corporate skulduggery » Absurd Intellectual

Small business Saturday

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 22 November 2011 Modern Life

Nov 222011

Small Business Saturday is just one of the backlashes against the Black Friday consumerist madness. Cyber Monday has grown into a black day all its own, and I’m sure the small business owners of the world hope that Saturday does, too.

I also saw a handmade/local crafts “day” being planned, but I can’t remember what it was called, which makes it impossible to Google. (Here’s a similar pledge.)

All of these, of course, share the conceit that it’s not the consumerism that’s the problem, it’s that you’re aiming your consumerist impulses in the wrong place.

The granddaddy of all of them, of course, is Buy Nothing Day.

Having just had two great experiences with local, downtown shops in the past week, and having had excellent luck last year having a local artisan custom-craft me a gift, you can tell I’m primed to support these causes.

And yet — I was at Wal-Mart yesterday. And I’ve already ordered gifts this year from Amazon.

So don’t feel bad if you did, too. But the Christmas season is such a spend-a-thon, it’s an excellent time, no matter what the prompt, to take a step back, a deep breath, and examine exactly where all that hard-earned cash of yours is going.

Hmmm, actually, that’s an interesting idea: Cash-only Christmas. Tackle the credit crisis and force local shopping all in one? LOVE IT.

(Of course, I’m not the first to think of it, but maybe I can be the one to make it a thing this year.)

Shooting with a silencer: Camera noise, the Jacobsen Blimp, and why those Osama/Obama photos were staged

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 4 May 2011 Modern Life, Photography

May 042011

Did your local newspaper run a photo of U.S. President Barack Obama, addressing the nation about the death of Osama bin Laden?

Well, no, it didn’t.

What your local newspaper actually ran was a staged photo, taken a few minutes after the president gave his speech. Obama walked back out to the podium, and faked talking for a few minutes, while photographers snapped away.

According to Al Tomkins, writing on journalism website Poynter.org, this is pretty standard practice — although it’s not talked about much:

This type of staging has been going on for decades.

John Harrington, president of the White House News Photographers Association, tells me that the Obama Administration has used this technique before and they are not the first.

“I am aware of it happening in previous administrations. I believe Bush 41 did it too,” Harrington said. “The times where I have known of it happening before is when the President is in the Oval Office and you are working in a very tight space.”

Other photographers who work at the White House told Poynter.org that since the Reagan era (and possibly before) it has been the standard operating procedure that during a live presidential address, still cameras are not allowed to photograph the actual event.

(See also the blog of Jason Reed, a White House photographer for Reuters, who posted a description of the night that Tompkins linked to.)

So why do they do it?

Apparently, it’s partly a concern for space, partly because the teleprompter gets in the way, and partly because camera shutters make too much noise (especially when there are dozens of them, and they’re echoing off White House marble).

But there are ways to silence a camera. Check out this cool foam-lined case for an SLR that practically mutes the shutter sound, although at the price of limiting your ability to change settings on the camera itself. It’s called a Jacobsen Blimp:

Tompkins doesn’t hold back what he thinks about this type of re-staging of a photo. Although the initial photo captions are clear that this was a re-enactment, Poynter checked into 50 newspaper front pages from the next morning. More than half don’t make it clear to readers that they’re not seeing the actual speech:

It is time for this kind of re-enactment to end. The White House should value truth and authenticity. The technology clearly exists to document important moments without interrupting them. Photojournalists and their employers should insist on and press for access to document these historic moments.

Hear, hear.

It’s the ‘Inception’ of documentaries

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 19 March 2011 Modern Life

Mar 192011

A documentary about product placement — funded by product placement in that very documentary?

I love this! This is exactly the kind of po-mo meta exercise that I can’t get enough of. It’s like a Borges short story, but in documentary form and about advertising.

It’s both wonderful and awful and I can’t wait to see it.

(via tdw)

Why is Nelly Furtado ashamed of earning $1 million?

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 7 March 2011 Modern Life

Mar 072011

Last week, it came out that Canadian songstress Nelly Furdato had earned $1 million performing a private concert for Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Of course, since everyone was all buddy-buddy with Libya at the time, this was no big deal.

Now, she is giving the money back. So is Usher. So is Beyonce.

The National Post names and shames a few other artists who make money from these corporate gigs — including Neil Young and Bob Dylan, who are accused of “stumping” for Guess Jeans: “a company that, at the time, relied on sweatshop labour and was fined in the U.S. for failing to pay minimum wage or overtime.”

Now, if you want to call out musicians for selling out, I’m with ya. But I’m not sure I get why Nelly Furtado is suddenly giving back her $1 million fee now that there’s revolution afoot in Libya.

Think of it this way: If you filled up your gas tank in the past 30 years, you’ve contributed some money to the Libyan regime.

But Furtado took a million dollars AWAY from them. Why should she be ashamed? Hell, she did more good than any Western politician — many of whom actually provided money or arms TO Gaddafi.

—–

Now, a thought experiment re: Libya.

So, you’ve got a very violent civil war. Some revolutionaries are fighting to ensure that they get a say in how their country is run — including a reform of the government and the possibility of social change. Others, “patriots,” are fighting to keep the status quo, and to keep their leader in power. Outside observers condemn the sickening violence.

Do you think the leader should step down?

And why do you think that Lincoln should do that?

Stop the Choddy

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 3 March 2011 2G1L

Mar 032011

“Choddies are transmitted directly to the right hemisphere of our brains through our computer, TV, and movie screens. Once there, they begin to devour our imaginations until we no longer recognize original thought.”

Take the pledge: Stop the Choddy.

Black Mamba vs. artistic integrity

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 19 February 2011 Modern Life

Feb 192011

Sigh. I guess you could play a drinking game based on product placement and selling out. But you’d get drunk pretty fast.

I can’t wait to see Black Mamba 2: Dark Secret, in which the Black Mamba’s secret past as a date-rapist is revealed.

(via tdw)

How about a fast food receipt that gives you nutritional information?

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 14 November 2010 Modern Life

Nov 142010

Despite the fact that I’m not a huge fast food eater, I will admit that I go into restaurants fairly often. And this strikes me as a good idea:

Have a receipt that gives you nutritional information as well as financial information.

I mean, all the stores are required to have this information prepared already — most of them have pamphlets that you can pick up, or ask for, or they have nutritional information buried somewhere on their website.

The computers they use as tills at a fast food restaurant are much more powerful than the ones powering the Apollo moon missions, so it’s not much of a stretch to say they could check a database and bring up “number of calories” to print on a receipt, somewhere beside the “number of dollars” that they’re already programmed to print.

This receipt comes from a Burgerville, which is a local — and locavore-friendly — burger chain in the American northeast.

It was posted on the blog of Cabal, and I noticed it after I saw his Flash-ad-becomes-pop-art tweet the other day.

The receipt is called a Nutricate, and it was designed and implemented by SmartReceipts.

I don’t own a restaurant. But if I did, this is exactly the type of thing I would pounce on.

Look, if you run a fast food joint, no one believes that your food is healthy. They’re not going to be surprised by the fast that there is fat and carbs in the burger and fries that you sold them. But they might be impressed if you’re upfront and straightforward with them.

Fast food: What you see is not what you get

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 12 November 2010 Modern Life

Nov 122010

Back a few years ago, when I was really rabidly anti-fast food, I enjoyed sending people to a site called “Fast Food, Ads vs. Reality.”

There, fast food ads were juxtaposed side-by-side with pictures of the same food, ordered from a fast food outlet. The results, you will not be surprised to learn, showed that the reality rarely resembled the advertising. To wit, a Burger King Whopper:

Now, another photographer has taken the same idea but ramped it up slightly — shooting the fast food in a studio and attempting to match the lighting and angles of the advertising. See what Dario D. has done with a Whopper:

There are many more on the website (appears to be down, Google cache here), but what I really appreciate is how the argument is ramped up rhetorically:

I happily pitch the idea that lawmakers are committing a crime against us people by allowing us to be continually insulted by this advertising, and consequently this pursuit of technical correctness, in defiance of human perception.

Ha! Indeed! There is also a comparison made between the advertised burgers and the box that they come in, which would be too small to fit them if they were actually they size as advertised.

I have chosen to highlight the Burger King Whopper because it was the last fast food hamburger that I ever ate, just over seven years ago. And that was an anomaly — I stopped eating McDonald’s in mid-high school, and most of the rest of the fast food burger chains didn’t last much longer. That Whopper, seven years ago, which didn’t sit all that right in me, was kind of a test.

Caveat: I do sometimes eat fast food fries, or even dessert, but even that is very few and very far between. I will also confess to a love of burgers in general, but I prefer to find them at cafes and diners.

Strange that I am still so perturbed by the false advertising, when it doesn’t affect me at all anymore.

(via Jezebel)

You know what, the heck with logos

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 22 October 2010 Modern Life

Oct 222010

Let’s say you’re not a very good capitalist consumer. Let’s say you didn’t score very well on the logo recognition test.

Perhaps you even hold that as a point of pride. Perhaps, you say, it is just that you “place all such capitalist icons into their proper perspective (i.e. into the banal, derivative, generic, and irrelevant categories).”

That’s excellent. As a person who was just the right age to have Naomi Klein’s No Logo make a gigantic impression on me,* I am completely sympathetic.

That’s why I think you might be interested in this (ahem) product:

It’s the brainchild of one Jeffrey Crouse, and with about a month to go, he only needs about $1,100 in donations to get it up and running.

Do I love it? Yes. Do I think it’s perfect? No.

I would prefer to be able to download it as a filter, say, for Final Cut or iMovie or something. I think his idea of an uploadable server is interesting and cool, but far too single-point-of-failure for me.

Still, I keep thinking about a trip that Amy and I took to Cuba a couple of years ago, when we were surrounded by LITERAL PROPAGANDA everywhere we turned, and all we could think of was what a nice relief it was to not have our brains assaulted by advertising at every juncture. Now that’s a vacation.

(via BoingBoing)

____________

* One of the worst side-effects of 9/11, in my opinion, was the way it completely derailed all the wonderful youth protest movements that were just getting started.

Invasive advertising ‘breaks into’ your home

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 5 October 2010 Modern Life

Oct 052010

In Santiago, Chile, security company ADT has launched an ad campaign that involves surreptitiously placing empty boxes inside peoples’ apartments, with the slogan, “Breaking into your apartment is easier than you think.”

The trick? The box is spring-loaded and can be slid under their door, while flat:

Copyranter nails it by calling it “creepy” and says:

Do you like your advertising invasive? Well, it doesn’t get more invasive than this ADT stunt …. [It'll] get your attention/piss you the fuck off.

Here’s a video that shows it in action:

(via BoingBoing)

The lawyer who squatted in the Empire State Building

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 23 September 2010 Modern Life

Sep 232010

There’s something so now about this story, and how it combines elements of individual desperation, lack of oversight at large corporations, and the collapse of the economy. Lawyer Daniel K. Perlman used to sublet a room from a business that had a suite on the 40th floor of the Empire State Building.

When that business left, though, Perlman stayed. Other tenants got eviction notices from the building. He, somehow, didn’t.

With no one to pay rent to, and vacant offices all around him he kept working. The maintenance people knew him. When his access card stopped working one day, he got another (though it was for a different floor) through a friend.

This lasted for seven months.

Read the whole story at the New York Times (also the source for the picture). I love his attitude, summed up in this quote: “If I’m guilty of anything, I’m guilty of procrastinating.”

And the gold for Olympic cognitive dissonance goes to …

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 18 February 2010 Modern Life

Feb 182010

I’ve always found it sort of sad that the Olympics are brought to you by mega corporate sponsorship in the first place, but the choices of some of the sponsors are so at odds with the pure athletic lifestyle that it’s even worse than sad, somehow. And perfectly summed up in this hilarious image from The Daily What.

Look at this beer coaster

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 9 February 2010 Modern Life

Feb 092010

Just look at it:

Yes, that’s a beer coaster. And yes, it’s an advertisement.

Okay, I’m used to beer coasters that are ads for, you know, beer. Or pubs or something. Or even public service announcements telling me to call a cab or to wear a condom.

But this, I’m guessing as part of a run-up to Valentine’s Day, is an ad for a local jeweler. And this beer coaster incorporates a ring sizing chart.

Now, not to be churlish, I actually have no idea what my ring size is, and it’s kind of cool to know. I might appreciate some kind of placemat that also doubled as a hat-size indicator. But this ring sizer isn’t aimed at me. In case you can’t read it, let me tell you what it says:

Deluxe Combination
Ring Sizer / Coaster
Let him know your
ring size, and leave
the rest to us.

That’s right, ladies, if you want to wear a band of domesticity, your future mate is likely too thick-skulled to realize it on his own. Hint, hint and hint until he finally caves and buys you the symbol of him love.

I’m just surprised that it doesn’t have a diamond quality chart on the reverse, along with an inflated “How else can 72 months’ salary last forever?” slogan.

Corporations: Legal fictions, but their feelings are real

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 7 February 2010 Modern Life

Feb 072010

The whole thought of corporations being granted more and more civil rights just rubs me the wrong way. While I understand the utility of the limited-liability corporation and the fact that a company can get things done and can organize productive labour in a way that’s more efficient than individually possible, I just can’t articulate how frustrated it makes me when people seem to think that an economic “good” is the only thing that’s good.

I’m glad that I’m not alone in this. For example, I present to you a “Tom the Dancing Bug” comic strip, which I read in Salon:

And, after a friend of mine posted Sully from “Monsters, Inc” as his Facebook doppelgänger last week, I dug up this strip, too:

Ski resorts ‘fluff up’ their snowfall reports

Posted by Grant Hamilton on 8 January 2010 Modern Life

Jan 082010

Well this is an interesting study!

Snowed: Deceptive Advertising by Ski Resorts, by two Dartmouth College economics profs, shows that ski resorts in the U.S. inflated their snowfall amounts near weekends, when they thought they could attract more skiers. Ski resorts that were closest to population centres, and therefore had the most to gain, inflated their numbers the most. Weather Service data doesn’t show a “weekend effect” that would explain the resorts’ numbers.

From an NPR story:

According to Zinman, resorts reported 23 percent more snow on weekends. And the resorts that had the most to gain by fluffing up their numbers did more of it.

According to Zinman, resorts with more people living within driving distance inflated their numbers more, as did resorts that don’t offer money-back guarantees.

The researchers didn’t single out specific resorts in their report, choosing instead to make broad statements about the industry as a whole.

Most interestingly, half way through their study, they watched as a new iPhone app was released, which allowed skiers on the slopes to report numbers back themselves. What happened? Suddenly caught, the ski resorts immediately stopped inflating their numbers.

At least, the ones with iPhone reception did.

(via Poynter)

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