cue the jokes about bad british food…..now.

[telegraph, photo via bbc]

barnard has no love for this kid, she said “The pain was so excruciating that I didn’t even know I was deaf” and in emails she is said to have written “I guess we are simply fortunate that my eardrum was exploding and I was swallowing blood…Had it not been for that, I would have dragged that kid out of his mother’s arms and stomped him to death.”

i’m sure she meant that in the nicest of ways.

[time, photo via djabonillojr.2008, azaria chamberlain story]

the product got a little bit lot of bad publicity last week when facebook india debuted an app, also sponsored by vaseline designed to whiten skin. it features the effect of the product on indian actor and bollywood star shahid kapur’s face–he gets a few shades lighter.  men are invited to try out the product using the application. not surprisingly, people were kind of appalled by the application and many protests came up.  in response, vaseline said

Vaseline is committed to creating culturally relevant products that meet the needs of its consumers in markets around the world.Much like self-tanning products in North America and Europe, skin lightening products are culturally relevant in India. In India, men use these products to lighten and even out their natural skin tone and to reduce the appearance of spots while protecting their skin from the sun. The Facebook application was created for the Indian market as a culturally relevant and engaging way for Indian men to interact with this product.

i guess they were trying to show how relevant the product is in this print ad.

[vaseline app for facebook, price of beauty, print ad via copyranter]

the fix for the problem?  they say put some masking tape over the problem area.  i think it looks much better with the livestrong band.

[john kerry flip flop, consumer reports update]

even though her look was digitally created for her bad romance video, fans are buying contacts that will make them look like her. according to the new york times, the look she wore in the video can be made possible through contacts that first became popular in asia.  the eye fashion “give wearers a childlike, doe-eyed appearance [and the resulting] look is characteristic of Japanese anime and is also popular in Korea. Fame-seekers there called “ulzzang girls” post cute but sexy head shots of themselves online, nearly always wearing circle lenses to accentuate their eyes.”

the trend has become all the rage with u.s. teens who don them for facebook profile picts.  take melody vue, a north carolina teen for example, she says “I’ve noticed a lot of girls in my town have started to wear them a lot.” vue herself owns 22 pairs of the things and wears them often.

so what’s the problem?

the f.d.a. warns that they oxygen cutting eye gear can cause serious damage, if not blindness and that’s why they’re illegal here in the u.s. so an allegiance to gaga could in fact be a blind one. and to think i thought that the eye jewelry we told you about was bad.

[nytimes, photo via nymag via lady gaga]

is there anything lance armstrong can’t do?

[business week]

thanks to a tip from my buddy and love anderson cooper, i learned about the bp’s blog from the gulf today.  in every way possible, the blog’s reporters take a glass half full reporting approach.  my favorite example of this was from a report filed on may 28.  in the blog post titled ballet at sea reporter paula komar describes the cleanup effort using flowery language like this: “triangles, circles, v-angles: precision shapes at sea executed by shrimping vessels and choreographed by skimming perfectionists to stop any oil from potentially getting close to Alabama’s coast.”

here are a few tidbits from komar and her colleague tom seslar’s other reports:

• in working together – “On Mothers Day, BP provided a rose boutonnière for each mom and a wonderful Alabama police office bought hundreds of roses and handed a single rose to every mom and lots of daughters. Though the work never stopped, there were a lot of smiling faces and a few tears, reminding everyone that this spill response is only a very small part of what’s important.”
• in i saw the oil spill today – “Seeing it real-time, up close, eyes-on is, oddly, an inspiration to shake off the weariness, to look ahead, not behind, to dig in and focus with vigour on the task at hand.”
• in flying higher to get closer to the oil spill – “My appreciation for the enormity of the oil industry as an economic contributor in the Gulf of Mexico climbed sharply within minutes after I hitched a ride aboard a helicopter that BP had chartered for a couple of oil hunters.”

[bp's blogs from the gulf, image street giant]

the loss of the spaghetios guy and the loss of the gloved one just a year ago may have given some of us the feeling that bit by bit, our childhood was fading away.  here’s a little more sand through the hourglass–the founder of swatch watches nicolas hayek died of heart failure at the age of 82.  hayek was known as a great manager and is credited with saving the then failing swiss watch industry back in the 80s–back then he asserted that a cheap watch could tell time as well as an expensive watch and used lower-end materials like plastic and quartz movement along with mass-production to keep prices low.

ok, but what’s this got to do with a smart car?

hayek invented  the smart car and said city cars only need “room for two big adults and a crate of beer.”

i’m going to play my pretty in pink soundtrack now.

[msnbc]

during the testimony, costner called out regulators and oil industry peeps for being bureacrats and eejits.* he said the regulators were caught int he never ending circular cycle that forbids untested machines at oil spill sites he reminded regulators that machines meant to clean up oils spills need to be tested at….oil spills.  and he called out oil industry peeps because they were too clueless to even imagine that a spill could happen so they wouldn’t therefore invest in the tool.

costner was pretty honest that he was shilling his own product but it’s interesting to consider his motives.  maybe he saw the urgency of saving the earth after the recent birth of his daughter grace on june 3. maybe he wanted everyone to remember that cameron (a.k.a. mr. titanic/ monsieur avatar) isn’t the only academy award winning director with an idea. maybe he thought that saving the oceans would make people forget that stinker waterworld.

* a shout out to  friends in ireland who use this word so well

[nytimes, huffington post]

food giant mcdonald’s has recalled about 12M commemorative shrek forever plastic cups because they expose consumers to cadmium and long term exposure to cadmium can cause health risks.  the joint doesn’t want a pesky health scare like this to ruin their healthy reputation, right? follow the link at the bottom of this article for recall information.

[u.s. consumer product safety division]