archives: Gimme a Break

Double Cross

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In the “Say it ain’t so” department, we have this story (thanks to /.) of corporate avarice:

Johnson & Johnson, the health-products giant that uses a red cross as its trademark, sued the American Red Cross on Wednesday, demanding that the charity halt the use of the red cross symbol on products it sells to the public.
Johnson & Johnson said it has had exclusive rights to use the trademark on certain commercial products — including bandages and first-aid cream — for more than 100 years.
It contends that the Red Cross is supposed to use the symbol only in connection with nonprofit relief services.
Johnson & Johnson sues American Red Cross over use of emblem – International Herald Tribune

Back To The Asylum

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The other day we recognized Tom Tancredo for having the (fleeting) common sense to recognize that the term “war on terror” was foolish. Now he goes right back to proving that he is “reprehensible” and “absolutely crazy,” to quote the US State Department:

“If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina,” Tancredo said. “That is the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they would otherwise do. If I am wrong, fine, tell me, and I would be happy to do something else. But you had better find a deterrent, or you will find an attack.”Tom Casey, a deputy spokesman for the State Department, told CNN’s Elise Labott that the congressman’s comments were “reprehensible” and “absolutely crazy.” Tancredo was widely criticized in 2005 for making a similar suggestion.
CNN.com – CNN Political Ticker

And now for this brief announcement

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/. has brought this Ars Technica article (covering a story first broken by Information Week) about Micro$oft receiving a patent for a technology to data-mine your hard disk for advertisers. Makes me glad I don’t use Micro$oft products.

Microsoft has filed another patent, this one for an “advertising framework” that uses “context data” from your hard drive to show you advertisements and “apportion and credit advertising revenue” to ad suppliers in real time. Yes, Redmond wants to own the patent on the mother of all adware…
“Applications, tools, or utilities may use an application program interface to report context data tags such as key words or other information that may be used to target advertisements,” says the filing. “The advertising framework may host several components for receiving and processing the context data, refining the data, requesting advertisements from an advertising supplier, for receiving and forwarding advertisements to a display client for presentation, and for providing data back to the advertising supplier.”
The adware framework would leave almost no data untouched in its quest to sell you stuff. It would inspect “user document files, user e-mail files, user music files, downloaded podcasts, computer settings, computer status messages (e.g., a low memory status or low printer ink),” and more. How could we have been so blind as to not see the marketing value in computer status messages?
Microsoft patents the mother of all adware systems

What did they mean to say?

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Pawn just loves it when people misspeak, or misstype, and the resultant sentence means something else entirely. One example was in a La Crosse, WI, newspaper where a letter writer, writing about the forces which keep gay people from coming out wrote “People never seem to amaze me.”

Here is another fine example, penned by one Andi, who was responding to an article over at The Caucus at The New York Times about a sequel to the popular Obama Girl video. Note the misspelling of “underlying” in the 3rd sentence (if you can ignore the absurd banality of the opening sentence):

I didn’t realize that our culture had stooped to popifying our politics. Not only that but this is by far the most sexist political ad I’ve ever seen. It is representative of the underling paternalistic value in our culture and supports sexist ideas and social constructs. If this strikes you as an over the top comment think about weather or not there would ever be anything like this made promoting Hillary.— Posted by Andi
Obama Girl 2: Electric Boogaloo – The Caucus – Politics – New York Times Blog

Oh, This Is Horrible! Why Didn’t You Kill Me?

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The slug, above, is just one example of the achingly bad dialogue from the movie “Tough Guys Don’t Dance“, written, adapted and directed by none other than Norman Mailer. He could have done us all a favour and left with just the writing credit. Pawn wasted a couple precious hours of his life last night watching this exemplar of bad acting, as Ryan O’Neal, Issabella Rossellini and Debra Sandlund cavort through a pathetic mystery involving several meaningless murders and several meaningless characters.

Debra SandlundIssabella Rossellini

A particularly humorous scene involves O’Neal and Rossellini’s characters, an apparently adventurous couple, deciding to go visit “The Big Stoop,” a babtist preacher who’s into wife swapping on the side, played by none other than Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller fame. That character’s name, by the way, derives from the fact that he’s sexually well endowed, but a little dim. Not enough of a man for Sundland, it seems.

John Bedford Lloyd turns in perhaps the most intelligent performance, made even more striking by the stilted and improbable dialog, such as “I am so wrong for this kind of imbroglio.” I’d swear that Kevin Spacey based his performance in “Midnight in the garden of good and evil” on Lloyd’s efforts.

Garbage In – Garbage Out

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The New Yorker magazine has one of the most storied style guides in publishing, as famous to some as those of The Times or The Wall Street Journal.  They also tend to have more thorough fact checkers and proofreaders, publishing, as they do, only once a week (or two).  Oddly, though, this interesting bit of typography crept into both the print and on-line versions of this excessively blogged-about profile of the elusive English graffitist, Banksy:

But for every litter freak or culture purist driven to indignation by Banksy there’s a person who is entranced. While setting up the show in Los Angeles, Banksy ordered a pizza, ate it, and tossed the box in a Dumpster. Within weeks, the pizza box was sold on eBay, for a hundred and two dollars. The seller suggested that a few anchovies that had been left inside might yield traces of Banksy’s DNA.
Dept. of Popular Culture: Banksy Was Here: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Now Pawn will concede that there is a trademark in the books for the word “Dumpster” but unless there is a record of this particular receptacle bearing that brand name, perhaps someone in rewrite got a little carried away.  Call a Dumpster a dumpster, and let’s move on.

Word Police, Where are you??

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Bob Zitter, Chief Technology Officer of Home Box Office, wants to do away with DRM — the term, not the concept. Addressing the NCTA (a cable programming trade group), Zitter proposed changing the terminology. Here’s an excerpt from coverage at Boradcasting Cable:

Digital rights management (DRM) is the wrong term for technology that secures programmers’ content as it moves to new digital platforms … since it emphasized restrictions instead of opportunities.
Zitter suggested that “DCE,” or Digital Consumer Enablement, would more accurately describe technology that allows consumers “to use content in ways they haven’t before,”
NCTA: HBO’s Zitter Says DRM Is Misnomer – 5/9/2007 12:04:00 PM – Broadcasting & Cable

Okay, more accurately describe technology… Interestingly enough, Zitter chose to exercise both sides of his mouth; speaking with the reporter after his address, Zitter added that HBO was ready to provide HD content but was loath to do so until they could ensure that consumers could not “use it in ways they haven’t before” — by shutting down the analog component outputs on most cable boxes:

Theoretically, says Zitter, those analog outputs could be disabled, forcing consumers to use a secure digital connection to watch HD content. But current FCC rules don’t give HBO or cable operators that power, in order to protect consumers who bought early HDTV sets that don’t support digital copy protection. “They say we can’t turn off the analog output,” Zitter notes.

Isn’t it time that the word police cracked down on such blatant abuse of the language?

Stay away from Indiana Markets

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Bloomington Market

Just a quick follow up from THe New York TImes on Sen. McCain’s epic adventure to a street market in Baghdad:

“What are they talking about? The security procedures were abnormal! They paralyzed the market when they came, This was only for the media…This will not change anything.”
Ali Jassim Faiyad, the owner of an electrical appliances shop in the market, said Monday.

How about this quote:

“like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime,”
Rep. Mike Pence (R – Indiana)

McCain Wrong on Iraq Security, Merchants Say – New York Times

That’s it, no more market days in Indiana!

Doves of Syria in the Bermuda Triangle

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Syrian cylinder dove

John McCain has ventured into the Bermuda Triangle of Irrelevance, the Middle East, in an experiment in extreme irrelevancy. He headed out to a Baghdad street market accompanied by 147 soldiers, armored Humvees and helicopter gunships and then scolded the media for not reporting that you can go for a stroll in the newly safe Baghdad. The press met his report with laughter.
John McCain called out by CNN reporter Michael Ware – People

Trying desperately to bring relevance to the region, Nancy Pelosi went to Israel yesterday, where she met with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and got from him an offer for negotiations to take with her to her next stop, Syria, where she is to meet with President Bashar Assad. The Bush administration lambasted her for visiting Syria and meeting with Assad while staying oddly mute on the visit there, yesterday, by a trio of Republican congressmen who also met with Assad.

Hmmm.