WTF Headline Of The Day

Sheep Belches Treaten World

More New Words

I've seen these words in print occasionally, but I always tried to discern their meaning from the context of what I was reading. Today I finally looked them up in a dictionary. I may never actually use either of them in a real conversation but they're still fun words to know.

Nihilism: (n) The doctrine that existing social, political, and economic institutions must be completely destroyed in order to make way for new institutions; a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless.

Solipsism: (n) The theory that the self can be aware of nothing but its own experiences and states; the theory that nothing exists or is real but the self.

Still Famous

After a few days of relative obscurity, Nadya Suleman, aka Octomom, is back in the news big-time this week. This morning, the morning news shows had video of a pretty spirited argument between Nadya and her mother, from celebrity gossip website radaronline.com. Nadya's father was on Oprah, and now I just learned that Nadya has given a "daytime television exclusive" interview to Dr. Phil, which will be on his show tomorrow and Thursday. Wow.

Based on what I've seen since the octuplets were born a month ago, fame isn't doing this family any favors (think about it - they've been getting death threats,) so why are they all of a sudden all over the place again? My best guess is that they're trying to create a more sympathetic perception of Nadya, presumably to generate more assistance and support. So far, that strategy doesn't appear to be working. I only saw a small clip of the face-off on radaronline.com, and I don't know the context of how the interview came to be, but what I saw didn't reflect well on Nadya or her mother.

I was curious to hear what her Dad had to say, so I videotaped Oprah and watched it while I was eating my lunch. At the end of the show I felt a great deal of sympathy for Mr. Doud. He personally came across as a kind man doing his best to cope with a situation that he didn't create and can't really control. The first thing that struck me was that he clearly wanted to go on Oprah - she said a couple of times that he reached out to her producers and asked to be on the show, and I found myself wondering why. Given how negative the press coverage of his daughter's story has been, why go on Oprah? It seems obvious that he was hoping to change the tone of the coverage, and as I said, hopefully generate more donations.

There's no question that Oprah can mobilize people. If she had had a nice cozy chat with Dad, then announced that she was making a generous donation to the family and encouraged her viewers to do the same, Nadya's financial problems would probably be over. That didn't happen and I believe it was naive in the extreme for anyone to think that it would. Why? Because nice cozy chats make boring television, and the Oprah show is first and foremost a television show. Forget that fact at your own peril. Conflict, confrontation and scandal is what makes good television.

So there was Dr. Oz, declaring Nadya to be "selfishly delusional." There was another fertility expert talking about the guidelines for IVF implantation and how Nadya's doctor exceeded them. Dr. Oz again, saying that people aren't donating money because they don't trust Nadya. "If I send $100 to Mom right now, will it go for a pedicure or will it go to help the kids?" A snarky comment, perfect for television, and it got the biggest applause of the entire show. It really did make me feel sorry for Nadya's father.

As I said in my first post about the octuplet story, the media in America is a very fickle lover, and so far it's been pretty mean to Nadya. Something tells me it's not going to get any better with Dr. Phil. I'm sure it will be very good television, but good for Nadya? Probably not so much.

The Oscars

Some random thoughts about last night's Oscar show.

• I like it when there's some suspense about which actors and movies will win, and I really like it when there's a big surprise. Before the show started, there was almost universal consensus about who the winners would be, at least based on the various predictions I read, and they were right. No disrespect to the late Heath Ledger, but imagine how interesting it would have been if Michael Shannon had won Best Supporting Actor.
• On the other hand, it's fun to see a Cinderella story like the huge success of Slumdog Millionaire. And wasn't it cool to see the kids from India, who had been flown in specially to attend the awards ceremony.
• Whose idea was it to go from "And the winner is... " to "And the Oscar goes to..." ? Presumably this is to avoid bruising the tender egos of the non-winners, i.e., if Kate Winslet is the winner, does that mean that Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie, Anne Hathaway and Melissa Leo are the losers? Apparently so, but I'm guessing they could handle it.
• And speaking of Angelina Jolie, I actually found myself feeling some sympathy for Jennifer Aniston, which isn't usually a feeling I experience when thinking about multi-millionaire television/movie stars. It can't be easy to see your ex-husband and his gorgeous, sexy, more-successful-than-you-are, we-have-six-children-together partner sitting front and center as you're trying to be cute with Jack Black.

Anyway, it's over for this year. Let's all go to the movies and try to predict who next year's winners will be.

Tab Trivia

Yesterday I added the picture of a Tab can to the top of this blog, and it makes me smile every time I see it. It's kind of an "in joke" for people who know me, because I'm a devoted Tab drinker and I've taken a lot of teasing about it over the years. There aren't many of us left anymore, so much so that just being seen with a can of Tab in my hand can be a conversation starter. The two comments I hear most often are: "I didn't even know they still made that stuff," and "Oh yeah, my sister-in-law/cousin/best friend drinks Tab." As I always say, I can't be the only one still drinking it.

I didn't actually take that picture, by the way, I just googled "Tab beverage" and found a great site with several pages of all things Tab. Did you ever wonder how the Coca Cola company came up with the name Tab? Here's the answer, from the site's FAQ page:

When Coke was looking for a name for their diet cola, they configured an IBM 1401 computer to print all four letter word combinations that had a vowel. This generated over 250,000 words; they also added names suggested by employees. After cutting out stupid combinations, Coca-Cola narrowed the list to 600 possibilities and checked each of these against existing trademarks. By the time of the final selection, there were less than two dozen choices left. TABB was the final choice. Before production began, the superfluous "B" was dropped, leaving us with TAB.

So long live Tab! As long as Coke keeps making it, I'll keep drinking it. I may even play around with the colors on my blog, to better coordinate with the famous bright pink can.

Do You KenKen?

I've just discovered a new numbers puzzle called KenKen, which is a numerical logic puzzle from Japan. It's kind of like sudoku, in that it has a grid of blank boxes to be filled in with numbers, but you have to do actual arithmetic to solve it. According to the New York Times, the name loosely means "cleverness squared." I'm all in favor of cleverness, so I went to the KenKen website and printed out one of the easier-looking puzzle grids.

For some reason I've never gotten into sudoku, but I like the idea of something fun that will challenge my brain, so I'm off to do my first KenKen puzzle and I'll let you know how it goes.

And in case you're wondering, yes, it snowed here last night but I'm not snowed in. The snowplows have already been out and it's just another wintry day in Chicagoland.

Hunkering Down

It's still winter here in Chicago. We're currently under a Winter Storm Warning, with 4-8 inches of snow expected by Saturday afternoon. Right now it's 27 degrees with bright sunshine, and looking out the window you'd never know what's coming. Truthfully, I usually take these warnings of coming weather disasters with a grain of salt, although a "warning" is usually more substantive than an "advisory." In particular, the local TV stations like to go into hysterical "armageddon is imminent" mode at the slightest hint of a change in the weather. There have been many, many nights when I've gone to bed expecting to wake up to the blizzard of the century, then woken up to only the lightest dusting of snow.

Every now and then, however, we do get socked in by buckets of snow, so I can't ignore the weather reports completely, and I'm ready for tomorrow, just in case. I went to the library this morning and got several great books, then I stopped by the grocery store to stock up on provisions. Let the snow fall - I'm ready. I can keep myself occupied and well fed without leaving the house for days, if I have to.

While I was on weather.com I couldn't resist checking out the current weather for Santiago and Dubai. Both my niece Laura (in Chile) and my friend Lorraine and her family (in Dubai) are enjoying much nicer weather than I am right now. It's summer in Santiago and the current temperature is a balmy 84 degrees. It's winter in Dubai, (and as I'm writing this it's also the middle of the night,) but even at that, the temperature is 66 degrees, with 83% humidity. Sounds good to me!

More Words I Like

Lagniappe (n): a gratuity, a gift with purchase, an extra you weren't expecting

Agitprop (adj): of or for agitating and propagandizing, (n) any agitprop activity or agency

Schadenfreude (n): glee at someone else's misfortune

These words are fun to know and fun to say, so try dropping them into a conversation from time to time. Your friends will think you're either a brilliant speaker or an obnoxious show-off. Let me know how it goes.

What time is it in Santiago?

As I said at the beginning, this blog is a work in progress, and this morning I'm experimenting with the "add a gadget" function. I added the World Clocks gadget and I'm not sure how much I like it. I love knowing the current time in various places around the world that I'm interested in, but I don't like the low-tech look of the clocks. I also don't like seeing the ads. I can play around a bit with the look of the clocks, so maybe I'll find a look that I like. Stay tuned.

WTF Headline Of The Day

Woman OK After Bullet Ends Up In Hairweave

People and Pets

I haven't been paying too much attention to the story about the pet chimpanzee that mauled its owner's friend. This morning, however, there was a segment on Good Morning America that really got me thinking. I wasn't paying too much attention to the specific details about what happened, although I was glad to hear that the woman who was attacked is apparently holding her own in the hospital. It was the part about the pros and cons of keeping chimpanzees as pets that caught my attention, specifically the comments of some pet owners and the degree to which they treat their pet chimps as children.

Lots of people who have traditional house pets, i.e., dogs and cats, consider their animals to be "part of the family," and I totally understand that. So why was I so creeped out to see chimp owners doing the same thing? A lot of it had to do with the clothes - not on the people, but on the chimps. There was a shot of a small monkey dressed in a green satin dress, with a voice-over of an adult woman's voice cooing "that's a pretty girl" as if she were talking to a baby. Another woman was shown in a clothing store, picking out outfits for her chimp. A third woman described the "onesies" a chimp owner bought for her pet.

It was the shot of a chimp dressed in a diaper that helped me to clarify my thinking on this. Dog and cat owners do indeed sometimes treat their pets like children. They talk to them, give them "people food," let them sleep on the bed and sometimes even kiss them. But dogs and cats are different enough from people (they walk on four legs, they go outside/use the litter box to pee, they don't have hands that can grasp things, etc.) that we're less likely to forget that they're not actually human. Dressing a chimp in diapers and a green satin dress is way beyond treating a pet like a member of the family. Treating an animal as if it's actually a human being is the part that gave me the creeps.

Added Friday, February 20, at 2:50 p.m.
Even Chimps In Tutus Can Be Vicious

Parlez-vous Français?

Oui, je parle Français, or at least I'm learning to. Truthfully, I should say "re-learning," because I took French classes in high school and college but as they say, if you don't use it, you lose it, and that's what happened to me. For many years I've been wanting to learn it again, and for the last 15 months or so I've been using all kinds of tools and resources to once again learn French.

The first thing I did, during Thanksgiving week-end in 2007, was to buy the Rosetta Stone language learning software. I've been working my way through it, with periodic breaks, ever since. I'm actually on my third time through the program. When I get to the end I just start over by signing in with a different user name. The entire program is broken down into modules, some as short as 5 minutes, so I can do as much or as little as I want. It's a great way to learn, lots more fun than the "lets conjugate some verbs" way I learned in high school.

There are also a lot of great resources on the internet. One of my favorites is "TV5Monde," which has newscasts entirely in French. They're taped, so I can stop and start as many times as I need to. I'm still not understanding everything, but I'm getting better at it.

Another cool resource on the web is "French In Action," a series of 52 30-minute lessons that were produced by Yale University and a public TV station in Boston back in 1987. Each lesson was filmed in France, with native speakers and no English instruction at all. Since these videos are 22 years old, each one is like a little time capsule of how much our lives have changed. The clothes, cars and hairstyles are all totally "80's", which is pretty funny, but the other thing that's interesting is the complete lack of any reference to computers, e-mail, cell phones, or the internet, all the elements of modern life. There really was a time when we all lived without such things.

WTF Headline Of The Day

Chinese Mistress Contest Takes Tragic Turn

Read about it here:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/02/17/china.mistress.contest/index.html

A Guilty Pleasure

True confession: I've been watching "The Bachelor" on Monday nights. In a short-term, completely inconsequential way, I'm hooked, and apparently I'm not the only one. According to the New York Times, the current edition, featuring single dad Jason Mesnick as the bachelor, is drawing the show's biggest audience in five years. How about that? What is it about this show?

I watched the The Bachelor when it first came on, back in 2002, and stayed with it through the first 3 bachelors (Alex, Aaron and Andrew) and the first bachelorette (Trista). When Trista's season got down to the last episode, her final two potential husbands were Charlie and Ryan, and as I watched I was certain that she would pick Charlie. It seemed obvious that her attraction to Charlie was so much stronger than her attraction to Ryan. I kept reminding myself that what we see is very carefully edited to create suspense and mystery about the outcome until the big reveal in the final show, but it didn't matter. Charlie was a hunk and I wanted him to win. I was sure he would win.

As everyone who follows reality television knows, Trista picked Ryan, and boy was I mad about that. I even called a friend and left her a rather over-the-top message about how lame the outcome was, how stupid the show was, how manipulated I felt, etc. Then I took a good look at myself and said, "girl, get a life". That's way more emotionally invested in a television show, reality or otherwise, than I want to be. So I stopped watching.

I wish I had a deeply profound reason for why I started watching again in January, but I don't. It's just kind of fun, in the middle of a cold Chicago winter, to plunk myself down on my couch every Monday night to watch two hours worth of romantic mayhem and melodrama as it unfolds on television. Did you notice I said two hours? As I recall, Bachelor pioneers like Aaron and Andrew only got one hour a week, but apparently the ratings are so good for Jason that ABC has expanded each episode to two hours. Of course, that doesn't mean there's an extra hour's worth of actual story. The extra time seems to be mostly reviews of last week and previews of next week, interrupted frequently by lots and lots of commercials. But who am I to complain? As I said, I'm watching.

Learning New Words

I admit it, I'm a word geek. As a writer, I already know a lot of words, but there are still lots of good words to learn. When I'm reading something and there's a word I don't know, I'll usually write it down so I can look it up and learn what it means. (I know - geeky. Deal with it.)

So here's my latest new word: Opprobrium.

And here's what it means: Infamy, a disgrace resulting from shameful action, reproach mingled with contempt. (Guess which current event/media story I was reading about when I came across this word. Hint: see yesterday's post below.)

Your assignment is to use your new word in a sentence at least twice today and report back to me. I'll start: "Octomom didn't realize her story would result in such opprobrium from people who don't even know her."

Isn't learning new words fun!

WTF Headline Of The Day

Ohio Woman Pleads Guilty To Exercising Husband To Death

Read about it here: http://www.newsnet5.com/news/18715066/detail.html

Fame in America - Not For The Faint of Heart

I've often thought that the last place any ordinary American (read "not a celebrity") would ever want to be is at the center of a media feeding frenzy. On a pretty regular basis, some unsuspecting American all of a sudden gets famous and most of the time it isn't pretty. Think of the newlywed man who had tuberculosis, the crazy astronaut chick, the "runaway bride," etc.

For the past few weeks, I've been watching the concurrent media firestorms surrounding two Americans who are suddenly famous - US Airways Captain Sullenberger, who landed an A320 in the middle of the Hudson River, and Nadya Suleman, the California woman who gave birth to octuplets.

If the general rule is that fame will ruin your life, US Airways Captain Sullenberger appears to be the exception that proves the rule. So far, everything I've read or heard about him is positive. That's at least partly because he performed a genuinely heroic feat. He's also personally appealing - smart, professional, humble and funny. As long as nothing scandalous or controversial about him floats to the surface to disturb his positive persona, he'll come out of his 15 minutes looking pretty good.

Then there's Nadya Suleman, now known as the "Octomom," who is the rule that proves the rule. Whether or not she deliberately set out to become famous, it's safe to say she never expected and certainly never wanted to become the most reviled woman in America. Without rehashing her story and everything that's being written and said about her, here's what's been on my mind as I watch this story play out.

From a communication and messaging point of view, did her publicists get what a train wreck this was going to be when they agreed to represent her? On February 3, eight days after the babies were born and before Nadya had been seen publicly, publicist Joann Killeen used the following words to describe her client: smart, bright, articulate, well educated, balanced and together. Huh? That's certainly not what the rest of us saw once Nadya began speaking for herself and the details of her story came to light. Killeen also said, in response to a question about how Nadya would support her 14 children, that Nadya had been a "working professional" before she had the octuplets.

According to the Killeen Furtney Group's website, Joann Killeen is an "award winning public relations executive with over 30 years of industry experience." Did she really think she could promote this client as being balanced and together, much less a working professional? Working at what, exactly? I also think she could have done a better job of preparing Nadya for the media spotlight. For example, don't go on television and say something that isn't true, such as "I'm not on welfare." It took about 17 seconds after that interview aired for information about food stamps and disability payments to show up online. Apparently Nadya doesn't consider food stamps to be welfare, but that's a subtle semantic distinction that won't stand up in the kind of shrill narrative coverage this story is getting. How about "I've never had plastic surgery." As far as I know that hasn't been proven one way or the other, but it didn't take long for some old pictures to surface, side by side with screen shots from the Today show. Not to call anyone a liar, but Nadya's face sure has changed in the last few years.

As of this morning, the octuplet story appears to be fading from the limelight, at least in the mainstream media. One of the lessons for me is that if think you want to be famous, be careful what you wish for. The media in America is a very fickle lover. If you want to come out of your moment in the spotlight unscathed, make sure you, your story and your behaviour are appealing. Otherwise, you're toast.

Seven Days of Blogging

It's now day 2 of my "adventure in blogging" and I want to be sure that I get in the habit of posting regularly. I'm always a little annoyed when I click on a link to a blog that sounds interesting only to discover that it hasn't been updated in months. To help develop my blogging mindset, I have set myself the goal of posting something every day for the next seven days. It's actually an intriguing exercise - ever since my first post yesterday, I've been continually thinking about things to write about. I've even started a list. Today's post will be up soon.

Starting my blog...

Okay, here goes. I've been thinking about blogging for quite a while, and today I'm actually going to start doing it. As I begin, I've been pondering what kind of blog I want to create - should I be completely anonymous, with deeply personal musings that I wouldn't want anyone who actually knows me to read? Or should I write it with a specific audience in mind, more like a personal conversation? I've decided to stick with writing for an audience that knows me. If I ever want to go into private stream-of-consciousness mode and write things I wouldn't want my grandmother to read, I'll start another blog (and never tell any of you about it.)

For a while this blog will definitely be a "work in progress," as I learn all the tools and tricks of blogging, but hang in there with me. This is going to be fun!