The truth will set you free from your job

From ProPublica

 

What do asking for a raise and feminine hygiene have in common?

If you know then you probably work for Summer’s Eve®. Via BOING BOING:

A moment of silence for one of the greats … Satoshi Kon

The brilliant anime director Satoshi Kon has died at the age of 46 from pancreatic cancer. I’m not even going to pretend that most people have heard of him, let alone seen his work, which is a shame. Kon, along with Hayao Miyazaki, are two truly great artists whose chosen media is anime. Kon directed four amazing movies Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paprika, as well as the incredibly strange and good TV series Paranoia Agent.

Unlike many anime creators, Kon’s work was rooted in the present – not a science fiction future or fantasy past. My favorite of his movies is Millennium Actress (I’m looking at my copy of the poster for it as I write this). It gives the history of 20th century Japan in the form of an actress telling her life’s story. Tokyo Godfathers is about homeless men trying to raise a baby they find. With all of Kon’s work you are never quite sure if what you are seeing is real or not. He brought magical realism to the screen far better than any other director I’ve seen. In Paprika, my least favorite of his movies, he goes over the top in trying to confuse the waking world with the dream world. Paranoia Agent is a totally unique work and well-worth watching. It’s ostensibly about a serial murderer in Tokyo, unless it’s about a woman who create a Hello Kitty-ish character for her company, or maybe it’s about police corruption? Agent is so claustrophobic, weird and, well, paranoid that it makes The Prisoner look like a Disney special.

On the good news side of things, Katoshi’s final film, The Dream Machine, was already in production at the time of his death and will hopefully be finished and released.

Lolrus snafu as AP rejects I Can Has Cheeseburger offer

Earlier this week it was reported that the AP had turned down a purchase offer by Pet Holdings Inc., best known for the amazingly successful LOLCat’s site I Can Has Cheeseburger. Of all the efforts to Rescue The Future of Journalism™, this was by far the least expected and easily my favorite. As the LA Times put it:

The Associated Press finally axed the project on concerns over "journalistic integrity," Pet Holdings Chief Ben Huh said in an interview Monday. For the prestigious wire service to even consider associating itself with a business that makes a living from fan-made cat pictures may have seemed unthinkable a decade ago.

But if AP had started to consider it (or something like it) a decade ago they would have been a lot smarter about than anyone else in the news business. Today Pet Holdings makes money like newspapers used to. That’s because in addition to I Can Has Cheeseburger, they own a bunch of other equally serious sites, like the LOLDogs site I Has A Hotdog, and the LOLNews site Pundit Kitchen. (In the interests of full disclosure I must admit to regularly reading Cheeseburger and Hotdog.) Pet Holdings is able to make money the way it does because 99.9% of its content is generated by its readers, so all the company has to do is generate revenue from its amazing traffic numbers. I’ve been meaning to write about their marketing deal with the Seattle Mariners for far too long. They regularly sponsor lolcats nights at the ballpark which, I suspect, greatly increases attendance for the last-place Mariners.

Pet Holdings, like the newspapers of the past, has a virtual monopoly on its very loyal readership. The fact that that readership is idiots like me apparently hasn’t hurt them. While I totally respect the AP and their reasons for passing on this deal, this is the kind of totally unexpected move that will finally Rescue The Future Of Journalism™.

Is a Disney-brand Muslim headscarf on the way?

Imane Boudlal has a problem: She is a member of two of the world’s largest religions — Islam and Disney. This became an issue in her life when, several months prior to Ramadan, the Disney World employee asked if she could wear a headscarf in observation of the month-long religious celebration. This was kicked up the chain of command and Disney corporate came back two months later and told her

told she could wear a head scarf, but it had to be designed by Disneyland’s costume department to comply with the Disney look, Qazi said. She was fitted for a Disney-supplied head scarf but was not given a date when the garment would be finished and was told she couldn’t wear her own hijab in the interim.

On Sunday – five days after Ramadan began, Ms. Boudlal showed up to work wearing her own hajib which was notably devoid of anything Mouse-ish. Ms. Boudlal’s job requires her to deal with the public and so her supervisors reportedly gave her the option of removing the hajib, going home or working in a behind the scenes position for the month.

As much as it pains me to do this, I have to side with Disney on this one. They are nothing if not consistent when it comes to employees wearing symbols of competing religions. My resident expert, Mrs. CollateralDamage, confirms that Mousers can’t wear crosses, yarmulkes, saffron robes, or pins saying “Scientology? YES!” on the job (or at least when their job involves working with the public). Above right: Disney’s standard way of depicting Arabic women.

Say it with me folks: “Thou shalt have no Mouse before me for I am a jealous Mouse.”

Still, I love the idea of Disney-designed religious clothing.

That said, allow me to make a few other points about Islamic issues in the news lately.

• Dear France (and Canada): IT’S A FREAKING VEIL!!!! GET OVER IT!!!
• It’s not a mosque and it’s not at Ground Zero. GET OVER IT!!! What about the strip clubs – which are also two blocks and can’t be seen from GZ?

Wow. I defended Disney and slammed France in the same post. Clearly I am getting the flu that Mrs. CD & CDjr. already have.

Farewell – hopefully – to American Apparel

American Apparel’s brand promise was a unique mix of “clothes made in the USA” and porn. The company alleged it manufactured things in a responsible way. (Mass layoffs earlier this year of the illegal workers who made their product in the USA did away with that one.) AmAp’s approach to marketing is best described as an NC17 version of “nothing comes between me and my Calvin’s.”

For most businesses this would have just been another horrid example of sex sells. For AmAp it seems to have been a reflection of CEO Dov Charney’s “issues.” Charney, who took most of the pictures of company employees used in the ads, was the defendant in so many sex-harassment law suits that you couldn’t keep track of them.The wonderful practices didn’t stop there – no surprise. AmAp was also accused of firing employees who weren’t attractive enough and, Gawker reported that,

Charney "made store managers across the country take group photos of their employees so that he could personally judge people based on looks. He is tightening the AA ‘aesthetic,’ and anyone that he deems not good-looking enough to work there, is encouraged to be fired."

Happily Charney’s management style seems to have come back and bitten him in the ass. Today the Times reported that the company’s woes continued as it raised "substantial" doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern and warned it could breach a loan covenant, sending its shares down 22 percent to a lifetime low. This follows a Federal inquiry into AmAp finances which was spurred when the company’s auditor quit after warning of problems with the company’s financial reporting and the reliability of the company’s financial statement for ‘09.

BTW, Charney is the company’s largest shareholder. Huzzah. Justice, oddly enough, is served.

The Penguins of Irony’s favorite moment in the effort to save journalism from its future

Here are two of the 10 projects that came out of the “Journalism That Matters” conference at the University of Washington in January.

• Abundant Journalism: Led by Fancher, this group eventually wants to link journalism projects and initiatives with potential donors.
• Microfinance: The initiative would provide business and micro-finance training for journalists who want to launch new media ventures.

“Whether all 10 initiatives that came out of the JTM Pacific Northwest conference can score the necessary funding to survive remains uncertain. While some have obtained initial grants, others remain unfunded. [Former Seattle Times Executive Editor Mike] Fancher acknowledged that each will face heavy competition for financing.”

Round-up of great stuff found on the web this week

•  CSMonitor: Monkeys hate flying squirrels, report monkey-annoyance experts

• AdFreak: Kelly Brook nude billboard airbrushed while Kelly speaks out against airbrushing

• Uncle Dudley’s Knucklebones: Weird dice

• Monkey Goggles: Deep in the Novelization of “E.T.” is an Edgier E.T.

• NESN: Hiroshima Carp’s Masato Akamatsu Makes Baseball’s Catch of the Year

One more reason ProPublica rocks

From their blog, Officials Say The Darndest Things:

“No consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking vitaminwater was a healthy beverage.” — A judge, summarizing the defense offered by Coca-Cola’s lawyers as to why the company’s marketing for vitaminwater isn’t deceptive.

Naomi Campbell and Tony Hayward: A match made in JUST SHUT UP

“I don’t want to be here. I was made to be here. This is a terrible inconvenience to me… Obviously I just want to get this over with and get on with my life.” – British supermodel Naomi Campbell about how much trouble it is for her to appear as a prosecution witness in the trial of African warlord Charles Taylor. Ms. Campbell testified that she was anonymously given a small bag of diamonds which she then gave to someone else seemingly for no reason whatsoever. Taylor, former leader of Liberia, is charged with trading weapons for blood diamonds with rebels in neighboring Sierra Leone. More than 100,000 people died in Sierra Leone’s civil war.

Spirit Airlines brand model is screw you

Spirit Airlines, known as a traveler’s worst friend, is considering going all out and charging customers if they want to talk to a person at the airport. This would be in keeping with Spirit’s long and distinguished history of viewing its customers as chattel. Just last week the airline began charging for carry on bags.

Customer screwage like this starts at the top, and in this case the top is CEO Ben Baldanza, who has never had much time for the people who make it possible for him to get a paycheck. This was documented a few years ago in Baldanza’s response to a customer email. The customers had written what has been characterized as a “long but polite” letter asking for a $376.84 refund to cover a trip ruined by a three-hour delay to their Spirit Airlines flight. In an email meant instructing a staffer how to respond Baldanza wrote: “Please respond, Pasquale, but we owe him nothing. Let him tell the world how bad we are. He’s never flown us before anyway and will be back when we save him a penny. “

The icing on this particular pile of crap was the “spin” the company’s head of communications tried to put on things: “No, we really don’t believe we have anything to apologize for regarding Ben’s e-mail. I can tell you that Ben cares enormously about our customers and our customer service. Ben said what is exactly true: that we don’t owe the customer anything. People can and do post whatever they would like on the Internet. But it cannot alter your adherence to your company policy or your procedures.”

Why aren’t these guys working for BP?

Rhode Island outraged by use of Massachusetts to illustrate size of oil spill

Rhode Island, perhaps because it is the smallest state in the union, is the preferred media reference when describing the size of something. This works well for both the factual and the fantastical.

The following are just from news stories in the past week:

• Charles Mix County covers an area about two-thirds the size of Rhode Island and about half the size of Delaware,
• The Basque Country, a region the size of Rhode Island, straddles the border of Spain and France. It’s historically comprised of seven provinces
• Complete with hand-dial radio and a trunk the size of Rhode Island,
• We’ve literally lost an area the size of Rhode Island off our coast," said Jindal.

The ice sheets that peel off of Antarctica all seem mathematically related to the Ocean State. The most recent: An Ice Shelf the Size of Rhode Island Breaks Up in Just 24 Hours

For those of you keeping track at home, Rhode Island is either 1000 square miles in size (just measuring the land part) or 1,500 sq. mi. if you include Narragansett Bay as well. Now comes the horrific news that MASSACHUSETTS!!! of all places is being used as a measure.

They say the dead zone is roughly the size of Massachusetts, or at least 7,722 square miles. The largest ever measured was just over 8,000 square miles in 2001.

Rhode Island has always had a chip on its shoulder about Massachusetts. My home state was literally founded by Bay State castoffs (cast off because they were in favor of things like religious tolerance, I might add). So this trend has to be stopped in its tracks. NOW. So Mr. Reporter, lets try again. It is nearly EIGHT TIMES THE SIZE OF RHODE ISLAND!!! Now, isn’t that more impressive?

Hen thinks it is a penguin or, when life imitates Wallace & Gromit

It’s almost August and that means the papers are filled with stories of animals as media silly season descends upon us. Nowhere is this more true than Metro UK which this week has already run stories on the bear who broke into a house and “stole” a teddy bear and another of a bear who put a safety cone on its head. This last story ran only because someone came up with the headline Cone and the barbearian. In today’s edition we have the breaking news of a Chinese hen who walks like a penguin.

While some may think of this as cute, in reality it is just another case of outrageous copyright infringement by the Chinese. Clearly they have trained this fowl to play the Feathers McGraw role in a horrible live-action rip-off of the classic Wallace & Gromit short “The Wrong Trousers.”

I shall recap the salient plot points for those of you poor pathetic souls who have not yet seen it (but I’m not speaking to you until you correct this error): Wallace rents a room out to a penguin. After displacing Gromit, the penguin is then revealed to be the nefarious bank robber Feathers McGraw. McGraw is a brilliant master of disguise who uses a red rubber glove to transform himself into a chicken (nudge, nudge) when he pulls off his heists. I won’t tell you anymore but I will say that the closing chase scene – involving a toy train set – is (really) one of the best and funniest things I’ve ever seen.

Extra kudos to the W&G site for having the best competition I’ve seen in a while. “TOP BUN The best Wallace & Gromit-themed baked good uploaded to the site each month will win a set of Wallace & Gromit baking kits.” I believe they mean best picture, either that or they’ve figured out some super cool new technology.

Zork! Old text-based games are the hot new thing

Do you remember the game Colossal Cave? How about

YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING.
AROUND YOU IS A FOREST.  A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND
DOWN A GULLY.

Anything? (If you’re under 30, ignore this question.) You may also know it as Colossal Cave Adventure or even Adventure. Colossal Cave was one of the first (if not THE first) of what are known as text-based adventure games. Created back in the ‘70s, these games were at one time the cutting edge of computer gaming and the sentences above will cause many an elder geek to wax nostalgic about evenings of Doritos® and Tab®. These games used a simple verb-noun parser to interpret these instructions, allowing the player to interact with objects at a basic level, for example by typing "get key" or "open door". Well guess what? They’re making a comeback, digitally and in-person. There’s even a documentary about them.

The ones I have had personal experience with are from Memento Mori Theatricks. As a whole, the series is called Parsely (parse, get it? Of course you did.). Memento Mori has turned these into more of a party game. One person gets the instructions and map and gets to play as the parser (a role that’s more fun than you might think) while the other people take turns giving very simple commands as they try to complete the adventure. I have played with 70+ people (at ConnectiCon) and with two other people while driving in the car, both times it was a hoot.

Around the same time Colossal Cave came out, the print equivalent was coming out in the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books. Each of these books was written in the second-person and at the end of each page the reader was given a choice to make. If you chose A you turned to one page, if B then to another page. The decision tree was seemingly endless and not a few of us didn’t so much play them as just read all the possible outcomes. Edward Packer, the creator of these games, is now updating them for the modern era as iPad/Phone apps called “U-Venture.”

The basic idea of the choose your own adventure books has had a profound impact on the development of PC/Video games. Do a news Google of the phrase and you get a surprising number of results – many from the recent ComicCon. But, if that’s not cutting edge enough for you, consider this headline from TechCrunch: Foursquare’s Next Game: Choose Your Own Adventure? 

Additionally there is now a documentary called Get Lamp, about the history of the computer versions. It has a genius tag-line: “Before there was the first-person shooter, there was the second person thinker.” DAMN THE VIDEO CARDS! Yesterday, HERE WE COME!!!!!

A moment of silence for one of the greats … John Callahan

I doubt there has ever been a cartoonist who combined sick, twisted and funny as well as John Callahan. Callahan – quadriplegic and alcoholic – was totally without fear when it came to finding humor in a situation. Callahan, who died yesterday at 59, had a drawing style that could at best be called unschooled. If your 6-year-old drew this badly you would take him or her for physical therapy. Yet his horrid drawing, like Bob Dylan’s horrid singing, was the perfect instrument for his perverse muse.

The drawing shown here is one of his classics and also provided the title for his brilliant 1990 autobiography which tells you more than you want to know (and is also the bare minimum you should know) about life as a quadriplegic.

Here are descriptions of his cartoons from Gene Weingarten’s great eulogy in the Washington Post:

• A blind man is plummeting off a cliff. In front of him, on a leash, also falling, is a small animal. The blind man is thinking, "Why did I buy a seeing-eye lemming?"
• A man is selling puppies on the street. The grim reaper has walked up to him, accompanied by her three little grim reaper children. They are excitedly bouncing around, saying, "Mommy! Mommy! Can we kill the puppies?"
• Two horseflies are sitting on a couch. The male fly is putting the moves on the female fly. On the floor, in front of them, are some little round objects. The female fly is saying: "Darling! Not in front of the maggots!"

As Weingarten puts it (and really – stop reading this, click on the link and read the damn thing, it’s great):

Typically, Callahan’s humor was judged against the backdrop of his disability — he was, in effect, given a pass for what would be considered tasteless if done by anyone else. He objected to that, and for good reason. Callahan’s genius — and it was genius — may have been informed by his disability, but it was not dependent on it or beholden to it; Callahan’s work needed no special accommodation for the handicapped, and to suggest it did is a disservice to him and to humor itself. Callahan’s crippled characters were stand-ins for all of us; he saw all of humanity as being lame — disabled by prejudice, by sanctimony, by vainglory, by small-mindedness, by self-absorption.

It’s no surprise to learn that his cartoons garnered a lot of hate mail, which he clearly loved as a lot of it is republished on his website. One sample: “In a recent edition of The Riverfront Times, you printed a cartoon depicting a square dance as an "Alzheimer’s Hoedown." Several our family caregivers of AD victims contacted our office to voice their outrage at your insensitivity.” Callahan believed everyone should be able to share in the gallows humor for any group. He took jokes which could usually only be shared between people afflicted with a condition or caring for those people and made them public. He did much more than that but even if that was all he had done he would have contributed a lot.

Let me end with this tagline from Callahan’s website: when you’re done laughing at the maimed, sick and unfortunate visit our foolish sponsors