Bruner Blog

I should be posting this to my ExecutiveSummary.com blog, as it’s the kind of business insider stuff that I like to post there, but that site is presently under reconstruction.

Anyway, I was on a conference call the other day with a bunch of people, and we were temporarily interrupted by mooing. One of the women apologized that she was walking around her farm in Texas. (It was a wacky call altogether, trust me.) Anyway, Greg Jarboe, a PR consultant on the call, quipped, “Jill, this just goes to show you’re outstanding in your field.” (I am not sure her name was really Jill; there were lots of folks on the call I didn’t know.)

At the time no one laughed, as I recall. Later, buddy Kevin Lee and I mused on the comment for about 15 minutes, figuring it was too quick for the rest of the participants (in case you’re slow, yes, she’s a smart, accomplished lady so she’s outstanding in her field, but at the same time, she was, at that moment, literally out standing in her field!). We wondered if he’d been sitting on that pun for years waiting for the perfect moment to unleash it (doubtful; it’s really a once-in-a-lifetime quip), but Kevin is pretty sure he’s just that smart.

So, if you want certainly the wittiest PR in the biz, and, in all probability, very smart PR, give Greg a call.

If you’ve been meaning to donate to Kerry but have been procrastinating, do it immediately, because after Thursday, July 29, when he’s named the party’s nomination officially, it’s too late.

It’s hard to tell whether this Canadian guy is sincere or not in his outrage about this obvious spoof site. Those Canadians are a humorless lot, by and large. Another reason we should indeed go kick their asses. Besides, it would be easy. Many of them speak French.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/790817.cms

In my ongoing effort to be recognized as the premier blogger of the NY NPR affiliate radio station WNYC, let me be the first to link to the 19-minute audio interview from this morning’s Brian Lehrer Show with über blogger Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit. Smart comments all around (Reynolds is a law professor, after all, so it’s not surprising he’s quite articulate when speaking, in addition to in writing). Highlights:

• Libertarian though he is (often deemed simply a “conservative,” which he rejects), Reynolds thinks Kerry has a decent chance of winning, especially if he gets tougher about “The War on Terror.”

• He thinks the U.S. should simply bribe foreign countries (notably France) to participate in the war. INTERVIEW’S BEST QUOTE: “It seems that any coalition that doesn’t include France gets called unilateral, no matter how many other countries it involves. Britain doesn’t seem to count, Australia doesn’t seem to count, Poland doesn’t seem to count. But apparently as long as France is included we are then being multilateral. I don’t know, maybe we could buy a bunch of Airbus plane and use them as decoy Air Force Ones or something…. I know they’re supporting Robert Mugabe because he’s planning to lease a lot of airplanes from them. They seem to maybe be changing their position under pressure now on Sudan, they seem to have been pretty supportive there, though French oil interests are involved as well. So I think we ought to take that bribery approach into account in the future. Perhaps if we decide to invade Iran or Saudi Arabia, we should just tell France, ‘Look, Total Fina Elf will get half the oil concessions,’ and I think then we’ll find it will be no trouble to be multilateral.”
• On the significance of blogs: “A.J. Liebling famously said, ‘Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.’” (That one’s good enough to have a place of honor on my blog’s sidebar from now on.)
• On promoting his blog: “I had no PR plan, and certainly no PR budget. [Emailed some friends when it started and use to email journalists early on. After that, it was just] “….people finding me on their own. Which has to be frightening to professional marketers.”
• On why he is not attending the conference: “I wasn’t convinced that I had the requisite Hunter S. Thompson kind of flair to produce anything that would be especially interesting.”
• He reiterates his position that he supports Bush dumping Dick Cheney in favor of Condoleeza Rice for VP in 2004.

I just opened our refrigerator to see a loaf of Pepperidge Farm’s “Carb Style” bread. “Carb style?” That’s a good thing? That’s even a style? Much less a selling point? (Shouldn’t it be “Low-carb style”?)

Strangely, nothing that I can see about it on PepperidgeFarm.com, though here it is in its many varieties on Peapod.

Mmmm, carbs.

UPDATE:
This “bread” tastes like burnt plastic and has the texture of rubber wet cardboard. (Okay, not burnt plastic, maybe, but not good bread, either.)

Highly suspect invoice
Click image to Enlarge

Take heed. I just discovered a seemingly new scam. I have to hand it to them, it’s original.

I logged into my PayPal account today and noticed in my recent activities folder a bill from a company called Signature Networks out of — guess where? — Florida, invoicing me for $200 for supposedly sending them spam.

Failure to remit the ammount [sic] due, in full, may result in further collection proceedings, up to and including actions taken before the courts for collection of outstanding debt. …

Florida Law provides Civil and Criminal Penalties for Unlawful access to Computers within the State of Florida, including the unlawful access and use of e-mail servers located in the State Of Florida.

Just to be clear on this, I am not a spammer. I suppose it’s possible that this was an honest mistake; for example, some real spammer spoofed my address, and these folks responded in good faith. But I doubt it. I tried calling the number, and it’s only a voice mail account. I left a message telling them that I reported them to the Better Business Bureau (which I did), and that I was posting a warning about the scam to my web site. I gave them my phone number to follow up, so I’ll let you know if I hear back. The email address of the reporting party had the domain Bondage-Radio.com, which doesn’t look completely scary but certainly a bit dubious.

Anyway, if anyone else has had a similar experience with these folks or something along the same lines, I’d love to hear about it.

UPDATE:
I just got this email today:

This letter is an automated reply to the rejected invoices returned to us from paypal.com, however, please do not believe that the sentiment here is insincere.

Beginning Saturday, July 17, 2004, someone using a corporate paypal account began sending out invoices for Spam to lists of individuals. Over 5,000 invoices were distributed … THESE INVOICES ARE NOT VALID.

Most, if not all of the rejected invoices have come from upstanding Net Citizens. I am unaware of any correspondence that originated with those individuals.
Action is being taken by myself and my staff to track down the individual as well as protect all corporate accounts with paypal.com.

We sincerely apologize for our failure to safeguard corporate accounts and passwords and will endeavor to better safeguard such information in the future.

No information about the rejected invoice is being saved or collected. No e-mail lists are operated or maintained by Signature Networks, or any of it’s subsidiary operations. We specifically deal with INTERNET RADIO, and the proven and accepted radio advertising methods we ourselves supply.

Our policy on the issue of SPAM in our own promotions has been ZERO TOLERANCE specifically for our DJ’s, Staff, Promoters, and Advertisers.

The Invoice is being treated as a Spam, and reports have already been made to PayPal.Com, FTC.Gov and the Internet Anti-Spam Groups and Lists we are aware of.

Sincerely,
Paul Coates, Owner CEO
Signature Networks
www.Bondage-Radio.com

Well, so maybe these aren’t the bad guys after all (even if they are a bit pervy, but whatever), but someone out there is perpetrating a fraud.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE:
CEO of Signature Networks Paul Coates has since found this blog post and left a further comment, basically to the effect that they tracked down the culprit to a former employee. Most remarkably, Coates comments on my restaint! I must be getting soft in my blogger dotage.

Seymour Hersh

I just watched/listened to all two-plus hours of the gala dinner presentation for the 2004 Membership Conference in San Francisco (Real Video file), which took place last week. Speakers included comedian Sandra Tsing Loh, railing against public radio for an incident in which she was fired for a misunderstanding involving the word Fuck, independent filmmaker John Sayles, who has a new political film coming out soon that got an extended preview at the event, commedian Greg Proops and, most notably, Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker investigative journalist who broke both the story of the My Lai massecre in Vietnam back in 1969 and the Abu Ghraib torture abuse scandal in Iraq earlier this year.

Most remarkably, Hersh (who starts roughly 1 hour 8 minutes into the clip) claims to have seen videos the US military took in the prison of children being raped. From Daily Kos’s partial transcript:

Some of the worse that happened that you don’t know about, ok. Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib which is 30 miles from Baghdad […]

The women were passing messages saying “Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened”. Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it’s going to come out.

Presumably, Hersh going to report about this in an upcoming issue of the New Yorker. This story has been floating around the Net and the international press for weeks now (fucking Aljazeera has scooped the US press with it by now) — when the hell is the NY Times or NPR going to decide this is newsworthy already?

I’m listening to NPR’s Fresh Air this evening, with the guest John Allen, Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. Terry Gross asked him about the whole question of American Catholic bishops prohibiting pro-choice politicians (read John Kerry) from receiving communion. Allen notes something that the Pope doesn’t seem to have a problem giving communion to pro-choice politicians, which he reported on earlier in this article:

In January 2001, Rome’s outgoing mayor, Francesco Rutelli, was the candidate of Italy’s center-left “Olive Tree” coalition to be the country’s next Prime Minister. (Rutelli went on to lose to Silvio Berlusconi). Rutelli’s political background was in the Radical Party, which had led the battle for legalized abortion in Italy. As he moved into the mainstream, Rutelli took the classic position of left-leaning Catholics in public life: personally opposed to abortion, but not willing to impose his stance through law.

On Jan. 6, Rutelli and his wife Barbara, who are regular Mass-goers, attended the final act of the Catholic Church’s Jubilee Year: the closing of the Holy Door at St. Peter’s Basilica. Despite what in the United States would be termed his “pro-choice” stance, Rutelli came forward for Communion and received it from Pope John Paul II himself.

I was at a picnic this afternoon with, among others, Elizabeth Spiers. I’d link on her name to somewhere but, despite the fact that she was once the “It Girl” of bloggers, she no longer blogs anywhere. After leaving Gawker nearly a year ago to write for NY Magazine, her NY Mag blog The Kicker has been defunct for a few months, and her personal site, ElizabethSpiers.com, is experiencing operating difficulties at the moment.

So at the picnic, I see her pull out a paper journal and start taking notes. “Your new blog?” I wryly observed. We joked for a few minutes about how hard-bound diaries or magazines should be “the new blog.” I then recommended that she write a column for the magazine that fact-checks blogs. She agreed it is a great idea, so new millennial post-ironic, but I doubt she’ll ever get around to it, so I thought I’d go ahead and scoop her and get credit for it here. While blogs are still even partway relevant, anyway…

I can juggle three balls better than the average person, and four balls for a few seconds, but I never could crack five. Much less while playing the piano.

Thanks Mark.

UPDATE:
My link to this seems to have stopped working. I found the same file here. To all of those who suspect this is a fake (see comments), I’ve decided you’re probabaly right, in as much as I’m guessing that his piano keyboard just plays the next note as soon as it’s touched by a ball, regardless of where the ball lands. It’s still some pretty amazing juggling and impressive entertainment.

Stepbroheem Jay brought me to his favorite record store in Chicago over the weekend, Dusty Groove. It is truly a connoisseur’s record shop, with a relatively small collection of LPs and CDs for sale but really choice stuff, much of it rather obscure.

Jay took special delight in calling my attention to this CD. In searching for it on Google, I find the only listing for it on DustyGroove.com. Adi was duly impressed. Thanks.

Funny: