Exactly

After seeing this video, the Clarion Content is asking ourselves why we had not heard of Amy Steinberg before, no matter, we are only grateful to have heard of her now. Thanks to one of our local Chapel Hill readers for forwarding this our way.

Enjoy.

Another Reality Genius

Alicia Guastaferro (pictured above) another reality TV rocket scientist is suing ABC after being featured on the network's 'Wife Swap' two years ago. Now to be fair, the show was truly focused on her mother, the wife swapped. However, Alicia blames the show for a variety of problems in her life. One: she has supposedly gone from the honor roll, to being a special education student. Now besides ABC, another factor might be that her mother freely admitted on the program and subsequently demonstrated that she does her daughter's homework. Mrs. Guastaferro said, "She doesn't have time! I feel the way to Alicia's happiness is, give her everything she wants. Don't give her any rules. Why upset her?"

The episode of Wife Swap showed the Guastaferro's home life to be rather different. Alicia is described as the "princess of pageantry" and is given gifts every single day by her parents, who kept a Christmas tree up all year in the house. But it's ABC's fault?

The entertainment blog the Pop Eater reports, "[Her parents] Ralph and Karen Guastaferro plead guilty to felony money laundering charges stemming from a Canadian telemarketing scheme. Karen is also in hot water for not declaring wages at the family's glass-tinting business...she faces up to 16 months in jail, while he could spend up to 57 months behind bars."

So we'd guess that blaming someone else is about the only logical response left open to them.

Yahoo Search

Have you heard the new radio ads for Yahoo search. This is their big plan to save the company? Who are they kidding?

Dear readers, you would not believe what they think the public can't find on line!?! One ad describes a Mom trying to find movie times on-line. Another ridiculously lowbrow ad has a middle aged man searching for directions to deliver weasels, still a third is looking for sports statistics. These basic things people can't find? Really? Are these ads for grandparents using the internet? Brand new immigrants from small rural villages? Seriously, Yahoo, who is it that you think is struggling to find driving directions? And movie times?!?

This is a company that is fading away. The Yahoo brass unwisely refused a $45 billion takeover offer from Microsoft two years ago. Today the company is worth less than half of that amount. Other than email, what is it that Yahoo is recognized for doing? Why would one go to Yahoo? The Sunnyvale, CA company has gone through three CEOs in three years.

Full disclosure some members of the Clarion Content play in a Yahoo managed Fantasy Baseball league.

Milgram revisted

State-owned, France 2 channel broadcast a documentary last Wednesday night. This documentary attempted to imitate the famous experiments of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram's experiment, in his view, was a test of the collective culpability, the obedience component of the Shoah, the Holocaust.

The test involved one subject, one examiner and one accomplice. The accomplice played a test subject as well. The actual subject was induced to believe that both they and the accomplice were test subjects. The basic game is that the subject, called "teacher," examines the accomplice called "leaner," on word memorization. After wrong answers the subject/teacher was supposed to shock the accomplice/learner, played by a trained actor. No actual shocks were administered, but subject/teachers were convinced that they were doling out actual electric shocks gradually increasing in voltage for 15 volts to 450 volts, by the end of the "game." Literally convulsing the accomplice/learner. Crucially the subject/teacher was given a 15 volt real demonstration shock just before the start of the "game," so as to understand how it would ostensibly work for the subject/learner. (Wiki does a surprisingly good recap here.)

The French documentary attempted to recreate the scenario. In a non scientific sampling, 82% of participants, in the ludicrously named, fake TV show "The Game of Death" agreed to pull the lever to inflict electric shocks, gradually increasing in voltage, on their "opponents." Again instead of real subjects, they were but actor/opponents/accomplishes, not really being shocked. Interestingly the BBC reports that, "'The Game of Death' has all the trappings of a traditional TV quiz show, with a roaring crowd chanting "punishment" and a glamorous hostess urging the players on." A horrifying self-fulfillingly megalomaniacal set-up.

Ultimately, the Clarion Content, having read Eric Hoffer's True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, fears for our collective humanity. Careful with your demagogues, because who knows what we are capable of, six species epochs have gone before us.

Wow

The story here? The imagination runs amok.

Spanish Conjugation

How about this as a way to study Spanish verb conjugation...



Bet he got an "A."

Not keeping it

The UK's Telegraph reports Austrian millionaire Karl Rabeder is giving away his $4.5 million (estimated) fortune. He is selling all of his possessions and the business that made him his money. His company made interior furnishings and accessories, from vases to artificial flowers. It does not sound like much.

However, Mr. Rabeder has a beautiful old stone farmhouse in Provence with 17 hectares. On sale for the bargain price of 613,000 Euros. He already sold his collection of six gliders valued at 350,000 Euros. He raffled off his Alpine home, a 3,455 sq. ft. villa with lake, sauna and spectacular mountain views over the Alps, by selling 21,999 lottery tickets priced at 87 Euros a piece.

All the money he raises will go into his microfinance charity vehicle, which offers microcredit, very small loans to self-employed people and small, family businesses in El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina and Chile.

Rabeder is only forty-seven and according the Telegraph's story he intends to move into a small wooden hut in the mountains or a simple bedsit (a rental consisting of a single room and shared bathroom) in Innsbruck. It is a curious counterculture tale, here is hoping he does not go Ted Kaczynski.

A Bad Surprise

The Clarion Content has always wondered how much of the Darwin Awards are made up. Are they apocryphal? Urban legend? Loyal readers know that we recognize that the realm of truth has as much breadth as the tales of fiction. Yet we always struggle with credulity when reading the Darwin Awards. Yesterday, however, we ran across an item in the Detroit Free Press that is probably an early candidate for the 2010 winners.

Here is the story. A 50 year-old Washington state man was apparently not very seriously hurt after his car collided with a power pole Friday. He called a relative to help pull his vehicle from a ditch. As it turned out, unfortunately, while he was waiting he had to pee. When family members arrived they found him dead, electrocuted. He apparently urinated into the roadside ditch, but did not see the live wire from the downed pole. The urine stream probably served as the conductor that allowed the electricity to reach his body. Zap.

Ouch! To say, what a way to go, hardly seems sufficient!

The Friday Night E-mail shutdown

The Clarion Content has observed a phenomenon at our offices and in the personal lives of our staff. We call it The "Friday night e-mail shutdown," though it goes on for the whole weekend. We want to ask you, dear readers, is it as pervasive for you as it is for us?

In our little corner of the world, the weekend nearly brings to a halt email communication. We are deluged all week. People expect responses to emails within hours, if not minutes. Then suddenly just after about 6pm Eastern, there is an abrupt and fairly complete drop off to our email traffic, from heavy to near nil. Even the folks who usually reply in five minutes all week, disappear.

Is this true for you, too?

There are probably a couple of phenomenons at work here. One is texting. Social planning of a rapid and semi-spontaneous nature is far easier via text than e-mail. Two is Facebook, a far more social milieu than e-mail (The Clarion Content does not Facebook, but so we hear.) Perhaps a third, is that people who spend so much time working in front of their computer all week are ready to get out from in front of a computer by the weekend, to leave it behind, like letting go the shackles of work itself. We have various friends of the Clarion Content who we know fall into that category. Email even more than computing in general seems to be associated with work and obligation. Many emails are requests for one to do something. Respond or react to something. Have an opinion on something. Sign a petition on something. Action and doing required. Effort.

What say you, dear readers? Are you reading this column on a Monday having spent the weekend away from your computer and email?

Zebra runs amok in the ATL

This is where and how circus zebra's live

"Zebra runs amok in the ATL"
We are by no means f*ing with you, dear readers, that was indeed the headline out of Atlanta this afternoon. Our pop culture editor, a radical Gaian, is always telling the rest of the staff that the zoo is animal jail. They think of it as the clink, the pokey, the cell block. In his view, the circus is an even lower form of routine, more akin to a chain gang. Today one of the zebras made a break from the Man. In its case, the man was Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

The story is thus. The circus was in Atlanta. The zebra got loose from his handler and made a break for it. Cue wild goose chase scene now! And, bingo. The Atlanta Constitution Journal quotes Daniel Nance, "All of a sudden, a freaking zebra comes running down the street like a car. Five or six police cars were in hot pursuit. And a bunch of officers on foot."

For real. The boundaries of possible and real events are unimaginably large, and the number of events verges on the infinite, ergo things can and do happen.

The ATL-CJ continues, "Prapik Jani saw the animal jogging along Baker Street a half mile away next to Centennial Olympic Park. Jani...looked outside and saw an African creature running down the pavement. "It was wild," Jani said. "I thought I was seeing things."

Jani said there were "a bunch" of police on bicycles chasing after the zebra."

Reportedly the zebra was cornered in the parking area by the Richard B. Russell Federal Building, which is near the CNN Center and NBA Atlanta Hawks' Philips Arena.

Circus trainers were walking with the zebra when it started to charge again, dragging one of the trainers momentarily before it took off, in another bid for freedom, running across the railroad tracks and through a gate. One of the trainers was holding on to the zebra as it ran through the gate, but subsequently bounced loose as the zebra headed first for a nearby underground tunnel, and then up the block to a freeway entrance ramp. According to the Constitution Journal, "[he] was finally captured on the interstate near the Grady curve. According to witnesses, he was galloping between lanes of traffic on the Downtown Connector before his capture."

When a creature yearns to be free, say what, say what, anything can happen.

Read the Atlanta Constitution Journal's whole account here.