.... /quinn .... /robin .... /???ambiguous is mainly me and robin skyler. me is quinn. robin is still robin.
happy to say our little blogtocracy has grown to 3- the regular robin, the slightly more absentee me, and some jon gilbert thrown in. and now, subjects of the media gods, you can access our back post through a handy dandy archive. look for more changes to occur in accordance with temporal progress.
| quinn's reading list | robin's reading list |
|---|---|
| oblomovka | Indymedia |
| boingboing | v-2 |
| ambiguous archive | |
and now, content...
Fri, 13 Dec 2002parody
is protected speech though not unless you have a lot of money and/or lawyers lying around.
dow-chemical.com, which focuses on the bhopal incident (we have previously
linked to) and bursonmarsteller.com
which focuses on the fact that bm is fucking evil (we haven't linked to, and
isn't really parody, but hey, who wants to wget it for posterity anyhow?) are
getting to be the mole
in dow and bm's game of legal whack-a-mole. though it looks bad for these
guys right now, dowethics.com is
mirroring the dow-chemical parody site, along with a bunch of other people.
dow-chemical.com currently points to dow itself.
The activists behind the fake corporate websites have fought back, and
obtained substantial publicity in the process.
Fake websites have been used by activists before, but Dow-Chemical.com and
BursonMarsteller.com represent the first time that such websites have
successfully been used to publicize abuses by specific corporations.
Two giant companies are struggling to shut down parody websites
that portray them unfavorably, interrupting internet use for thousands in the
process, and filing a lawsuit that pits the formidable legal department of PR
giant Burson-Marsteller against a freshman at Hampshire College.
note to copyright holders at
dow... parody is fair use, biznatch.
Posted at 15:30 #
G
Oh,
thank GOD! According to this article,
those wacky scientists have figured out the bit of brain that loops songs
endlessly in our heads.
So, excuse me while I have this bit of brain tissue excised ASAP. (I think
I'll keep it in a little jar on my desk, with a button on the jar that plays
"Impanema" when you press it.)
"This region in the front of the brain where we mapped musical
activity is important for a number of functions. Our results provide a
stronger foundation for explaining the link between music, emotion and the
brain."
This is quite a problem for me, actually. I've had "The
Girl From Impanema" stuck in my head for about 3 years now, and it sucks.
Dance/techno/electronica is about the only thing I can listen to, because for
some reason it doesn't stick in my head like your standard
verse-refrain-verse-refrain-coda-refrain song does.
Posted at 14:58 # G
where
are the trumpets? So hydrogen fuel cells sound great, and as I understand it the chief problem with them is that at
the moment, it takes about as much energy to electrolyze the necessary hydrogen
as you get back out of the cell--meaning you're burning a bunch of coal anyway.
So it sounds great, but if it's really going to be clean the way we want
it to be, we need a technical breakthrough first.
Well, here are some folks in Boise who say they've done it.
It sounds great--granting that I don't quite follow how it works. Breathless as
the press release is, it sounds like they're dangerously close to describing a
perpetual motion machine. Unless water is the fuel being consumed, in which case
see above: I don't quite follow. A few outlets have picked up
on the story, a week later, but not many. And the loudest alarm bell in my mind
is that this source (who
knew there was so much news about fuel cells?) did not.
Posted at 13:06 #
G
BEA is
Evil, Media is Just Plain Stupid It's lunchtime, PST, and I'm just waking up from a particularly bad upgrade
evening. Every so often my workplace decides it needs to shut everything down
(about 50 major applications, and scores of others), upgrade or change them, and
then bring them back up. The entire process takes anywhere from 4 to 6 hours,
not including prep time, and about twice as long if we have to do a roll back.
(Sometimes, I wonder how we're still in business.)
But that's not what this is about.
Today, BEA Systems - that pinnacle of
support, that bastion of good coding, that prime example of correctly blocked
signals inside of LWPs - announced that they were going to "reposition its
WebLogic line as a Swiss Army knife for business software development". Not
really news, in and of itself. They've been touting that in meetings for the
last few years - "we can do anything!", on sales engineer once proclaimed to me.
Officially, WebLogic allows companies to quickly and efficently build web-based
applications on a stable J2EE foundation. In reality, the "framework" (term used
very very loosely) promotes bad coding practice, applications that aren't web
based at all, and US$250,000 "professional service" bills. I am not making any
of this up; if you want, you can come over, and I'll show you how they've fucked
my company inside and out.
But that's not what this is about either.
The annoucements (found here
here here here and here) all appear to come
from the same news "source" - ZDNet. Now, I
personally have nothing against ZDNet ("Where Technology Takes You") as a news
source, much like I have nothing against Baskin-Robbins as a mid-east military
power - they just aren't. But what's interesting is that they (ZDNet, not the
Shiai') have so many disparate properties it's hard to tell who's owned by whom.
Or, if you're a bit of software logic, whether
or not the story is worth showing on your front page. But hey, what's a bit of
give-take-give-back-pay-off between old buds, (ambiguous will leave it as an
exercise to the reader to find the connection between the Evil Company and the
Just Plain Stupid Network), eh?
Before you jump to any conclusions, let me confirm them for you: Yes, I'm
bitter at BEA, because they suck eggs, plain and simple, give me a scratch paper
and a pen, I'll prove it, and show my work. No, I don't have much respect for
ZDNet's journalistic integrity as a whole (although I quite like the Rupert
Goodwin editorials). And Yes, I'm a bit of a conspiracy hobbyist, but when
you're looking at persons that may be using a confluence of intrest and media to
drive up long term investor activity on a business
stock, well, it's difficult to sit still.
(In retrospect, it might have taken less time to write this blog entry by
filling a page with "hate hate hate hate hate hate". Next time, I'll try that,
and you - the reader - can tell me if it's more or less coherent that this one.)
Posted at 12:58 # G
with
endorsements like these, who need detractors? well trent lott's not on everyone's shit list. this pleasant little essay over at the
council of conservative citizens website give lott a glowing commendation- and
still finds room to expound on the black conspiracy to destroy america. (don't
forget, these are the guys to whom lott said "The people in this room stand for
the right principles and the right philosophy.")
i bet he doesn't even end up resigning. so many excuses i'm going to have to
come up with for my daughter.
Posted at 22:02 #
G
Knecht
Ruprecht and the Yuletide Lads After only the most cursory look around, I'm realizing there are deeper wells
of Santa
scholarship out there than I had remotely imagined.
Was passed this
new-to-me description of the Yuletide
Lads, a band of obstreperous Icelandic trolls who serialize themselves every
winter; the first is due tonight, so take note. Anyway this all reminded me of
Knecht Ruprecht in
all his frightening names and forms; quite possibly older than any variety of
Santa, Black Peter plays bad cop to the right jolly old elf's good cop (or in
some times and places has merged with him entirely, as is perhaps inevitable). I
was an adult before I ever heard of him and he still creeps me out.
Posted at 18:44 #
G
this
is a toy. I was never that concerned about combat-oriented games and toys on principle,
but it's hard to think dispassionately of children playing with the
representation of some family's home, blown to pieces and occupied by
heavily-armed soldiers. Who thought of it? How many different middle-management
relay-running font-pickers had to rubberstamp this thing and say yes, let's
design it, let's build it, let's sell it for the use of children?
Increasingly, I find myself looking more favorably on a few stances I used to
think were extreme: the reaction against corporal
punishment, for instance, and also the reaction against toys that are icons
of violence. The justifications for them are virtually always along the lines of
"hey, I turned out okay."
News flash: you're the last one who would know how you turned out. You have
to give it a little more thought than that.
Posted at 16:23 #
G
Strom
and drang Everybody's talking about Trent Lott
and some dumb thing he
said at the birthday party of centenarian fossil segregationist Strom
Thurmond. It was vague, but in a way that couldn't really have meant anything
good: he opined that if Thurmond had won the presidency in 1948, "we wouldn't
have had all these problems over all these years." Which problems, exactly,
nobody seems to have specified--but since Thurmond's presidential run was
conceived in protest against the increasingly de-segregationalist sentiments of
the Democratic party in general and Harry Truman in particular, it's hard not to
imagine that the subsequent success of the Civil Rights movement features
prominently among them.
The senator actually doesn't come off so badly in the CNN article; his
comparison between a Christian college's no-interracial-dating policy and the
no-female-clergy policies of various churches, particularly, is spot on. But
even so, his excuse is transparently weak. It was a little slip, uttered in a
casual environment, he says, so we shouldn't worry about it. "Look, you put your
foot in your mouth, you're getting carried away at a ceremony honoring a guy
like this, you go too far. Those words were insensitive, and I shouldn't have
said them."
But how is this reassuring? According to Lott, his mistake was to say the
words; whether or not he was mistaken to have been thinking the thoughts is no
concern of ours, or of his either. It's a deeply unconvincing retraction. Pay
no attention to the mind behind the blurtin'.
To understand why his brief remark was so troubling, you have to realize just
who Strom
Thurmond is. His long story is inseparably tied up with racial politics in
the past century. Here's a worthwhile history of the
schism and eventual realignment of the Democratic party, and the abandonment of
that party for the Republican party by much of the white south: a shift
personally embodied in Thurmond, and one predicated entirely on the politics of
segregation and civil rights.
The first thought this history brings to mind is how surprisingly central
race politics have been in American history. It's been a crucial divide, and
corollary to that is that some stripe or another of unabashed racism has always
been powerfully represented in our political system. If there had not been an
enduring constellation of high officials with a vested interest first in
slavery, and later in segregation, it wouldn't have taken such long and bitter
campaigns to dismantle these institutions. The parties essentially swapped their
identities over race.
The other thing I want to observe from this history is how recent it all is.
Those armies of American voters (and non-voters) who believe fervently in the
immutability of the two parties as they have known them cannot be aware of how
recently they changed places, or how often they are seriously challenged, and
their own discourse meaningfully altered, by third parties. It hasn't been long
at all since left and right arose in the forms we know. And none of it
has been static, not even between last year and this year. We are as much in
flux as any other people in any other age; we are susceptible to change, to huge
changes.
Posted at 15:03 #
G
for a
change of pace, somebody else's scary politics Saw this article
today on the alarmingly righteous and hawkish conservative wing of Indian
politics. I've heard a little about
this before, but not lots.
A friend of mine
who's traveling through India right now, leaving a trail of long and fascinating
e-mail travelogues, sent an installment just a few days ago from Varanasi with
some chillingly apropos material from the ground. Unfortunately he can't
transfer everything to html right away while he's on the road, so I can't link
to the whole letter. But here's the most pertinent bit.
"Every day they are killing-killing with the terror in Kashmir. Why? If
India makes a war, just *one day* -- shp! -- Pakistan finished." Disturbingly,
the BJP minister of Gujarat -- a state that's been torn apart by Hindu-Muslim
violence -- has made much the same argument, frankly challenging Pakistan to a
fight. It's true that in terms of conventional weapons, Pakistan is no match
for India. That's why Pakistan has refused to rule out first use of its
nuclear arsenal. If India threatens to take Islamabad or Karachi, chances are
good that Delhi and Mumbai will cease to exist. When I suggested as much to
our hotel-wallah, he informed me that India would simply knock the Pakistani
missiles out of the sky.
Stunned, I tried to explain that no such missile defense actually exists --
that even America has only recently decided to build such a thing, and many
scientists say it's impossible -- but I'm not sure he believed me. And even if
he did, too many Hindu Indians -- mostly the high-caste supporters of the BJP,
like our Brahmin hotel-wallah -- believe in their own country's invincibility
and are hankering for war.
Hindus in Benares talk freely of war with Pakistan. Our
hotel-keeper gave us a speech that we've heard all too often.
Posted at 21:04 #
G
new
cover, only 1.5 months late. i've finally written up the user mythology definition stuff. i promised
myself i'd do this before the social software thing, but alas my body had other
plans. it's my current cover, and
the perma link is here.
feedback is always appreciated.
i've committed to writing something new for my site every fortnight. it only
looks like every two months. by way of scant comfort danny notes "at least you
are accelerating". oy.
Posted at 17:40 #
G
one
step forward plus two steps back equals three steps! Good article today
on the monstrous, but virtually unchallenged, fallacy of Gross Domestic
Product as a measure of economic health. With one reservation--I was
surprised to see that the article never namechecked Herman Daly, who
deserves more credit than anybody for blowing the whistle on this particular
chimera. In his book, he
shows exhaustively that economists record the consumption of natural resources
as income, and record the disposal into the biosphere of our various
waste products not at all. He compares conventional economists to a biologist,
trying to describe an animal entirely in terms of its circulatory system, never
mentioning the mouth and the anus, with which the animal's body interacts with
the world outside the animal.
Posted at 10:41 #
G
the
dark maths of image linguistic processing. ALIP is a learning
system for computers- it allows them to learn to annotate images linguistically.
this wants to be a distributed app like the old cddb, then a google web service.
then it probably wants to take over the world and enslave mankind. in the mean
time, it is very very cool in a does my head in sort of way. the abstract
alone left me needing a little lie-down.
Posted at 21:31 # G
a time
to gather stones together I've been torn, for weeks, about whether I should write this up now or after
the holidays. On one hand, I reasoned, I'm virtually certain my mother doesn't
read this. On the other, the stakes are moderately high, and one can't be too
sure. So here's my compromise:
**Mom, if you do in fact read this weblog, please give this particular
entry a miss for about one month.**
There. She can be trusted.
And now to the point. I like games; I don't know game theory so much as
fantasize about knowing game theory, and I don't excel at any particular game so
much as enjoy playing and fantasize about learning to excel, but either way I
like games. I like to play games that are elegant and deeply variable. I like to
play games that involve a minimum of material claptrap, and preferably a minimum
of arcane bylaws. I like to play games with other human beings, whether in
tandem or in opposition. I like to play games that force me to work hard. And I
dearly love games with a broad scope, enough to allow for a long and varied arc,
maybe narrative of some sort, and a palpable sense of achievement and progress
over time.
A particular favorite was Fool's
Errand, which my whole family worked through over a long weekend on my
brother's SE30; I was disappointed when it was finished (and doubly so since
something was broken about the finale so that I never got to see it even when we
finished everything). It's the sort of this that can only really be played once,
so that one time becomes precious. Years later Myst came along, and it
was very much in the same spirit, but with much prettier art. And there have
been a few others down the line. But never really enough. Recently, though, I've
come across a new successor to these, The
Stone, a web-based brainteaser nexus that launched sometime in 1998.
The basic puzzle, by the by, is generally something like a single complex
image with a title, a little text (maybe) and a field for the player to enter an
answer. There might be some animation or interactivity; I haven't yet heard any
with sound, but I've only just started. And they are head-crackers, man. My
greatest fear about all of this is that I'm simply not smart enough for the this
game. To be fair, I haven't given it a real concerted effort yet; the puzzles
are designed to make you google around before you can turn up an answer, and
I've only just begun to do that. My stone, see, only showed up a few days ago.
All is not well over at Abject Modernity, and that is my second-greatest
fear. Stones have become very scarce indeed; the one source I've made contact
with, in the UK, says only two vendors do business there, and I still have yet
to hear of any stones left in the US. Maybe there's the odd one in a little game
shop once in a while, and maybe not. Electronic memberships are also available,
but unlike stones they need to be renewed annually, and even their availability
may not be wholly reliable. I can't think why the stones would be rare unless
the business is faltering, sadly--though its overhead ought not to be too
terribly much as long as it's not obliged to expand its offerings on any
particular schedule. (For now, if you want one you go to Netfysh, and that's
that.)
The other sign of trouble is that service on the site is startlingly
sluggish. The main site is up and running fine; you can play the game, you can
drop into the message boards, no problem. But a couple little extras, I
understand, are down--including, in my opinion critically, the free puzzles
prospective players can see without buying. I mean, you can see the puzzles. But
no matter what answer you submit, the response will be Error 403--Access
Denied. Decidedly unencouraging, this is. But months and two followups after
I tipped the webmasters to it, nothing's been done to change it and the
management seems not to give a damn. Even though this is the only bit of the
product a potential customer can see! This just can't mean anything good.
Whoa! Hold it. News flash: I just now checked, one last time before posting
this, and they just fixed the damn thing! Ha. I know I checked only days ago.
Well, they finally patched it, and good for them. And I can finally say I
solved one, one of the two free samples I thought I knew. Which gives me a
little more hope for the game at large. And I've seen what happens when you get
it right: you get an interesting explanatory essay. (In the game proper, of
course, I understand you might also unlock some new part of the grand riddle.)
Well, back to the story: the webmasters being no help, I finally googled up
some dedicated players, and let me tell you the players themselves have been
nothing but sweetness and light, and they got me straightened right out. The
broken samples were old news to them, anyway, but they assured me the rest was
running; they gave me some history, told me about Netfysh, and told me where I
could go try my hand at player-auhored puzzles of the same
type. They treat you nice in there, seems like.
So I'm enthralled, because this is right up my alley. And I'm doubly pleased
with myself because I found this game shortly before my mother's sixtieth
birthday, on January second. She loves this sort of thing at least as much as I
do, and is better at it (she's also willing and able to frag your ass in a
first-person shooter, but that's neither here nor there). I have every intention
of buttering her up a lot this year (her birthday tends to get overlooked
in the general exhaustion, you know) and this makes a nice little unexpected,
lastingly interesting present--and happily, I don't even need to repackage it
for coolness of presentation, because the Stone conscientiously plays its artsy,
mysterious stance to the hilt. Even the little brochure that comes in the box
with the rock is elliptical and riddly.
Anyway, before this is all through I'm going to need her help in a big way.
That was one small mark against the players--two of them volunteered doubts
about how comfortable a sixty-year-old might be with this game.
Oh, kids--you just don't understand...
You acquire a little
stone pendant (well, more like painted glass maybe, but it's satisfyingly cool
and solid, either way) for some twenty bucks; it has some curious-looking
heiroglyphics on it, and those are your passport into the game. They're almost,
but not quite, unique: each stone has one matched mate out there somewhere. The
person holding that stone is your predestined partner--or, well, sort of. That
was the intention. The people behind the game were hoping strongly to build a
benevolent community of riddle-chasers, and the automatic partnerships were
instituted to encourage that. But it was a superfluous measure, in the end; the
net seems infinitely able to fill ever more communities, and the Stone
was soon home to a small army of enthusiastic "stoners" trading veiled advice,
speculating about the nature of "the Enigma," the great overarching mystery of
which every little puzzle is a part, and eventually throwing meatspace
get-togethers and even designing apocryphal Stone-style puzzles of their own.
(One player hazarded some thousands of players total, hundreds of whom might be
called "active." Which is smallish, really.)
Posted at 21:06 # G
claritin OTC, what next for
prilosec? my friend the anonymous pharmacist wrote me a note- as always, news from the
pharma world is good and bad.
"I have in my hand an odd bit of pharmacy history,a packet of
the first drug to be forced over-the-counter by an insurance
company. Yes, I have my very own pack of Claritin OTC - actually, I've had
it since Thursday due to a shipping error (we weren't supposed to
get it until Monday). I'm certain that shareholders of Blue Cross and
other insurance providers will be quite pleased, as this will make them a great
deal of money (since over the counter drugs aren't covered). Even
Schering, the manufacturer, does OK, since, at least in theory, they get extra
patent protection on the OTC product, and a boost in sales. Only the
consumer gets screwed, since the over the counter version retails at about $1.75
per pill. Well, I guess two out of three ain't bad.
I love this business...
By the way, I noticed that our pharmacy wholesaler has a
listing in their system for a generic prilosec - it looks as though Schwartz
pharma really is planning to make the stuff before too long. With any luck
the generic will hit the shelves before Astra gets approval on an OTC version,
if not, well then repeat above."
later i received....
"Today we received notice that generic prilosec has been shipped to our
distributor's warehouse. With any luck we'll have it shortly, so i guess its
this system still beats copyright."
maybe, but then, that's not saying much.
Posted at 20:30 # G
on
loyalty and the bush administration brad delong has written an excellent essay on the economic policy of the bush
administration, and the firing of about everyone that was supposed to be
involved in it. In the
Bush Administration, Loyalty Is a One-Way Street Only misses the mark in one
important place- the loyalty being betrayed by bush's economic decisions isn't
larry lindsey's, it's ours. and it's us who will pay for it.
Posted at 11:34 # G
I did
not blog today Today, as Quinn oh-so-helpfully pointed out, I failed to make a blog entry.
Now, for those of you who read this thing on a regular basis know, Quinn herself
isn't that, err, frequent of an updater herself. Personally I have no
beef with this - she can update whenever and however she wants. Me, on the other
hand, seem to be held to a much higher standard, and I can't help but think
that, perhaps, someone is Being Wronged.
At any rate...
If I had blogged today, it would be probably something along the lines
of a personal declaration of Suspicion of Being A Terroist. Because, earlier
today, I exchanged with a friend the (somewhat farfetched but still no less
valid) concern that $35,000.00, a smile and a handshake, and a good deal of
Semtex, a majority of the country's telecomm links and equipment could be taken
out simultaneously and without warning. I expressed this concern over the phone
(well, a wireless phone, actually). Except, when you use the word BOMB in
a phone conversation nowadays, people around you seem a bit spooked. I encourage
you to try it. Go out in public, despite the bears. Call a friend. Have a
conversation. Use the word BOMB in it. Not like, "it was the bomb!", or
"I can't wait for Marketing to drop the next bomb on us." No. Use it in it's
original definition. Examine the looks you get. Contemplate the fact that you're
being sized up; your fellow humans are likely looking for a pretense to stop you
and chat. They're sizing you up, wondering if they could take you down, had they
the need to stop "an incident." You are no longer a human, you are now viewed as
a Potential Threat And Therefor Target. Congratulations. Now, hop into that
getaway car and hustle out of there; your fellow humans are probably calling the
FBI right now. In all likelyhood, you may have already won.
Thankfully, I didn't blog today. If I had, well, who knows what trouble I
might have stirred up.
Posted at 01:25 # G
someday
we'll look back on all this and laugh. nervously. i only stand by one kind of prediction that i make- the embarrassing kind.
i've just always had this gift. i can tell when something, a haircut, some
fashion or fad, or even some idea is going to turn out to be really embarrassing
later. sometimes i just see something that looks perfectly fine in context, but
i just stop short. i can tell in my gut that someone is going to spend more
energy trying to put that behind them than they ever put into it in the first
place. i've even been able to tell a few times while i was doing one of these
things, but like the pull of the tide i couldn't stop. i could just feel the
growing dread in the corner of my mind that just somehow can see the shame
coming.
i am experiencing this now, intensely. in some small part, about this post.
someday it's going to be embarrassing that this is online, but i've already got
plenty of stuff on my website that i have a dreadful trepidation about. so i'm
not that bothered. mostly though, i have it for american history classes. there
are just these bit of american history which you can't spin well. lots of people
leave them out, but being embarrassed by some of the things we've done as a
nation is healthier than omission. japanese interment camps, tuskegee
experiment, the trail of tears, mccarthyism- all of these are shameful little
bits of american history and there are many more. they are events we
individually try to distance ourselves from. and it really stands out too- not
often do you hear people say "the elimination of polio? that was someone else, i
didn't even know about that." we're living through one of those times that will
be really embarrassing later on. the news and events of our time give me an
unprecedented gnawing sense of precognitive humiliation. sometimes, when i am
thinking of my unborn daughter, i catch myself formulating the excuses i will
give her later for what american history is doing now. not a good sign, but at
least i've come up with some pretty good ones.
Posted at 14:54 # G
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111.com And that's all
I'm saying.
Posted at 08:14 # G
the
daily grind of not being silent Here's a petition worth
filling out: a plea to the government to take weapons inspections seriously and
give them a chance to work (rather than insisting war is a foregone
conclusion). Also, since this petition has taken off faster than just about
anything they've ever done, MoveOn is going to take out a big old ad in the New York Times on
Monday. That kind of broad exposure doesn't come free, so if you've got two
minutes and ten bucks, you might help them out with that as well.
[Whoops. Been a while since I linked to a Washington Post article; I suppose
I'd suggest wantonly lying to that little form, until the link rots anyway. I
chose it for its unabashed oil-ogling. But if you'd rather, you can look here for
more material on the same.]
Posted at 07:45 # G
suvs
crucified the washington post has a review
of keith bradsher's High and
Mighty: SUVs which actually touched on the book for a sec, and then went
careening off into how evil suvs really are. the amazon reviews for the book are
rich, but absolutely the best part is this quote from the book about suv owners:
"They tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous
about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack
confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered
and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities."
people are getting really riled up and mad at the author, but it turns out he
was just quoting from the car company's own marketing data. ouch, ouch, ouch.
the amusing thing about this for me is that i saw the marketing data (yes, a
lot of it really does read a bit like that) back in '95 on suvs from a couple of
car companies i did web work for. at that time it was all about giving the
minivan market something that let them deny that they were part of that
demographic. i still look at suvs to this day and think "you're not fooling
anyone, you're just driving a funny shaped MINIVAN of DENIAL!" i think if i
started a bumpersticker
campaign for suvs, it would probably be stickers that read "pity me, i paid
too much for my minivan."
Posted at 01:54 # G