American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture
…hairstyle for long hair, that is, from the BlogHer TotalBeauty.com tutorials, with a chance to win!
A lovely style, perfect for dressing up or for bad hair days.
And, check out the contest, on the Prizes & Promotions page on Blogher.com. You might win!
Related:
New hairdo, new contest!
Watch the video and you can enter for your chance to win!
First the hairdo: How to style blunt bangs, easy enough I can do it,
And the contest,
Hair Sweepstakes Offical Rules week 1
Get gorgeous hair & WATCH TO WIN!
UPDATE,
And now for the sexy loose bun. . . with more chances to win!
After I posted the “No worries, man. Ev’rythin’ will be all-right” Volkswagen ad last night, a friend emailed with another Super Bowl ad “outrage”: CAIR complained about this ad,
Apparently they’re upset that the Arab has a camel, or something, and that you can’t vote for him at the website.
You can, however, vote for the bikers, the cowboys or the show girls.
The ad, by the way, borrows from
Vote early, vote often!
The Mad Men are back, and I’m not the only one loving it. Jeff Jensen has Four Fearless Predictions for Season Four, which are,
1. Henry Francis Will Dump Betty, Not Vise Versa.
2. Betty will slap Don. And then… ???
3. Advertising Age Will Expose Don Draper’s Dick Whitman Past.
4. Lucky Strike is going to put its account in review.
Jensen may be on target – we’ll find out soon enough, but my best bet is that item #1, Henry drops Betty, is the most likely.
One of the many things I enjoy about Mad Men is how the writers weave in real brands, such as London Fog, Hilton, Utz and Jantzen, in the storylines. Having grown up in Puerto Rico where my father worked at Hilton, and where Jantzen was a preferred brand of swimwear, it makes the program distant and familiar at the same time. Too bad Don told Jantzen to get lost in last week’s episode – I would have loved to see what the agency would have come up with for promoting the brand.
Adding to the reality-mixed-with-fiction effect, the Wall Street Journal has an article on What Don Draper’s Wall Street Journal Hedcut Would Look Like, with the proviso,
BTW, we’ve included a hedcut of Draper with this story, but we should note that the Journal’s signature dot-ink portraits weren’t launched until 1979, and this season “Mad Men” takes place in 1964. But you have to admit Draper’s hedcut looks pretty cool.
Which brings up the issue of memory: memory is a funny thing. I have been reading the Wall Street Journal since the early 1970s and could swear they always had hedcuts.
Clearly, they didn’t.
Those of us who do/don’t recall the “John & Marsha” skit Peggy and her assistant joke around with in last week’s episode can find it on YouTube,
While I was writing this post Mom called and said that Jon Hamm is this week’s Parade Magazine’s cover, Jon Hamm
He Knows You’re Watching. Nice slideshow on line.
Man Men’s on at 10PM Eastern tonight on AMC. You can watch last week’s episode, season 4 premiere, Public Relations below the fold (available only for a week from today), but the Wall Street Journal archives the recap of the episodes,
Public Relations:
(more…)
The man your man could smell like hits it out of the ballpark into the bathroom, again,
Allahpundit has Video: The greatest corporate viral marketing campaign ever, plus, this guy, doing the greatest form of flattery,
Now the question is, is The Old Spice Super Bowl guy retiring? He tweeted it on Thursday:
Prior Old Spice Super Bowl Guy post here, and more, waaay more in the Old Spice Super Bowl Guy YouTube channel.
Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last leader of the old Soviet Union, has been glamorized to the point where he actually modeled for Louis Vuitton; the consumer is supposed to aspire to own a duffle bag just like Gorby’s.
But Gorbachev’s not just a pretty face: Claire Berlinski, writing at City Journal, asks in her article, A Hidden History of Evil
Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
And we all should ask that question. Here’s what she has to say about Gorbachev:
For instance, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:
Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.
Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?
And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful protesters in Tbilisi.
Stroilov’s documents also contain transcripts of Gorbachev’s discussions with many Middle Eastern leaders. These suggest interesting connections between Soviet policy and contemporary trends in Russian foreign policy. Here is a fragment from a conversation reported to have taken place with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad on April 28, 1990:
H. ASSAD. To put pressure on Israel, Baghdad would need to get closer to Damascus, because Iraq has no common borders with Israel. . . .
M. S. GORBACHEV. I think so, too. . . .
H. ASSAD. Israel’s approach is different, because the Judaic religion itself states: the land of Israel spreads from Nile to Euphrates and its return is a divine predestination.
M. S. GORBACHEV. But this is racism, combined with Messianism!
H. ASSAD. This is the most dangerous form of racism.
One doesn’t need to be a fantasist to wonder whether these discussions might be relevant to our understanding of contemporary Russian policy in a region of some enduring strategic significance.
Documenting Evil: An Inconvenient History:
As uncomfortable as it may be for those who think it’s progressive to keep Mao’s Little Red Book on their bedside table or favor the radical chic of a Che t-shirt, we need to expose and acknowledge the reality of Soviet-style communism that has claimed so many tens of millions lives. A good place to start would be recognizing it for what it was, and understanding its history.
Until then, we shall continue to see tyrants selling expensive luggage while comfortably driven around in limousines.
Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last leader of the old Soviet Union, has been glamorized to the point where he actually modeled for Louis Vuitton; the consumer is supposed to aspire to own a duffle bag just like Gorby’s.
But Gorbachev’s not just a pretty face: Claire Berlinski, writing at City Journal, asks in her article, A Hidden History of Evil
Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives?
And we all should ask that question. Here’s what she has to say about Gorbachev:
For instance, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:
Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.
Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?
And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful protesters in Tbilisi.
Stroilov’s documents also contain transcripts of Gorbachev’s discussions with many Middle Eastern leaders. These suggest interesting connections between Soviet policy and contemporary trends in Russian foreign policy. Here is a fragment from a conversation reported to have taken place with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad on April 28, 1990:
H. ASSAD. To put pressure on Israel, Baghdad would need to get closer to Damascus, because Iraq has no common borders with Israel. . . .
M. S. GORBACHEV. I think so, too. . . .
H. ASSAD. Israel’s approach is different, because the Judaic religion itself states: the land of Israel spreads from Nile to Euphrates and its return is a divine predestination.
M. S. GORBACHEV. But this is racism, combined with Messianism!
H. ASSAD. This is the most dangerous form of racism.
One doesn’t need to be a fantasist to wonder whether these discussions might be relevant to our understanding of contemporary Russian policy in a region of some enduring strategic significance.
Documenting Evil: An Inconvenient History:
As uncomfortable as it may be for those who think it’s progressive to keep Mao’s Little Red Book on their bedside table or favor the radical chic of a Che t-shirt, we need to expose and acknowledge the reality of Soviet-style communism that has claimed so many tens of millions lives. A good place to start would be recognizing it for what it was, and understanding its history.
Until then, we shall continue to see tyrants selling expensive luggage while comfortably driven around in limousines.
Signs of Neanderthals Mating With Humans
Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.
And now for a few cavemen ads:
UPDATE
Commenter John sent Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer:
Jules Crittenden‘s stoked about having caveman genes,
In fact, I was deliriously happy driving home tonight, thinking about all that grand and terrible prehistory.
Jules also pokes fun at the AP’s take, “While many people think of Neanderthals as very primitive, they had tools for things like hunting and sewing, controlled fire, lived in shelters and buried their dead.” Jules:
AP apparently thinks we got the non-Neanderthal part of our genome from Homo metrosexualensis or something like that.
Or at least from those Warren Buffet cavemen. Either way, fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance – or so they claim.
And,
Whoa!
Conservatives?
Have scientists now stumbled on the source of contemporary conservative (formerly Neanderthal) white male anxiety? Are they expressing their distress with the relentless humanization of their kind?
Tea partying cavemen?
