Collateral Damage

The courts have agreed that Johnson & Johnson’s lawsuit against the Red Cross over the use of the red cross was one of last year’s top 10 dumbest marketing moves.

J&J, which also uses the symbol, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan against the American Red Cross and four of the charity’s licensees, seeking to prevent them from using the “Greek red cross on a white ground,” claiming that it is a trademark violation and that the humanitarian group was barred from using it for commercial purposes. But U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff disagreed, noting that the American Red Cross had used the emblem for more than a century and was authorized to do so by various Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Congress.

I really want to know who got the job of telling the board of directors, “Oh by the way, we’re suing the Red Cross.” There was no possible good outcome from this. Even had they won in the courts no consumer without a law degree would have understood it.

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf,” Bush said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

My head hurts from this quote.

Dear George, you want to show solidarity with these families? How about you visit each and every one of them. Maybe explain why neither you nor your children have served in this or any other war. How about adequate funding and administration for the Veterans Administration? How about not being an idiot? How about not starting wars on fictitious grounds?

Good Lord.

McCain? Hillary? Obama?

I’ll take any of them over this fool.

Not Huckabee, though. I can’t live through another administration that views facts as malleable.

Easy jokes:

1. Actually I’ve always thought of him as wooden.
2. Couldn’t be worse than the one they’ve got.

Sadly for Mr. Brown and happily for anyone with a sense of humor the truth is even funnier.

Embattled Prime Minister Gordon Brown faces more potential poll humiliation — as Madame Tussauds waxwork museum said Tuesday opened a vote on whether they should bother making a model of him.

Quick, name an English-speaking country that actually likes its leader. … Hmmm, I’m stumped too. Maybe Canadia? They speak English, don’t they?

Some leaders are actually seeing their wax popularity waxing and not waning. The St. Petersburg Wax Museum says the public is not content with its small model of Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s newly installed ventriloquist-dummy-in-chief. Apparently the people want a three-dimensional version. Should this come to pass, it will mean the museum’s version has more depth than the person it is based on.

Is it a brand war or a cat fight? Islanders from the Greek island of Lesbos are suing the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece because its name “insults the identity” of the island.

“My sister can’t say she is a Lesbian,” said Dimitris Lambrou. “Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos.”

1. Never EVER get into a fight with a Lesbian.
2. You don’t get better branding than this. Open a Subaru dealership, put Martina on every tourist ad you can and buy your sister a house on Thassos.
3. You can’t win.

Hey, they originated the Potemkin Village, right?

Russia’s southern region of Ingushetia is trying to overcome its reputation for bombs, murders and shootouts by paying for a glossy supplement featuring strutting dancers and smiling mothers. The eight-page, full colour supplement entitled “My Favourite Republic” appeared inside copies of the popular Moscow newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda on Tuesday. … “Ingushetia, it is an amazing, beautiful region,” the supplement said on its front page. “You could talk about it endlessly.”

Or you can believe what the US State Department says about Inqushetia and the rest of the Caucasus:

Throughout the region, local criminal gangs have kidnapped foreigners, including Americans, for ransom. U.S. citizens have disappeared in Chechnya and remain missing. Close contacts with the local population do not guarantee safety. There have been several kidnappings of foreigners and Russians working for media and non-governmental organizations in the region. Due to the ongoing security concerns, U.S. Government travel to the area is very limited. American citizens residing in these areas should depart immediately as the safety of Americans and other foreigners cannot be effectively guaranteed.

I went to ComeBackAlive.com, the website for Robert Young Pelton who writes The World’s Most Dangerous Places and was very disappointed to find only very dated material on Russia and its dangerous places. Tsk, Tsk, Robert. CLARIFICATION: Actually the site does have more recent info, it’s just that when I used the search function the first page and a half or so of results were all for the site’s DangerFinder archives. Once I did a search for Chechnya -DangerFinder, I got the new stuff. Now I’m just disappointed with the site’s search function, not its actual content.

My former employers at the Boston Herald somehow managed to read Andy Borowitz’s story about Dick Cheney challenging La Hillary to a shooting contest as a real story. Here’s the top of what Borowitz originally wrote:

Cheney Challenges Hillary to Hunting Contest
‘Meet Me in the Woods,’ Says Veep

One day after Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton professed an abiding affection for guns and hunting, her love of firearms came under attack from another sometime hunter in Washington.

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Vice President Dick Cheney said that a hunting contest between him and the New York senator was “the only way” to determine whether Sen. Clinton’s tales of her gun prowess were for real.

The only thing that’s better than that is the correction the paper ran:

An article in today’s Herald regarding comments purportedly made by Vice President Dick Cheney was inaccurate and should have noted that it was based on a blogger’s satire and was not provided by the Associated Press.

The story about the non-story was broken by Boston Daily, the blog of another one of my sometime employers, Boston Magazine. (No matter what you might otherwise have been told, Boston is in fact a small town.)

“We were bamboozled,” Herald publisher Kevin Convey told Boston Daily. He explained that the item got picked up as straight news in Google, and was folded into unrelated wire reports from the AP, and appeared online and in the print edition.

“We failed to double-check the item against the Meet the Press website, which we should have done. We have changed our policies a bit to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Convey added.

My sympathies, Kev, because you have to explain someone a mistake made by someone else but let’s make it clear: you weren’t bamboozled. That suggests malicious intent on the part of someone else. This one was self-inflicted.

BTW, Borowitz rightly makes a big deal of the fact that he is “Winner Of The First-Ever National Press Club Award For Humor” but I think this is an even better honor

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - A New Zealand man has been accused of assault with prickly weapon — a hedgehog. Police allege that William Singalargh picked up the hedgehog and threw it several yards to hit a 15-year-old boy in the North Island east coast town of Whakatane on Feb. 9.

Runner up: Woman slips boa constrictor down her pants and walks away

LANSING, Mich. (AP) - A woman stole a boa constrictor from a pet store by slipping the snake down her pants, the owner said. The animal was stolen Thursday afternoon from Preuss Animal House in Lansing.

You can take this penis envy thing too far …

Shades of Jerry Ford and Whip Inflation Now…

Italy’s government has decided to appoint a special commissioner to try to curb price rises after inflation hit a three-and-a-half year peak in November … The ombudsman, dubbed “Mr Prices” by Italian media, will inform the industry minister of any “anomalous” or unjustified price increases and can also make proposals for legislation.

What exactly is an “unjustified” price increase? Isn’t that basically at the heart of the theory of capitalism? I set a price and either the market meets it or it doesn’t. If I can sell bananas at $500 each then shouldn’t I? I’m not saying this is a good thing but it is how we’ve designed the system.

This brings us back to the debate over “price gouging” by oil companies last year.

Just as no one can define terror, no one has any idea what price gouging is either. This fact is made plain in the GOP-sponsored House bill, which leaves it to the Federal Trade Commission “to develop a definition of price gouging.” You have to love a law that is so specific about the penalty and so vague about the crime. (and if I do say so myself the rest of that rant is pretty good … I suggest reading the whole darn thing.)

I expect Signor Prices will, in some form, be coming to the US soon.

Weirdly, a Yahoo executive APOLOGIZED TO THE U.S. CONGRESS yesterday for helping the Chinese government find and arrest journalist Shi Tao, who, thanks to Yahoo, is now serving a 10-year prison sentence. But why Congress? Yahoo should instead have apologized to the Chinese people for selling them out.

I couldn’t have said it better, so I’m not going to try. How do these people sleep at night?

TechDirt raises a question I also had

[Yahoo general counsel Michael Callahan is] now apologizing and saying he was ill-informed when he last appeared before Congress. That could be true, but in his new statement, Callahan admits that he realized he had misinformed Congress a few months after his original appearance, and chose not to inform them (which he regrets). However, if that’s the case, why did it take him two weeks to say that publicly after first lashing out at Congress for pointing out his clearly incorrect earlier statements?

And how does he explain this action to any children he may be related to?

Joe Winiecki, of Largo, Fla., boarded a Southwest flight in Columbus, Ohio, wearing a T-shirt for a fictional dishing shop which featured the words, “Master Baiter.” Winiecki said he was in his seat when an employee told him he had to change his T-shirt, turn it inside out, or get off the plane.

Earlier this year a Southwest flight attendant/waiter told a woman in a tank-top that she must either cover her cleavage or get off the plane.

Just a note to Southwest: Fashion police is a good brand differentiator if you’re the Queer Eye guys, not if you’re an airline.

Wonder if my readers from Trout Underground know which bait shop this is?

Quoth TechDirt:

Left Behind Games, makers of (somewhat controversial) religiously themed real-time strategy games … apparently isn’t happy that its video games were reviewed negatively across the blogworld. So, they did what any video game company would do: they improved their game. Oh… no, they didn’t. … They simply pulled out the lawyers and threatened to sue a bunch of bloggers for posting “false and misleading” content about the games. Of course, opinions can’t be either false or misleading, so they’ll have quite a case on their hands.

So guess what story/opinions are now being spread far and wide across the interweb? A text book case in how not to do this.

Allow me to take this opportunity to thank the legal system for protecting providers of false and/or misleading opinions … a/k/a me.

A study published in Nature Neuroscience showed that

Conservatives tend to crave order and structure in their lives, and are more consistent in the way they make decisions. Liberals, by contrast, show a higher tolerance for ambiguity and complexity, and adapt more easily to unexpected circumstances.

Consider this in the light of Mr. Craig’s behavior: First, there’s the Hamlet-like debate over resigning (if Hamlet were really, really, really creapy). Then his lawyer William Martin said on the Today show (today!) that Craig didn’t “knowingly and intelligently enter a guilty plea” and so would be changing his mind on that one, too.

Perhaps the soon-to-be-former senator is bisexual, because other than his plea & the resignation, he has yet to change his mind about any other facts in the case:

“He admits to going into the bathroom, he admits to moving his foot, he admits to reaching his hand down,” Martin said. “That’s not a crime.”

Martin said Craig will argue that he was under too much stress to knowingly plead guilty.

And you KNOW Mad Annie Coulter is going to have a field day with this. This is the person who wrote:

Assuming the worst about Craig, the Senate has not held a vote on outlawing homosexual impulses. It voted on gay marriage. Craig not only opposes gay marriage, he’s in a heterosexual marriage with kids. Talk about walking the walk! Did Craig propose marriage to the undercover cop? If not, I’m not seeing the “hypocrisy.”

God love her. Someone has to.Personally I think the Democrats should offer to pay Craig’s legal fees. He’s the best thing to happen to them since whatever that last GOP sex scandal was.

(Aside from the issue of the study’s implications for the Man Behind Door #2, I have to say I had my doubts about the science of this study. I’m always uneasy when I hear of science “proving” a social contruct. It reminds me too much of the bogus studies that have been done to “prove” this or that racial group or people with a particular sexual preference are always X — with X being a value that is not considered positive by the ruling class at the time. But from what I’ve read this was a legit double-blind study. I wonder what it would show about people who describe themselves as libertarians?)

Why bother gilding the lily? Michael Arrington at TechCrunch says all that needs to be said:

Ah, PayPerPost. The controversial Florida-based startup that is leading the effort to tarnish the blogosphere makes another PR blunder. And this one’s a whopper. The company has been chronicling their startup days on a video blog called RockStartup. There have been some embarrassments before with the video blog - such as when a viewer noticed that the company had purchased $700 chairs for employees with investor capital and then yelled at a painter for standing on one (CEO Ted Murphy… later said the chairs were purchased used). But the most recent episode is where the company really takes the cake. All employees of the company were taken on an all-expenses-paid trip to Club Med, where as far as I can tell they spent their time getting drunk and dressing up as Native Americans, complete with lots of red face and body paint.

Yeah, making fun of the victims of genocide. Now that’s funny.

It’s not just anybody who can take the most successful product release in years and figure out a way to turn it into a total PR disaster. Not for nothing is the man lauded as an innovator.

For reasons that no one quite understands, yesterday Apple cut the price of the Jesus Phone by $200. While Mr. Jobs’ explanation was that this was to increase sales during the holidays some found this about as believable as the latest rationale for start of the George W. Bush Desert Classic.

Some analysts weren’t as convinced of Apple’s stated reason for the price cut. “It’s an extreme move. It speaks to some desperation,” said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies, a Wayland, Mass.-based technology research firm.

Yeah, I didn’t understand it either. If it’s selling well at $600 why cut the price? The other rational explanation besides desperation is Mr. J senses a downturn in the economy but if the economy hits the skids who really will be dropping four bills on a phone? (Note well: I WANT ONE! Two friends of mine have them and I am losing my mind with envy.)

But that little question of why the price drop has of course now been totally eclipsed by angry iPhone buyers who are asking why they had to pay the full fare on the darn thing.

Mr J. released a statement yesterday apologizing to them:

“(We) need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers as we aggressively go after new ones with a lower price,” he said. “Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these.”

That would be more touching if Apple had ANY track record of actually engaging in customer service. My theory about Apple has always been that they make their products so user-friendly because they never want to deal with the customers again. (And I speak as a mostly content iPod owner.)

My hat is off to the marketing department at Nokia for moving quickly and taking advantage of all the kerfuffle.

They’ve taken out ads on Google that suggest users check out Nokia’s new Mosh mobile social network. The ads, which appear for searches on “iphone price drop,” say “Sorry, Early Adopters” and suggests they salvage their iPhone experience by checking out Mosh.

BTW, check out Matt Dickman’s post about Nokia’s response at his excellent blog Techno//Marketer. Unlike mine, it is actually informative.

Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza “inadvertently sent an e-mail intended as an internal memo to a Spirit Airlines staff member to a couple who had e-mailed Baldanza a complaint about bad service on his airline.“

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. “

He then hit “reply all.”

BTW, Aviation.com (from whence I got this story) said that the customers “were more angry over the rudeness and bad service they felt they had experienced at the hands of Spirit Airlines staff during the three-hour delay than at the fact of the delay itself.”

(I am late to the story, it broke a couple of weeks ago when one of the customers in question posted the story to another blog and then it went into WIDE circulation.)

Aviation.com also quotes the Orlando Sentinal who got the following amazing quotes from one Alison Russell, Spirit Airlines’ director of corporate communications in North America:

• “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.”
• “Truthfully, I’m genuinely not concerned,” she said. “People are going to have a blog for good things or bad things. We are very pleased with our customer service, we are very pleased with what we do.”

It’s always been my understanding that when it comes to customer service, it’s the customer who should determine whether or not a company is pleased with what it does.

Repeat after me, Mr. Baldanza & Ms. Russell, “I’m sorry. We screwed up. This is not how we want to operate. This kind of attitude starts with the top leadership and I clearly need to take full responsibility.” Then you list the concrete actions you are taking to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

There’s a simple lesson that spies and journalists learn early on: Don’t write anything down unless you’re comfortable with it appearing on the front page of the New York Times. Fortunately for spies and journalists, very few people learn that lesson.

Hmmm, seems to be airline theme week …