Meantime, back in Gotham City, menacing Batman movie billboards tower over the sidewalks around Times Square.
Darkness has indeed risen. News media interview moviegoers. Police up security around theaters in fear of copycats.
I got a phone call early this morning to go out to Aurora, Colo., and report on the theater shooting, but I am here in New York, unable to jump on a tragic story about 18 miles from my home.
I can only marvel at the chaos advertised in this film. Any wonder the victims could not discern between the violence on the big screen and the real violence coming at them?
Seems to me this a repeating story that can be reduced to three words: Nut With Guns.
Cries rise for gun control, a curb on the glorified violence we see in the movies and on TV, more help for the mentally ill … We have had all these discussions before. They have gone no where.
All we know for sure is that in the real world there are indeed monstrous villains, but there are no super heroes.
If everybody did this, the entire Earth would be reduced to a billboard spinning absurdly about around in space.
This is how JetBlue Airways and TV network TNT are marking their arrival in Dallas – Jetblue with a new flight between Boston and Dallas, and TNT with a remake of the show Dallas. “Using the Earth as his palette, environmental artist Stan Herd created a five-acre art installation that is visible from all JetBlue flights departing from or arriving to Dallas/Fort Worth Airport,” the companies said in a joint press release. Click here to read more from JetBlue and TNT.
People have been advertising on the Earth’s surface since the beginning of time, from ancient civilizations forming hieroglyphs for the gods, to farmers plowing their fields with political messages. There are even reports of aliens coming down in flying saucers to create crop circles with hidden messages for humanity. But now that corporate America has glomed on, will there be a square inch left on the planet that isn’t sponsored by somebody?
Just think what the world will be like when they can make the moon look like a Coca-Cola bottle cap.
Bank of America spends $2 billion a year on advertising and marketing, and yet it seems to protesters in the streets are able to come up with better buzzwords.
This week, I offer the too-big-to-fail bank with some marketing ideas.
Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal. And click here to watch me discuss the suprise $2 billion-plus loss at JP Morgan Chase with Matt Flener of Denver’s 9News.
So far, only a few folks have sent me nastygrams this week. Perhaps it was because I went so much easier than, say, Rolling Stone magazine when it wrote it’s piece: Bank of America: Too Crooked To Fail.
In today’s column, I had some fun with a press release touting a start-up company’s plans to begin mining operations on asteroids, and I received some reader responses arguing that I shouldn’t make fun of visionaries.
I’s not the vision I’m laughing at. It’s the hyperbole.
How many times have we been to the moon since 1969? And these guys from Planetary Resources Inc. say mining an asteroid will be as easy as going to the moon? Click here to read their press release.
Maybe some day. Meantime, it may be more likely that an asteroid will mine the Earth. Or perhaps we’lll kill ourselves with our own technology before it can ever happen. In any case, a tiny dose of reality is in order here, people.
Anybody can put out a press release these day. I just put one out touting my plans to turn myself invisible.
Here’s what it’s come down to with unemployment stuck at more than 9% for years on end: The people with jobs need to start creating jobs for the people without jobs.
Basically, anybody who can pay as much as $5 for a cup of coffee can kick in another five for this cause.
Starbucks is leading the way with it’s “Create Jobs for USA” program. The money it collects will fund “underserved community businesses which include small business loans, community center financing, housing project financing and microfinance,” Starbucks says. Click here to read its announcement.
“We recognize that in this time of crisis, we can and must do more – especially when the small business community, where Starbucks has its roots, is so challenged,” the coffee company says.
Who knows? At the rate America is going, there may soon be little need for coffee.
In the Great Depression, the song “Brother, can you spare a dime?” lamented how the men who built skyscrapers and railroads were abandoned by the labor market. Today, the song remains essentially the same, only plea is now for $5. Click here to hear a riff from the song.
Doomsday preacher Harold Camping still needs to get his signs down predicting Judgment Day on May 21. I mean, it’s the middle of June already.
May 21 came and went, and everyone knows the big judgment that came down: The 89-year-old preacher was wrong.
Can’t he at least generate some more economic activity by changing out these signs to reflect his new prediction, that Jesus is now coming back on Oct. 21?
Camping has said he will remove these signs, but I’m still finding the roadsides littered with them, including this one along Interstate 25 north of Christian-right Mecca, Colorado Springs.
“We don’t need to talk about it anymore,” says Camping in the San Francisco Chronicle. “The world has been warned – my it has been warned. We have done our share and the media picked it up. The world has been warned that it is under judgment.”
Yep. It sure has. So take down your signs, already
Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal, where I take a stand for Ronald. I also talk about it with Matt Flener of Denver’s NBC affiliate, 9News. Click here to watch.
I don’t get the appeal of that fishy looking creature on the Starbucks cup.
Is coffee supposed to taste like tuna?
I’ve always interpreted this double-finned abomination as a Mermaid, but CEO Howard Schultz hints that it’s actually she-beast from Greek mythology.
“The Siren was as much a part of the Starbucks story as she is today,” Schultz recent wrote on a Starbucks blog post.
Starbucks is announcing a slight logo change, dropping “coffee” from its logo so that it can more logically stick it on other fine Starbucks products. Click here to read all about the change.
I suppose “Mermaid” and “Siren” essentially describe the same horror from different cultural traditions. The creature lures people into Starbucks’ stores. Then it gets them totally addicted to caffeine to the point where they’ll pay anything for a cup of coffee.
“She is a storyteller, carrying the lore of Starbucks ahead, and remembering our past,” according to the Starbucks blog.
“She’s a muse – always there, inspiring us and pushing us ahead. …
“She means something different to every one who sees her, who knows her.”
Yeah? Well, you know what she means to me? She’s a monster from Homer’s Odyssey trying to woo people into crashing upon the rocks. Happens to me all the time when the caffeine wears off.
