Bruner Blog

Back in August I mentioned a zany review on Epinions.com titled “Mi Amor; Or Death by Water Pik.” Now fellow Internet marketing consultant Bill McCloskey spots this as a trend with a whole novel written in the form on Amazon book reviews:

Tonight, while looking up a book on Amazon, I came across a reviewer (listed as a top 100 reviewer by Amazon). For some reason, I clicked on the link that allowed me to read all of this person?s reviews. What it uncovered was the funniest thing I have read in a long time. Basically, this guy has written one of the funniest, post ?modern novels, totally though his book reviews.

To see what I mean, look up Henry Raddick as a reviewer.

Just some of the gems we learn:

1. His recent public disgrace
2. His uncle?s battle with prison authorities to get the ?cosmetic surgery? he needs.
3. Battles with his wife, Majorie and his past indiscretions.
4. His ?part-time? ministry.
5. His obesity support group.

It goes on and on.

There is something here for today?s marketer. I just don? t know what it is.

Bill McCloskey, CEO, Emerging Interest

Sounds to me like a poor man’s weblog, but one with a built-in marketing platform and affiliate network… I’d love to see this take off as sport.

Speaking of blogs, Bill agrees with me that he needs one (I’ve already posted several of his comments to ExecutiveSummary.com). Stay tuned…

Coming in under the shadow of Giuliani’s magnificent final months, Mayor Bloomberg shied away from publicity stunts and pointless press conferences for the first year of his administration. He seems to be enough in the groove of things at this point, however, that he’s starting to ham it up a bit for the press of late. Christmas was a case in point. I’m just assuming from the name that he’s Jewish, which makes it just that much sillier that he delivered cookies to firemen and policemen yesterday, along with his unused “strike bike” (which he bought when transit workers were threatening an averted walk-off) to a kid in Brooklyn with diabetes (NY Daily News). Isn’t that sweet? The Daily News headline, however, should have read “Mike Gives Strike Bike to Tyke.”

Tell you what I’d love to see: some smartass Flash animator sit down and put out an underground animation of the M&M characters rapping to an Eminem song.

So, we’ve had a white Christmas here in NYC after all. It’s really dumping down now as I type this just after 7pm.

Hope it was a merry one for you. Was for us.

This seems like an outstanding idea: a stun gun disguised as a cell phone. Terrorists could probably easily smuggle them onto airplanes, and stupid people will electrocute themselves in the head trying to answer their real cell phones. (Via Mark.)

I don’t make a habit of watching the generally stupid new hospital comedy Scrubs on NCB, but I caught it last week, and one scene has stuck with me. Flunky young resident J.D. is assigned to videotape the birth of friends of the mean Dr. Cox. J.D. tells the audience that people have romanticized the whole experience of birth tremendously, and if they really had any idea what it was really like, they’d have serious second thoughts. The scene switches to an imagined 1950s educational film where Dr. J.D. cheerfully explains to a wholesome ’50s couple of expectant parents: “You will fart, poop and pee in front of a room full of strangers staring at your vagina, which, in 80% of cases, will tear during birth.”

No wonder cesarean sections are more popular then ever (nearly 25% of all births in the U.S.).

UPDATE:
This could not have been more perfect: Mark just happened to send me this hilarious video clip (1.4 MB MPEG) of a Japanese ad for Fuji film set in a hospital delivery room.

I’m
very pleased to read on Gawker
that Mayor Bloomberg has endorsed plans to turn a mile and a half of abandoned
railway line on the West Side of Manhattan (from Gansevoort to 34th Streets next
to 10th Ave) will be turned into a park area. The effort, which got the kibosh
from Giuliani, is largely the labor of love by Robert Hammond, who founded Friends
of the High Line (nice web site) to
support the initiative. Further details from
the NY Times.

Caught this on tonight’s edition of All Things Considered (archive page | Real Audio file). Los Angeles’s Beverly Mall is lucky to be visited for the next few evenings by Hunky Santa, who is the real Santa’s son, St. Rick. He’ll listen to your gift requests and pass them along to his dad, although from the sound of it, many of the adults who are flocking to see him are expressing holiday wishes that should probably land them in the naughty column.

More news of the weird from the excellent NPR new quiz show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me:

• J. Lo is already threatening to call off the wedding to Ben Afflack unless he dumps best friend Matt Damon, who is apparently counseling Afflack against the union.
• The Senate’s internal TV network broadcast porn earlier this week as an A/V technician accidentally hit the wrong button while dubbing a smut tape for his personal collection.
• China’s state auto manufacturer will release a car next spring equiped with a karaoke machine.

One of the show’s panelists, wag Charlie Pierce quipped that after Trent Lott’s apology last week on Black Entertainment Television, BET had offered him is own regular show. “I’ts going to be called ‘Trent Lott in the Hood.’ They’re just debating whether or not to use an apostrophe.”

I
think it’s simply marvelous that Marvel has come out (so to speak) with a
gay comic book hero, but did they really have to put him in a cowboy suit
and call him the Rawhide Kid? I mean, isn’t that a bit…campy?

“Bang! Bang! Don’t worry, pardner, I got your back.”

The new Rawhide Kid, based on the same character from the ’50s, is to be released this February and is presently promoted on Marvel.com as “Hot This Month!” (I’ll say.)

Rumor is Marvel is considering changing the name of the Incredible Hulk to the Incredible Hunk.

This is a bizarre little story in the present issue of the New Yorker, more along the lines of the Bush administration trying to woo the rest of the world with questionable information strategies. In this case, the State Department has enlisted the help of the DC rap group Native Deen — a group of African American Muslims whose hits include “M-U-S-L-I-M,” “I Only Fear Allah,” and “Drug Free” — to spread the message of America’s diversity and tollerance by sponsoring their international exposure. So, while selling out to the U.S. government appears not to trouble them, of Eminem two of the band members say:

He has skills. Anybody in the rap world knows that he’s a very good lyricist.

He’s definitely taking the rap world by storm. But what we have a problem with is the subject matter, the content, the image, you know.

Forester Whitaker is a good actor, most memorably in The Crying Game, but I’m sorry, Rod Serling he’s not. Yet meet UPN’s host of the new Twilight Zone. This is a perfect example of Hollywood not knowing when to leave well enough alone. What’s next, the “I Love Lucy” movie starring Antonio Banderas and Nicole Kidman?

UPDATE:
I am quite an idiot, apparently (no surprise to many of you). This is apparently the second season. I don’t watch a lot a UPN.

So, the judge in the infamous “Central Park Jogger” case freed the five men who, as boys, were sentenced apparently erroneously for raping and viciously beating a female jogger 13 years ago. I was living in NYC at the time of the case. It was the biggest crime story of the decade, summing up all the fears people had about living it what was then a very dangerous city.

The whole thing is hard to fathom now. So they were innocent? Seems like the police and DA aren’t willing to precisely say that (even though another unrelated guy has confessed, whose DNA also happens to match crime-scene evidence). As far as I can tell, the court has just annulled the convictions, they’re free, no questions, no apologies, whatever. The judge did wish them a Merry Christmas, I saw on a TV news clilp.

And what about that terrible word “wilding” that entered our vocabulary (sort of) as a result of this case, which the teenagers alledgedly used (during their “confessions”) to jauntily describe their seemingly horrific crime spree. What was the word? Nothing more than a hoax perpetuated by the cops to make them look like monsters? Something the kids said which the cops misunderstood and fed to the media, which delightedly ran with? I remember back at the time people in the black community suggested that the police had made up the word, as no one had ever heard it used before or since in any other context. But back in 1989, we were told that “wilding” was the latest urban fad, a la Clockwork Orange. Certainly made for such tantilizing headlines. The media had a field day with it. Now, I suppose we’ll never know. Or, on second thought, we probably will as soon as the now free young men write their books on the whole ordeal.

All I can say is NYC is a different city today in so many ways, almost all for the better (save, obviously, the whole Sept. 11 thing).

Picking up the Big Brother theme I’ve been blogging about in recent days, I caught over the weekend on NRP’s On the Media an interview (transcript and Real Audio file) with host Brooke Gladstone and LA Times writer William Arkin on his recent article about the military’s continued dirty tricks vis-a-vis international disinformation policies. Both the interview and original article highly recommended. Here’s Gladstone’s intro from the interview:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was roundly condemned last year when he unveiled the Pentagon’s new Office of Strategic Influence to feed disinformation to the foreign media. He claimed it was all a misunderstanding and supposedly scrapped the idea, but recently in the L.A. Times, military analyst and critic Bill Arkin explained that the Office of Strategic Influence is not dead but thriving under different names throughout the Pentagon. Arkin has obtained dozens of Pentagon documents that describe in detail how the military has restructured itself top to bottom to fight a global information war that could blow back into the United States.

Here’s the best paragraph of the LA Times piece:

Both the Air Force and the Navy now list deception as one of five missions for information warfare, along with electronic attack, electronic protection, psychological . attacks and public affairs. A September draft of a new Air Force policy describes information warfare’s goals as “destruction, degradation, denial, disruption, deceit, and exploitation.” These goals are referred to collectively as “D5E.”

UPDATE:
Struggling with my Hungarian on Adi’s blog just now, I found this related NYT article: “Pentagon Debates Propaganda Push in Allied Nations”

Now
that’s more like it. I heard much of the press conference announcing the new designs
for rebuilding the World Trade Center, and, from the sound of them (and this
NYT article with a short multimedia slideshow), the new plans are much more
impressive than the first stinkeroo round. I’ll look forward to buying the Times
tomorrow and seeing them in more detail.

Pictured here is British architect Foster and Partners’ ‘Twinned Towers’ design, which proposes once more building the tallest sky scraper in the world. I say hell yeah. Haven’t studied any of these at length yet, but so far this one gets my vote for sheer NYC-style in-your-face audacity. You think you can knock down our buildings? Well let’s see you try it again, mother fuckers!

Too bad the web site for the new project, RenewNYC.org/.com, stinks and can’t deal with the traffic it’s getting.

See Google News for more on the subject.

UPDATE:
I’ve had a chance now to scan through all of the online presentations. Traffic to RenewNYC.org has finally slowed down enough. One thing is clear: almost all of the designs show real stunning vision. They’re all incredibilty cool looking buildings. here are some others I particularly like:

Notice the fire exit plan for the “Memorial Square” plan on the right.