Gillette CEO: $8 billion loss is ‘price worth paying’ over #MeToo campaign Reads the headline of a recent article in the Washington Examiner. They Tweeted the article with the following comment: “Gillette’s controversial marketing campaign targeted at the #MeToo movement cost the company $8 billion. Still, its CEO says he does not regret a thing….
Category: Pop-Culture
The Tale of Max Martin
Once upon a time (2014)… The great kings of the music industry were worried. The harvest season had come, yet no one in all the lands had gathered enough music to make a platinum record. You see, international debts at the time were paid using platinum–in high demand in the Orient–while domestic debts were paid…
The Judge is Dead. Long Live the Judge
US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died yesterday. The news travels quickly, these days. Wikipedia was the first to break the story to me. “…Scalia was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the Court’s conservative wing” was the sitting terminus to his introductory paragraph. “Then he died”, appended a…
The Puppet Queen Bey
The key to the Super Bowl‘s awesome power as an entity is its egalitarianism. For what is essentially a holiday that emerged from a football game, it commands the cultural gravitas it does because it manages to trap far more than just football fans into its maw. Aside from the godawful, overrated ads that attract…
Musings on the Super Bowl
The Super Bowl is it’s own weird holiday. For the most part, only a few people are going to have a horse in the outcome of the football game. Not that the culmination of the NFL season isn’t worth a watch for football fans, it commanded this year an impressive 112 million viewers. This is…
Insecure Comedians and Ads Masquerading as Editorials
A 17-year-old kid attended some shindig and managed to grab a selfie with comedian Amy Schumer. This kid, being one of those young people always doing shit on their phone, reflexively posted the picture to his Twitter account, because he is a normal 17-year-old. In the longstanding tradition of accompanying pictures with captions, the young…
Most Kids Are Too Busy to Destroy Society
The Kids These Days TM are making demands on their colleges. They use a lot of hashtags, so it ends up circulating through to the media. From there, we go on to judge the opinions of 18-22 year olds and come up shocked when not all of them seem to be completely well thought out….
My Analysis of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta: a Metaphor for Conversion
Saw the opera Iolanta by Tchaikovsy not too terribly long ago. It struck a chord with me in a particular way, and I figure I’d record my two cents on it for posterity. It’s a fairly obscure opera, it seems. As of today, no full-length recording of it with English subtitles exists on Youtube. More…
#theyrenoangels
Ned: “You mean, like an angel?!” Lisa: “Well, obviously that’s impossib—” Moe: “Lisa’s right, it’s an angel!” For a far more trenchant and insightful version of everything I’m about to say. It’s not the exact same product/commercial, but the major principles are entirely the same. According to the refuse aggregate that is FB’s trending topics,…
Teenage Girls Are Dumb, But Don’t Be Too Mean To Them
http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/why-do-we-hate-things-teen-girls-love “This week, Stephenie Meyer released Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined, a gender-swapped version of Twilight… Naturally, the Internet had plenty to say on the topic, but while Twilight fans — many of them teenage girls — expressed excitement over a new book in their favorite franchise, numerous others mocked them for it.” I’m not…