Outrage: Spain STILL has not apologized

Ok, this is a little hypocritical and ridiculous now. Spain STILL has not apologized for the insensitive and incredibly stupid photo taken by the Spanish men’s olympic basketball team wherein they all made offensive poses derogatory toward Asians.

Spain's Offensive Pose against all of Asia

Why do I believe that Spain’s inaction is this so outrageous and hypocritical (and the media world in general for not making more of this story)?

Imagine that an olympic athlete in the heat of competition had used the n* word or other racial slur against another person. That athlete would be inevitably condemned formally by the media, their team, country, and the IOC most likely. Yet, an action such as this could at least be partially explained by the fact that it would have been an in-the-moment thing blurted out mistakenly. Ask Don Imus about such situations (for which he was fired). Yet, in similar instances where people have blatantly insulted Asians, little to no repurcussions have been felt. For example, beautiful and delicate Rosie Odonnel made her infamous “ching chong” comments on The View with nary a peep of protest from the mainstream media. This is unreal! Why not put on some blackface and say “yessum massa” or something horribly vulgar like that?

It’s almost as if it’s ok to demean Asians but it’s sacrilege to even make mention of Hitler or slavery. Even the term “Asians” is really too broad to be truly appropriate. Do you refer to the French / British / Germans? or do you just blanket them all as European americans?

The larger issue here is that this was not a simple case of someone blurting out a word and then living to regret it. This photo was an orchestrated group effort captured for posterity in film. This photo represents the worst of what’s wrong about the misunderstandings between cultures. “Hey, I didn’t know that was going to offend you, but I did it anyway” type of mentality. It has to stop – and the only way to stop it is by education and by letting people understand that they upset you and why.

It’s all about understanding, and yes it does take time. Forty years ago, ridiculing Jews and Blacks was commonplace on TV and in Film. These days, it’s actually hard to imagine, but it was really quite recent.

But, now that Jews and Blacks have much more of a voice in the media, and many more mainstream representations of themselves in the media, it is impossible to make negative remarks without backlash. When Asians are more fairly represented in the media (I mean, are all Chinese bad drivers? Do all Japanese carry cameras everywhere they go? Are Asians either Doctors or own stores or are rival gang members?) there will be more understanding and sensitivity.

The understanding and learning process can begin now. Spain needs to step up, realize that even if they “didn’t realize what there were doing was offensive”, it really was, apologize and have the Spanish basketball team apologize to China, to the rest of Asia and to the world for their behavior.

Please unite and join this petition to let Spain and the world know that this type of cultural misunderstanding must be righted.

Hayden is the new Britney

Britney Spears used to represent the best in marketing success.  Britney’s label, manager, and marketing team took a hard-working, average looking, below-average singing, over-sexed, under-educated, barely capable singer with a propensity toward becoming heavy-set, and turned her into an international star worth over $100mm thanks to suggestively themed performances staged by a not-yet-legal teen.

Now of course, Britney has fallen off the wagon (and her now-fictional celibate until marriage vow) into overweight and under-brained hot mess-dom.

Hayden Panettiere is the new Britney for so many reasons.

1) The underage drinking and partying.

2) The hot mess stage mom (actually, Hayden’s more like the new Lindsay Lohan with her super hot mess “look at me, I’m young and hot and drunk too” mom Dina Lohan).

3) And perhaps most importantly, it’s that Hayden is built like a linebacker in training

I mean, are people too obsessed with how young Hayden is to notice how thick she is?  I’m not saying she’s not attractive, and she seems like a fairly talented young person, but she’s got a body akin to the pre-KevinFederlined Britney Spears – toned, but thick and about to bust out.

I’m really hoping that Hayden doesn’t get married, have it annulled, get married again, have 2 kids less than a year apart, and have a melt-down any time soon.  At least she’s got the whales.

Hillary, snipers, WHO CARES?

Now Hillary is getting a LOT of flack for “misremembering” the situation in Bosnia.  She had claimed that she was under sniper fire.  Ok, I know you can read into this and begin to question the “trustworthiness” and “trustability” of Hillary, but the bottom line is that she is a power-hungry, manipulative, political monster as are most successful politicians.  Didn’t you already know that?  I mean, seriously, do you really care if Hillary mis-stated things about sniper fire?  I mean, in the worst case, you blame it on being a woman.  In another case, you blame it on being old and becoming forgetful.  In another case, you blame it on her being a politician, which she is.

So who cares!  It’s like blaming Barack for being of African descent and being raised by an Indonesian muslim father.  Elections should be decided on the whole sum of the person running.

Now, not to oversimplify, but Hillary is the smartest and probably the meanest, Barack is the most charismatic but will probably end up not getting a ton done (eg. his friend Deval Patrick in Massachusetts, whose speeches he has copied quite liberally by the way), and John McCain is probably the most sincere, but if he looks this old now, imagine how old he will look after a term in office??

All of this in-fighting between the democrats is going to lead to one thing: to another Republican in the White House.  Is that what we want?

Hillary and Barack should be discussing behind closed doors who will get to be president and who gets to be vice-president in their JOINT ticket or else they will blow this election like the Gore/Nader and Kerry/snowboarding/botox combos did before them.

Perez Hilton genetically engineered to blog

Ok, I pretty much suck at blogging. I thought you could have no talent and gain fame and wealth on the blogosphere.  Well, not me.

It has been said that blogs are written by people with nothing to say, read by people when they have nothing to do. But there are the rare few who were just destined to be bloggers, Perez Hilton, for one.

Mario Lavandeira, aka Perez, is genetically engineered to be (my weird way of saying destined to be) a great blogger. He dies for the fame and attention, is a very hard worker, knows his audience, is passionate about breaking news, and writes prolifically, even if not well.

He is also meant to be a blogger because he is physically unattractive, is overweight, obnoxious, overly dramatic on camera, and a terrible actor. He had studied to be an actor, had a guest spot on an episode of the sopranos, and was dying to be famous so developed an online persona, hitched his star to a former heiress’s sex tape wagon, and the rest as they say is history.  

I mean, he seems like he’s genuinely excited to be doing what he is doing which is awesome, but have you seen him on camera? He is NOT meant to be on video…it’s not his looks really, it’s his voice and personality. So here’s to you, Perez, and the hope that you keep blogging away and avoid the camera.  You are an inspiration to talent-less freaks everywhere!

Your life, aggregated

Are you twinkling on twitter? Fashionable on facebook? Space-caked on Myspace? are you kinky on Linkedin?

If so, you’ve probably started to feel the “Need for Feeds” – as in feed aggregators. You start using one – and then another…MyBlogLog, FriendFeed, pulse, socialthing

pretty soon you need a feed aggregator aggregator

This one is pretty SWEET: Introducing FriendFeedFeed – it will save your life

Nectar of the gods – Best, hottest singer ever

Click here for the hottness!!! Guaranteed to cause overheating

Cool to be republican again? Fiorina and Whitman power McCain

Since Dubya has been so unpopular, very few tech biz folks have been openly pro-republican in recent years.  Well, McCain is hoping to change that.

He’s got a team of tech all stars behind him, with former HP CEO Carly Fiorina joining the Republican National Committee as “Victory Chairman” and Meg Whitman, eBay’s retiring CEO (who had been rumored to be interested in heading to Washington), just joined McCain’s campaign as co-chair.

McCain has been smart about building as strong a team as possible.  I can totally see both Whitman and Fiorina with cushy Washington posts if McCain gets elected.  In fact, I could see them if Hillary gets elected, too. 

Gold tops $1030 an ounce – Mr. T is rich!!

Kitco indicates that gold just keeps on rising up and up, now approaching $1030 an ounce.  Keep in mind that the all time high (inflation adjusted) of gold is about $1200 an ounce, so there might even be room yet to run.  Time to buy?

Mr. T must be so thrilled!

ps. I’m a hold at $1000 and a seller at $1100.

JP Morgan bails out Bear Stearns for $2 – the return of “2 buck chuck”

Not too long ago, I used to often enjoy drinking a very cheap wine sold by Trader Joe’s from a vineyard called Charles Shaw – we called it 2 buck chuck.  Well, Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan must remember back to the days before private jets and $5000 suits: just a few minutes ago JP Morgan announced they are acquiring Bear Stearns (and all their problems) at the bargain-basement price of $2 / share.  At their peak, Bear shares traded at almost $160.

This deal is evidence that the credit crisis is going to GET WORSE – Bear shares closed at $30 on Friday (which was after shares had already taken a beating).  Even with the Fed offering to essentially subsidize Bear’s growing losses, JP was still able to step in and buy them for pennies on the dollar.  The biggest (and worst) news could still be to come.

Prediction: at least 1 other major financial institution gets acquired before it’s all said and done.

Prediction: AOL will combine Platform A with IAC- to be called CALIOA

After AOL bought Bebo last week for $850 million, and rumors were surfaced that they were going to also try to buy Kickapps, I started to wonder, “What are they trying to do??”  Is AOL trying to buff themselves up for a sale?  Are they prepping for spinning off Platform A (Tacoda, Advertising.com, Lightningcast et. al) from the dialup business?  If that is what they are trying to do, how does Bebo fit into that plan?  Are they trying to buy Kickapps for their little known, but highly traffic’d property, yuku.com?

Given what is going on with Yahoo (Micro-hoo) and IAC (Malone vs. Diller cage match), I think some really interesting deals could be possible.

What if you combined AOL’s advertising networks, with IAC’s highly traffic’d web properties?  I actually think that could be a very interesting combination.  I would suggest some combo with Yahoo, but I just don’t think it can happen given that Ray Ozzie’s vision for a “connected” Microsoft is so pinned around Yahoo. What Ray wants (given how much Bill loves him), he will get.

If a deal between AOL and IAC does transpire, I want some kickbacks!!!  Or at least some of those awesome AOL dialup CD mailers that we all love so much.  CALIOA in da house!