2008: Good Riddance?
Perhaps it’s fitting that plummeting temperatures put a chill on tonight’s reveling in Time Square – a bitter end to 2008, annus horribilis?
There seems to be some glaring incongruities this holiday season. And it’s not just wacky mother nature that gives us 67-degree spring breeze one day and showers us with sleet the next.
On the one hand, about half of people surveyed by NBC News/Wall Street Journal believe 2008 was one of the worst years in American history. On the other, if you had spent half an hour in the vicinity of Rock Center in New York City, you would probably not use “sour” to describe the public mood.
Granted, there’re loads of foreign, aka boorish, tourists who tend to either step on your toes or push you as if you were a stroller. Or perhaps they merely delight in taking pictures with you – not the skyscrapers – in the backdrop.
Quote of the Day
“Children who grow up in a different environment may have very different early experiences, and may process information differently than children from a different environment.”
- BBC
Making An Olympian Mountain out of Lip-synching Molehill
You could be forgiven for thinking that the media are competing for gold in China bashing, as if spurred by Michael Phelps‘ epic success. What else can explain they’re abuzz with ‘fake’ footprints of firework and ‘miming’ child singer?
UK’s Telegraph scooped the computer generated fireworks but it pales in comparison to the human interest story, as every newspaper worth its salt has duly reported the “sleight of voice“. Some even go so far as to connect the 9-year-old girl’s lip-syncing (to another girl’s voice) to the fabricated fake dumpling fillings of cardboard, surfaced last summer in the height of another bout of China bashing.
Perhaps they’re too caught up in the Olympic fever, reflexively making a mountain out of a molehill. But what they fail to highlight is the fact that both controversies came to light in the Chinese media. The main reason given by the producers of the opening ceremonies, it seems, was aesthetic in nature. Then there’s such a thing as reading too much into the Chinese psyche – obsessiveness with perfection, control freaks, and worse yet, paranoia.
Chase Credit Card Woes
Last week Bob Garfield hung up his boots after an 11-long months of crusading against Comcast. In the interim, many thousands “angry, mistreated” customers have visited the site to voice their grievances. Now their efforts appear to bear fruit: Griping Online? Comcast Hears and Talks Back.
Besides cable providers, credit card companies also deserve a place in the pantheon of abusive customer service. And we’ve had our fair share of woes with Chase credit card, part of JP Morgan Chase.
If you google “complaints about Chase credit card”, you’ll get hundreds of thousands of results, with the most recent ones dated yesterday. Which makes you wonder: Is Chase listening at all to those complaints or is it business as usual? If our experience today is any guide, the answer might be the latter.
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Summer Breeze That Disperses the Cobwebs of Reason
Summer is in full swing here – Fannie and Freddie plummeted as investors fear “socialism at our doorstep”, Fake Steve Jobs decided to hang up his boots, and stuffwhitepeoplelike hit the bookstores.
In the meantime, some intrepid souls “summered” in our backyard, a/k/a blog, and removed a June 10 post on “Deranged Hillary Hatred“. Summer must be going swimmingly for those into somersaults, we wonder?
