Very much so. In pretty much all possible respects. I wonder if this kind of service was what the mobile handsets’ manufacturers’ marketing department had in mind when developing the idea of mobile handsets with cameras?
Schlagwort-Archive: oddly enough
Make War. Then Love.
Well, not quite love, but it’s closest capitalist pseudo-substitute. According to this Reuters report, a Nevada brothel has come up with a truly unusual marketing ploy.
It is offering 50 “free rides” to US military personnel with Iraq exposure – “‘We want to feel patriotic and feel we are doing something for our servicemen,’ [a brothel representative] said. ‘If we owned a Dairy Queen we would be giving away free ice cream…'”
Make War. Then Love.
Well, not quite love, but it’s closest capitalist pseudo-substitute. According to this Reuters report, a Nevada brothel has come up with a truly unusual marketing ploy.
It is offering 50 “free rides” to US military personnel with Iraq exposure – “‘We want to feel patriotic and feel we are doing something for our servicemen,’ [a brothel representative] said. ‘If we owned a Dairy Queen we would be giving away free ice cream…'”
Note to the German media.
It is plainly embarrassing to see how most journalists are reporting the relationship of GWB and Gerhard Schroeder in an “oh-my-God-George-W-Bush-still-does-not-love-
his-prodigal-son” kind of way.
Got US$ 4,500,000 to spare?
Then this could be a nice gift to your special someone. Or just the beginning of your very own navy.
Maybe you could even get a used Tomcat in addition if you can pay in cash…
Strange, but interesting.
Brad DeLong ponders about the difficulties of a humanitarian military intervention in Congo and sparks a lively debate about the principles humanitarian (remember: operation Iraqi Freedom”?!) foreign policy. Here’s a great quote from Abiola Lapite:
“Funny how a discussion about mass murder in the Congo manages to drift off into arguments about “neocons”, Israel and anti-semitism. If one were cynical, one might surmise that for most western commentators, what goes on in Africa isn’t really of any interest unless it can be tied in to their political agendas in some way …”
“Vanity, definitely my favorite sin.”
Now if *that* couldn’t become a conspiracy theory of truly Faustian dimensions… instaed of simply forging evidence and continue lying about the real reasons for the war in Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, one of the brains of Washington’s neo-conservative foreign policy gang, has taken the high road of telling the truth for once – what else should one expect in a “Vanity Fair” interview. Here’s how Deutsche Welle reports it (my highlights):
“US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has admitted that the decision to wage war on Iraq was not based on the regime’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. Wolfowitz, an outspoken hawk in the Bush administration and a key architect of the Iraq campaign, said in a magazine interview that the weapons issue was agreed on simply for “bureaucratic reasons”. He told “Vanity Fair” that it was something everyone in the administration could agree upon. Wolfowitz indicated that the real reason was that a toppled Iraqi regime would allow the withdrawal of US troops from Saudi Arabia thus removing them as terrorist targets.”
Well, the “real reason” of the day is probably as questionable as the “real reason” chosen for “bureaucratic reasons”… But that’s not important. What’s important right now is to understand why Wolfowitz chose to tell the world about this now.
“Vanity Fair” makes one think of, well, vanity – possibly not just Al Pacino’s favorite sin. And hubris, pure and simple – “look people, if you all had my brains I would have told you – but haven’t – that’s why you have me.” Plus the added joy of explaining once more that the US can do whatever it wants even when it is lying straight to the world’s face.
All this is certainly possible. But I am not convinced. Why now? Why play in the hands of the former opponents and weaken Bush’s position on the eve of the St. Petersburg/Evian G8 reconciliation meeting?
More research is clearly necessary…
Dating In The Dark
is not another film by Lars von Trier ;-). Salon.com’s Amy Benfer reports about what may be the first heterosexual dark room in the world –
“Finally, someone has figured out a way to use night-vision goggles to make love not war”.
Not surprisingly though, it is located on the Island of Manhattan, and run by some French expats…
Did I miss something?
My sister is doing a masters degree in journalism these days. You know, masters programmes are the hype at German universities these days. It doesn’t matter that there have never been any other degrees offered by German universities, except for the name, of course. The programme she’s doing has been taught since 1993 and was previously described as an “journalistic add-on” programme. Surely, it sound a lot better to bet teaching and studying a “masters” programme, especially as pretty much no human resources department in Germany is able to tell the difference between one kind of masters or the other. Yup, it’s all about bullshitting these days, long gone the days when people strove to follow the idea of “mehr sein als schein” – to be more than one appears to be.
Well, her programme is not that bad, to be fair. It might be a tad bit boring for people with some media experience, as far as I can tell, but for others it compiles an interesting range of common sense knowledge about publishing that would nonetheless take quite a while to acquire left on one’s one devices.
So I had dinner with my sister tonight and she told me about this online publishing project she’s doing and asked for a hand with the coding bit.
While I have continuously followed the internet’s development since I saw the first hypertext pages in a gopher-browser, and then Mosaic 1.0, back in 1994 and even do have some knowledge of web coding, I would never dare to call myself an “expert” in any meaningful sense of that word – knowing that a lot of people are not as cautious when it comes to slef-ascribing said status.
And one of the latter group of people might well be the person teaching online publishing for my sister’s class. On the assignment paper the person unmistakably wrote that she would, until the next class, “check if the server [on which the project is going to be published] supports Cascading Style Sheets”.
Did I miss something?
Fame Is Money Indeed.
Remember the song? “Fame, I’m gonna live forever, Baby remember my name…”
When I just went through the advertisement Salon.com requires my to read their articles, I was shocked looking at the top right corner of the sponsor’s website, a new Fox tv reality show, for I suddenly remembered a face, and a name.
The show is hosted by a woman whose fame is based on little more than 15 minutes of worldwide limelight as supporting act in another reality tv-show. One that took place in Washington, DC, back in the summer of 1998.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Monica Lewinsky, the woman who once delighted the world and a former US president with her oral skills is now using her mouth again. And this time, everyone is invited to have a look.
Just see for yourself.