Aporkalypse Now: Rebranding swine flu is like putting lipstick on a well, you know

What with the World Health Org declaring Defcon infinity I suspect yesterday was the last day which anyone will find swine flu funny for a while. That said, here’s a round up of humorous headlines

• Bloomberg coughs up some humor during swine flu news conference (NY Daily News)
• Pork Industry Has Beef With Swine Flu (NPR)
• Swine flu not kosher in Israel (Reuters)

The nomenclature is clearly posing a big problem – although not as big as the actual illness.

"We will call it Mexico flu. We won’t call it swine flu," Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman, a black-garbed Orthodox Jew, told a news conference Monday, assuring the Israeli public that authorities were prepared to handle any cases.

Attempts to rebrand the disease are failing in great number. As old buddy/NY Daily News reporter Helen Kennedy noted:

Washington officials launched a comically doomed effort to call it "H1N1," while the European Union tried to rename it the "novel flu."

And the NYT reports:

Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, convened a hearing on Tuesday on a subject he described as “the so-called swine flu,” even as a campaign was mounted by farm groups to rename the virus “North American influenza.”

There are concerns pork sales will fall off a cliff faster than Matthew 8:28-34* as long as people continue to erroneously think you can get punk’d by pork. If they can’t rebrand the illness I expect marketers to start changing the name of their products: Four-legged chicken. Tuna of the farm. Mini-beef.

Another branding issue: swine flu – like global warming before it – just doesn’t sound scary. Al Sacco tweeted: “Swine flu isn’t a scary enough name. It needs a slogan, too: "Pork Plague, the (Other) White Death," for example.”

BTW, free instant diagnosis is available at DoIhavePigFlu.com.

 

*“and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water”

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Bitter dispute over sugar ad may bounce Czech government

A Czech government ad touting its turn to hold the presidency of the EU may and featuring a sugar cube may actually result in the downfall of the government.

The ad, built around the claim that the Czech’s invented the sugar cube (I always thought it Bjork), features the slogan, “We sweeten it for Europe.” However it “can also be translated in Czech as promising to give Europe a bitter lesson, making trouble for it or causing disgust. … [However] this has soured relations within the ruling coalition, with traditionally pro-European Christian Democrats attacking it.”

Apparently this kerfuffle is because the ruling party is split between pro & anti EU types.

Further confusing the issue is whether or not the Czech’s should claim ownership of the sugar cube. The ad claims it was a Czech invention dating from 1843. However reporters at the daily Lidove Noviny pointed out that the although it was created in what today is the Czech republic but was then an outcropping of the Austro-Hungarian empire by a Swiss named Jacob Christoph Rad. Speaking as a professional journalist, this is what’s known as a fun story.

Silly Czechs. How stupid to take an argument over sugar so seriously. They should follow our lead and argue about lipstick and whether it is placed on pigs or pitbulls.

For those of you not up on leading-edge political stupidity: The McCain campaign (slogan: “Truthiness is everything!”) is attacking O’Biden for saying “that Sen. John McCain’s claim that he will shake up Washington after agreeing with President Bush for so long is like ‘putting lipstick on a pig.‘”

It is a disingenuous attack, at best, given that McCain himself has used repeatedly, even to describe a health plan put forth by Hillary last year. Trotting out former acting Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift as the attacker is a nice sound-bite move that looks really dumb if you examine the facts.  True Ms. Swift is A) female, B) a mom and C) was sort of governor.

However her time in office was not a pretty one. She was named acting governor when her predecessor decamped to become ambassador to Canada. Despite having the governor’s office she couldn’t even carry her own party in her one attempt to win the job for herself and was defeated by Mitt Romney, a name you may have encountered. She was a notably inept governor:

By the end of her term, Swift was extremely unpopular with voters in the state (at one point having the dubious honor of a single-digit approval rating). This unpopularity was due in part to a perceived lack of effectiveness and in part to apparent abuses of her gubernatorial privileges, including: her use of a Massachusetts State Police helicopter to commute cross-state, from Boston to her home in North Adams; and, the use of State House aides to babysit her children.

Given all that is surfacing about Ms. Palin’s troubles in Alaska, Swift is not the best shade of lipstick for this issue.

Apparently the lesson Sen. McCain learned from his 2000 primary loss to Pres. Bush was that voters really don’t care that much about facts. I wish I could argue that it was a bad conclusion to come to.

BTW, Talking Points Memo has the following: A former McCain spokeswoman — who defended the senator when he made a joke about a woman raped by a gorilla — is also author of a book about being a political flack. The book’s title? Lipstick on a Pig.

During McCain’s 1986 Senate race, McCain was hit with allegations from women’s groups in Arizona that he’d told this knee-slapper (as quoted at the time by the Tucson Citizen)…

“Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, ‘Where is that marvelous ape?'”

McCain was defended by Torie Clarke who said, “John does not recollect telling that joke … And he has a very good record on women’s issues.” The reporter who wrote the original story disagreed then and now with Ms. Clark.

I want to see a pitbull put some lipstick on that pig.

Headline of the Day: Drag Queen Robs Burger King

Hard to get better than that.

Security cameras showed the man, wearing a dress with a revealing bust line and hair barrettes, climbed through the takeout window at a Burger King on May 11. He held the employees at gunpoint, demanded money, exited through the same drive-through window and drove away.

Only way it could have been better is if it had been a drag king.

2nd best headline of the day: Big, hairy pig attracted gawkers in Wisconsin

That’s odd, I don’t remember going to Wisconsin recently. And personally, I prefer to call them fans, not gawkers.