She's A Betty

Best Buy Rips Off Consumers With Secret Intranet Site

Best Buy admits to using a secret intranet site to bilk customers out of deals advertised on their website.  From the article by George Gombossy:

Based on what his office has learned, Blumenthal said, it appears the consumer has the burden of informing Best Buy sales people of the cheaper price listed on its Internet site, which he said "is troubling."

What is more troubling to me, and to some Best Buy customers, is that even when one informs a salesperson of the Internet price, customers have been shown the intranet site, which looks identical to the Internet site, but does not always show the lowest price. (Link)

Ugh.

Two Quizzes

Here are two amusing quizzes I found recently:

1) What American Accent Do You Have? (13 questions; they pegged mine as undeniably Southern--blast!).

2) What's Your Brain's Sex? (A series of tests from the BBC).::via [BB-Blog]

Feed Finds: 12/10/06

Some more finds:

• Cute bunny, cute puppy.
• Cute elephant fetus.
• Speaking of fetuses, Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter is pregnant.  Social conservative scoldings & Heather Has Two Mommies jokes ensue. 
• A study accuses several British clothing stores (Asda, Primark, & Tesco) of underpaying Bangladeshi workers (and by underpaying, we mean paying them £8 a month, instead of the minimum monthly wage of £20).
• BBC reports that regular condoms are too big for most Indian men.  Anecdotal evidence suggests, however, that this is a load of chutney.
• Awesome pop-up books.

Feed Finds: 12/07/06

We're really, really backed up on our feed reader (we use Google Reader now, BTW, and we love it!), so we'll be doing random feed finds (some quite old) over the next few weeks. 

• The safety illustrations for Nintendo's Wii are hilarious, but incomplete.   Luckily, the Iconfactory fills the gaps (see right).::via Core77.
• Banksy's getting on my nerves.
• Photos of Santa Claus scaring small children.::via Boing Boing.
• A new Bridget Jones movie, and she's having Daniel's baby [Ed. note: WTF?!]::via Pop Candy
• Fighting Words-mith Christopher Hitchens mystifies me.  Is his meandering Vanity Fair article on "Why Women Aren't Funny" a humor piece?  I have this sickening feeling that he's going to pop up and say, "It was *hic* all a joke!  You women have no sense of humor.*belch*"  From the article:

"So you could argue that when men get together to be funny and do not expect women to be there, or in on the joke, they are really playing truant and implicitly conceding who is really the boss.

The ancient annual festivities of Saturnalia, where the slaves would play master, were a temporary release from bossdom. A whole tranche of subversive male humor likewise depends on the notion that women are not really the boss, but are mere objects and victims.

The whole essay, believe it or not, makes even less sense.  Check out other responses from The American Prospect, Elizabeth Spiers, & Echidne.

• Finally, a machete-wielding convenience store clerk. The picture's better than the video.::via BB-Blog.

Feed Finds: 11/17/06

Another quick round of feed finds:

• Segolene Royal may become France's first female president, after winning the Socialist nomination.   
• Grace Bonney, aka Design*Sponge's Grace (or Gracie?), has been blogging about business for Slate.  First, she wrote a great piece on running a business as a young woman.  She has interesting anecdotes about people's reaction to her being young and female.  One quote from a prospective advertiser:

“Come on, who really runs the site? It’s fun to have a cute girl on the cover but I’m sure you’ve got some ad guys I can talk to, right?” ::Link.

Bonney also has a post on making money with your blog, and an incredibly cathartic post/rant on bad PR pitches.  If you pitch items to blogs, or get pitched to regularly, read it.  Even though I don't get anywhere near the number pitches DS does (she gets 200-300 a day!), I've gotten enough to know that most pitches are appalling.

I've had people call me the wrong name (the blog's called She's A Betty!!!), ask me to promote fur coats, offer to link to me in exchange for promoting their site or product (if you need to know why that's wrong, see here), and all other kinds of nonsense.

• Gilmore Girls fans complain that the show's tanking without Amy Sherman-Palladino (BTW, why does she call her "despotic"?  Did I miss something?).
• The Onion on humanity's possible division into two sub-species (first mentioned here).
• Presumably because of Mukhtar Mai's and others' vocal activism, Pakistan will revise its rape laws.  Now rape cases will be decided by civil, rather than Islamic, or Sharia, law.  In the past, "[v]ictims had to have four male witnesses to the crime - if not they faced prosecution for adultery."  This made rape prosecution difficult, if not impossible, and kept many women from reporting (in Mukhtar Mai's case, people expected her to commit suicide, not press charges).  Even with the presumably low reporting rates, the country's independent Human Right's Commission determined that "a woman is raped every two hours and gang-raped every eight hours in Pakistan."::original BBC article.
  

Feed Finds: 10/29/06

Time for another round of feed finds:

• Who wants to live forever without cheesecake or chocolate?  Boo.
• The New York Times has a great article about how America's political polarization affects our social lives.
• USA Today has an eye-opening list of the 101 most influential fictional characters.  As an occasional fiction writer, I sometimes wonder why (if?) writing's important--and then I see things like this list.
• Whipup.net has a nice summary of the fabric copyrighting controversy.
• Britain's "meat pie mums" sabotage their children's diets and call it love.  Though to be fair, they're really just aiding and abetting.
• Back-story and "making of" slideshow for Besame Cosmetics (previously mentioned here).
• More than 1 in 8 Americans are addicted to the internets, says study.
• Gina Lollobrigida (age 79) weds Javier Rigau (age 45), after dating for 20 years.  Go, honey!
• Small children trapped in toy vending machines, via Boing Boing.
• Jonathan Lundqvist, a Swede, recently returned from Iran with quite a few censored magazines.  If you've read Marjane Satrapi's wonderful Persepolis (or was it Persepolis 2?), Iran's magazine censorship is old news.  However, it's cool to see examples. ::via Gawker & Boing Boing

And some extra special Halloween links:

• Also via Boing Boing (yes, I do read other blogs), free streams of old radio thrillers.  They also have links to several other radio libraries on the web.
  
• An ingeniously gross Halloween dinner (from you-know-where).
• Learn how to make glitter pumpkins (Martha Stewart via cake + pie).
• In fact, just check out Martha Stewart's complete Halloween resource page.
• A very cool Dark Chocolate M&M'S quiz game (I could only get 40 right!  Even with extensive cheating!).
• Last but not least, Cute Overload has plenty of costumed pets, although you will have to search for them.

Feed Finds: 10/18/06

Time for another round of feed finds:

• Japanese women, emboldened by greater economic independence, prefer younger men (they're less bossy).
• London Mayor Ken Livingstone told London Fashion Week organizers to ban underweight models, or lose important funding from the London Development Agency.  The LDA has donated over £620,000 to LFW over the past three years. ::via Back in Skinny Jeans
  
• With Project Runway on the way auf, my new guilty TV pleasure is Ugly Betty.  Sadly, fourfour doesn't cover the show, but Television Without Pity does, with recaps written by Go Fug Yourself's Jessica. Here's the episode 3 recap. 
  
• Oh no he DI'NT! Mel Gibson blames his recent anti-Semitic remarks on alcohol and, uh, Semites.
• Incidentally, FashionTribes has instructions for making your own Mel Gibson Halloween costume.
• A year after severing ties with longtime partner McDonald's, Disney announces it will no longer serve junk food in its theme parks.
• Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry (who works at the London School of Economics, god help us) thinks that the human race may eventually diverge into two sub-species:

"The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures."

Charming.  Of course, Curry gives himself a 100,000-year grace period for this to occur.  He further predicts a general "prettying" of humanity over the next 1000 years.  Ignoring the potential effects of overpopulation, Curry predicts that:

"Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.

Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features, he adds. Racial differences will be ironed out by interbreeding, producing a uniform race of coffee-coloured people."--read full BBC article; also, the Sun Online.

According to the list, women with big (read: not "pert") boobs, body hair, and dark skin, and nonathletic men without square jaws or big johns are evolutionarily inferior (or at the very least, will have plastic surgery to remedy these "flaws").  Sorry, but I don't buy it.  I also think his vision of "a uniform race" is naïve (and weird).  Even if we all share the same skin color eventually (very unlikely), race is ultimately a social construct, and people will still find ways to discriminate.  So, boo.

More Feed Finds: 10/10/06

More quick finds:

• According to William J. Mann's new biography, Katherine Hepburn was a "double-gater," and more than a bit odd.
• North Korea goes through with its threats of a nuclear test (evidence suggests they exploded a mini-nuke).  Slate explores the potential fall-out.
• Google bought YouTube.  For $1.65 billion.  I can already smell the lawsuits.
• More progress on male contraceptives.
• Two useful articles (1, 2) on how independent booksellers have restructured their businesses to compete with Barnes & Noble, Borders, & Amazon.com.
• Here's a fascinating article on Human-Elephant Conflict (H.E.C.).  An excerpt:

"In the course of her nearly two years at the Elephant Sanctuary — much of it spent in quarantine while undergoing daily treatment for tuberculosis — Misty has also been in therapy, as in psychotherapy. Wild-caught elephants often witness as young calves the slaughter of their parents, just about the only way, shy of a far more costly tranquilization procedure, to wrest a calf from elephant parents, especially the mothers. The young captives are then dispatched to a foreign environment to work either as performers or laborers, all the while being kept in relative confinement and isolation, a kind of living death for an animal as socially developed and dependent as we now know elephants to be." --Charles Siebert, New York Times.

Read more about the Elephant Sanctuary.

Feed Finds: 10/9/06

Time for a quick round of Feed Finds:

• Here's an interesting NYMag feature on Stephen Colbert.
• Check out these stills from Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, out October 20th.
• I love, love, love Chow.com.  Check out the perfect salsa recipe.::via Not Martha
• NPR.org has an interesting interview with Jesse Kornbluth, writer for culture filter Headbutler.com.
• Slate and the BBC have two articles about Anna Politkovskaya, a recently murdered Russian journalist.  Politkovskaya was highly critical of Putin's administration, particularly its handling of Chechnya.  Her assassination, as well as the growing tension between Russia and pro-Western neighbor Georgia, further highlight the alarming discrepancy between Putin's pro-Democracy rhetoric and his government's behavior.

Feed Finds: 10/1/06

It's been awhile, but Feed Finds is back.

• Paul Newman is my permanent pick for Sexiest Man Alive.  At 81, he's still married to his wife of 48 years, Joanne Woodward, has a legendary acting career and a successful business that gives all its proceeds after taxes to charity, and is still (bless him) hot.  Favorite quote: when asked by Empire magazine why he'd never cheated on Woodward, he replied "Why fool around with hamburgers when you have steak at home?"  Like I said, bless the man.  Here's a nice NYTimes article about his new restaurant.
• Sofia Coppola does Paris.
• My favorite article on the thin model debate thus far has been this interview with Erin O'Connor, one of the models singled out by British politicians as an unhealthy example to young girls.  Unlike Lily Cole, O'Connor addresses the issue and her critics with a disarming sensitivity and perceptiveness.  Here's an excerpt:

"My teenage years were ridiculous. I desperately wanted a boob job, I desperately wanted a nose job, I constantly had sore feet because I would wear shoes two sizes too small because I couldn't bear to buy my big shoes. But that," she says, warming to one of her favourite themes, "is because I had no perception of how a woman was meant to be and how she was entitled to go with what her version of whatever being a woman was. It was only in my late teens and early twenties, when I started modelling, that I began to appreciate myself." --Hadley Freeman, The Guardian

• An art teacher in Frisco, TX was suspended after she took students on a field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art, where, as principal Nancy Lawson later scolded her, "students were exposed to nude statues and other nude art representations."  A parent apparently complained about said nudity, and now Sydney McGee is suspended with pay while officials interview replacements.  School officials have countered that "this is not about a field trip to a museum" and that the "timing of circumstances has allowed the teacher to wave that banner and it has played well in the media."  Instead, they've suspended her because she was "not displaying enough student art and for “wearing flip-flops” to work."  Right. (Quotes from NYTimes article by Ralph Blumenthal).
• Having said that, have I got some filthy pictures for you!  Here's Auguste Rodin's "Shade," and Aristide Maillol's "Flora," two of the works mentioned in the article.  Incidentally, similar Maillol statues are all over the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, which borders both the Louvre (also filled with "nude art representations") and a kiddie carnival.  Ah, the French.