February is American Heart Health month here in the US. So let me bring you a story that’s associated with heart operations: the no-kiss, hard CPR method.
And here to show us how it’s done is that master of vascular sensitivity, Vinnie Jones:
The British Heart Foundation endorses the method, and created the Jones video. We’ll have to see how it flies this side of the Pond.
Ordinarily I tune out commercials on TV, if I can’t fast-forward past them. (I’ve also trained my eyes not to see ads on web pages. All those billions of dollars spent on SEM just swirl down the drain as far as I’m concerned.)
I also don’t watch sporting events. I used to like the Olympics before NBC got hold of them & turned them into xenophobic yak-a-thons.
So the Super Bowl is a great big glob of non-interest to me. However, I do understand that this is where advertisers seriously strut their stuff, & sometimes the commercials are quite entertaining. Maybe more so than what’s happening on the gridiron.
(Well, unless Janet Jackson is involved.)
Here’s one that’s been “leaked” to the Net, from Volkswagen:
It’s not clear to me what dogs barking a John Williams piece has to do with German cars. But it’s certainly more entertaining to watch the piss being taken (so to speak) out of that pompous, self-important musically-bloviating, um, composer.
J.C. Penney’s new CEO is taking an interesting approach to the Applification of the retail giant. As of today, no more sales-du-jour; just consistent, low pricing.
& when I say “sales-du-jour”, I mean even more than that: last year they ran 590 sales.
I don’t know how they do that—sales on sales, I guess.
But Ron Johnson led Target for some years before moving to run retail operations at Apple. You can apparently thank him for the no-discount but really cool Apple Store ambience. (If you don’t know about Apple stores, all the customers look like they came from either Skid Row or a developers’ bullpen & the fixtures & the help are all minimalist chic.) He seems to be intending to meld the low prices of the former with the…well, the experience of the latter.
If so, he’s got a long row to hoe. I haven’t been in a Penney’s store in a while (by which I mean somewhere around 30 years), but peering into them at the mall, they strike me as seriously shabby.
Meanwhile, the company has been running commercials touting the shift in strategy. See for yourself.
Here's what I wonder: if it works for Penney's, will Macy's follow suit? I certainly hope so, because they must run at least 600 sales per year, too.
Evidently it’s not enough to have Sunnis fighting Shiites, or Tutsis going at it with Hutus or Serbs taking on everyone in the Balkans. No—Fox News and the Muppets are now firing across each others’ bows.
Not watching a whole lot of TV news, I hadn’t been aware that Fox’s Eric Bolling proclaimed that the latest Muppet movie indicates a “liberal media” bias that’s brainwashing kids against big business, especially (in this case) big oil.
Actually—I hadn’t been aware that anyone named Eric Bolling exists.
Nonetheless, it does seem a bit mean-spirited to go after the childhood icons. But it turns out that the fuzzy friends are not partially armed when it comes to a battle of wits. At a press conference in London this week, Kermit and Miss Piggy had a few words of their own:
A writer for Slate has come up with a Mitt Romney comparison calculator. It’s an algorithm that uses Romney’s income for 2010 (based on the tax returns he finally made public) andcalculates how long it would take the Republican candidate to “earn” whatever you made that year.
Then it tells you how long it would take you (at your income level) to amass what he does in a year.
If you’re not depressed when you start out, you are when you’re done.
