A little help here

A very spiffy new version of this blog is only a few weeks a way and I need some help with a number of things:

1) Blog categories – As you can tell from the category list on the right, this blog is a mess. Half of those categories I created and never posted to again. So, the good folk at Rule29 who are designing the pending spiffiness are laying down the law. I only get five categories. Any thought on what they should be? I’ll toss out a few: Travel, Engaged Consumer, This Writer’s Life….?

2) What should I give away? Here’s what I’m thinking:

a. A rare Advanced Reader’s Copy of WAIW?
b. a WAIW? Shopping bag (my publisher is having these printed up)
c. a writing critique – you send me 2,000 words or less and I’ll tell you what I think and pass on a little advice (for what it’s worth) and perhaps a little career advice as well.
d. A CD with all of the radio essays/interviews I’ve recorded that relate to WAIW?
e. ?

Tell me what you think?

American Apparel vs. Woody Allen’s Sex Life

American Apparel, the nation’s largest remaining clothing manufacturer, infamous for ads like this and this and this used Woody Allen’s photo on one of their billboards without his consent.

Allen is suing for $10 million.

American Apparel gave him the “Oh no you didn’t” finger wag and their lawyer Stuart Slotnick (what a great name for a lawyer, if I injured my back or was involved in a motorcycle accident, I’d call him!) countered with document requests and subpoenas digging into Allen’s personal life.

From a story in the Huffington Post:

American Apparel lawyer Stuart Slotnick said the company plans to make Allen’s relationships to actress Mia Farrow and her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, whom Allen married, the focus of a trial scheduled to begin in federal court in Manhattan on May 18.

“Woody Allen expects $10 million for use of his image on billboards that were up and down in less than one week,” Slotnick said. “I think Woody Allen overestimates the value of his image.”

He said the company’s belief was that “after the various sex scandals that Woody Allen has been associated with, corporate America’s desire to have Woody Allen endorse their product is not what he may believe it is.”

One billboard featured a frame from “Annie Hall,” a film that won Allen a best-director Oscar. The image showed Allen dressed as a Hasidic Jew with a long beard and black hat and Yiddish text. The words “American Apparel” also were on the billboard.

Allen’s lawsuit said the billboard falsely implied he sponsored, endorsed or was associated with American Apparel.

Slotnick said it was not a cheap shot to bring up Allen’s sex life in a lawsuit over the billboard and Internet ads.

“It’s certainly relevant in assessing the value of an endorsement,” he said.

Allen on why he wouldn’t do an add for American Apparel:

“I’ve always been, from the start of my career, a special taste,” he said. “There have always been people that have loved me and there have always been people that didn’t know what I was about and couldn’t see anything in me.”

Allen also said ads shown to him by American apparel, including his rabbi ad, “have a sleazy quality to them” and were “not classy.”

He said if he were to do a commercial, he would have to be paid a lot and “it would have to be a very clever, kind of witty or intellectual-style” commercial. He said being asked to do an American Apparel ad would be like being asked to do a deodorant or cigarette commercial.

This battle is fascinating because you have a guy, Allen, who has been involved in “grossly inappropriate” (a judge’s words not mine) conduct with his step-daughter suing a company headed by a man, Dov Charney, who has a closet full of well-documented sexual indiscretions. And both sides are slinging poo about the other’s image.

But wait, now Charney is praising Allen:

I have deep respect for Mr. Allen who is a source of inspiration to me. The billboards and images from the Annie Hall movie were intended to be a parody/social statement and comedic satire to provoke discussion and public discourse about the baseless claims that had been made against American Apparel and myself, society’s reaction to lawsuits that delve into an individual’s private sexual life and the media’s sensationalism of such matters.

American Apparel tends to get great mileage out of their controversial billboards. Someone in their marketing department is probably getting a raise for this one. If their intent was truly to be a social statement to provoke discussion about society’s reaction to lawsuits that delve into an individual’s sex life, mission accomplished!

Attack of the Magic Seeds

Sometimes I wonder if we are sheltered from really, really bad news or if there is just so much bad news that we can’t consume it all. And then I see the weekly Lindsay Lohan update (OMG! she spent the night at her ex’s) and I know it’s the former.

The other day @sonnyjohl pointed me toward a story in the UK’s Daily Mail about 125,000 Indian farmers whose suicides were being blamed on genetically modified crops.

Here’s a brief story of one farmer:

Shankara, like millions of other Indian farmers, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income if he switched from farming with traditional seeds to planting GM seeds instead.

Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with spiralling debts - and no income.

Shankara, like most of the other killed himself by drinking pesticide. This is gruesomely recalled in the story written by Andrew Malone, “most swallow insecticide - a pricey substance they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops.

“…the Indian Ministry of Agriculture do indeed confirm that in a huge humanitarian crisis, more than 1,000 farmers kill themselves here each month.

Simple, rural people, they are dying slow, agonising deaths. Most swallow insecticide - a pricey substance they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops.”

Twenty dollars buys 1,000 times more traditional seeds than GM seeds, which take twice the water and are still susceptible to bollworms and parasites. They also employ Terminator Technology, which sucks just like Terminators:

When crops failed in the past, farmers could still save seeds and replant them the following year.

But with GM seeds they cannot do this. That’s because GM seeds contain so- called ‘terminator technology’, meaning that they have been genetically modified so that the resulting crops do not produce viable seeds of their own.

As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds each year at the same punitive prices. For some, that means the difference between life and death.

And yes Malone points his finger at US. And by US I mean the U.S. biotech company Monsanto.

Desperate to escape the grinding poverty of the post-independence years, the Indian government had agreed to allow new bio-tech giants, such as the U.S. market-leader Monsanto, to sell their new seed creations.

In return for allowing western companies access to the second most populated country in the world, with more than one billion people, India was granted International Monetary Fund loans in the Eighties and Nineties, helping to launch an economic revolution.

I don’t think this is a very balanced story. The suicides are a tragedy of monumental proportions that don’t deserved to be dismissed as Monsanto tried, “there are other reasons for the recent crisis, such as ‘untimely rain’ or drought, and …suicides have always been part of rural Indian life.”

But what if any good has come from the Magic Seeds? Are there any success stories?

Just as we are sheltered from Bad News, I think Good News is often kept out of the headlines because it doesn’t sell papers.

I don’t mind subjective journalism and, as such, Malone’s piece is powerful and you should go read it right this minute. Everyone should know about this. But subjective journalism dressed up like objective journalism is a disservice to the people written about and the reader.

Decide for yourself which this is.

Chinese Heirs as phoney as Milli Vanilli

In the comment thread of this recent post, long time WAIW follower Kent pointed us toward this BBC News piece, “China Database to Track Children.”

It’s good to see that something is being done to help reunite kidnapped children with their parents.

A few passages of interest:

Correspondents say the children of migrant workers are usually targeted. They are traded for a few hundred dollars and few are ever found.

As if life for migrant workers isn’t tough enough.

And…

In a society that favours male heirs, it is often boys who are taken.

I understand the heir thing. Our children are our thoughts and ideals, our immortality. But kidnapping your heir? That can’t come with the gut-level sense of continuity. I’m not saying that heirs are less “heiry” when they aren’t flesh and blood. Adopted children can carry a family’s torch just as well as unadopted children.

It’s just that stealing your heir is cheating in my book, like…

Winning Best in Show with someone else’s dog.

A bully wining the science fair with the nerd’s volcano.

Winning a Grammy for lip-syncing, “Blame it on the Rain.”

Got any other analogies you’d like to share?

Obama Masks: Made in china

I exchanged a few emails with a reader that works at a costume shop. I asked her where most of the costumes are made. She told me that they have a lot of vintage costumes and make many of them themselves. Of course, the ready-made costumes mostly come from China. Part of her response:

It was fun during the election to tell people that we didn’t know when we would get Obama masks back in stock because they were working on them in China and they had yet to ship. Some people got really mad, but they just didn’t make them here, they didn’t even try. They were ONLY made in China.

You just gotta wonder what the workers think while they are producing and packaging Obama masks or Mardi Gras beads or dashboard buddhas or dashboard Hula dancers or ________. The workers I met in China produced shoes. How shoes will be used is no mystery. But masks? Obama masks. Do they think we parade around dressed up like our Presidential candidates? The thing is, we do. Even superstars like Seal with supermodel wives do…

Book bloggers

I had a speaking engagement today. It went awesome. I overheard several compliments:

“He’s like Matthew McConaghey, but not so flaky.”

“Best speaker we’ve had.”

In the words of @garyvee, “I crushed it.”

In other news…

One of these days I intend to getting around to writing about book bloggers and independent reviewers. Unfortunately, today isn’t that day. Until then, here is one of the most in depth reviews of WAIW? that I’ve seen.

It’s Monday. Dance.

Harper and I like to dance to this song. This is one of the coolest renditions you’ll ever hear. I think I’ll go order the Playing for Change CD now.

Happy eighth anniversary WorldHum!

Online or in print, WorldHum has some of the best travel writing around. Of course, I am little biased. They highlight my piece Adventure Dad as one of their eight favorite family travel stories.

People with skills do cool things; this is one of them…

Here’s a sneak peak of a promo video that JD Schuyler of Cantalopue TV is producing:

It’s nice when people with skills support your work. I can’t wait to see the finished product.

Today I’m at Rule29 for a photo/video shoot. It should be fun, but I just learned that there might be makeup involved. I grew a big zit for the occasion. I hope it smiles.