Thursday, October 19, 2006

Fun Ikea ads

Commercial Closet reports IKEA has returned to gay couples with a new family ad:

A happy couple are entangled on their sofa as they kiss, and the following shot shows a child doing a headstand The narrator asks: “Who says sofas are just for sitting?”

The inverted kid is knocked down from his headstand as the rest of his family joins him to wage a pillow fight. The voiceover continues, “Why can’t pillows fight with each other?”

The narrator wonders, “Why can’t a bookcase expand with your mind” as a father and his daughter, evidently a bookworm, hold stacks of books.

The last shot is of a happy gay male couple and their daughter on the floor, resting up against each other, as they lean on the front of their couch.

The voiceover poses the final question: “Why shouldn’t sofas come in flavors, just like families?”

CC has a Quicktime version up. Too small to even make out, I went to YouTube. Not there. Yet. But look what I found:

If you liked that one (from the Swedes, not seen in the US) you might like this one too.

Et Tu Bono update

Gregory Heller of Defective By Design wrote to thank me for signing the petition asking Bono to take a stand on DRM. Almost 5,000 people so far; the goal is 10,000 by the end of the month.

SIGN NOW!

He also pointed to a Reuters report questioning the viability of a record industry business model built on DRM which included this great quote from Yahoo Music general manager David Goldberg:

“It’s all nonsense. Music is never going to be protected, and anybody who tells you that is not being honest. Yes, you can put up speed bumps, but the people who really want to steal music are going to steal it. So you’re just making it hard for people who want to do the right thing to get the music they legitimately purchased on the devices and services that they want.”

This difficulty, Goldberg continues, only serves to dissuade consumers from buying music legally and instead keeps unauthorized peer-to-peer services in business. He calls the protected a la carte download model a “failure,” noting that legal digital download figures have remained flat all year.

“There’s been no growth this year at all,” he says. “The market has stalled.”

A Church Known for its Faith

Says Doug, “What about a church known for its love? Or a church known for its good work?”

Not here:

Seven Must Principles of Membership:

1.Believe that Christ was God manifested in the flesh.
2. Believe that Christ died for the sin of the world and arose from the dead.
3. Develop an intimate relationship with Christ through prayer daily.
4. Develop an attitude to attend worship regularly.
5. Develop an attitude to study of GodÂ’s word daily to live victoriously.
6. Develop an attitude of giving through tithing.
7. Develop an attitude of servant hood by participating in a ministry

Church Goals for Conference Year 2006 - 2007

1.  Endeavor to complete Project 2501. [Build a new church!]
2. Endeavor to develop a campus ministry to win college students to Christ.
3. Endeavor to have 100-plus attendees in Bible study.
4. Endeavor to win 100 new converts to Christ.
5. Endeavor to develop a 100% tithing church.

Make money giving away your photos

One of Larry Lessig’s favorite Creative Commons articles, is from Mark Glaser in Media Shift. Here Glaser quotes Kris Krug, president of the online community management company Bryght:

“I think Creative Commons is a huge thing and I attribute a lot of my success to it,” Krug said. “Since the beginning I’ve given all my photos away on the Internet and they’ve been used by other bloggers and people all along the way and it’s gotten my name out there. So without going to photography school, and just networking with other photographers, and giving my stuff away with attribution, I’ve got my name out there, I’ve got a lot of incoming links to my website…I didn’t realize that I could make money on photography by giving away as much as I could, that I could build up a portfolio and reputation so I could get paid work.”

Krug says it’s sometimes difficult to explain the concept of Creative Commons to friends, who are used to holding onto their work and not giving it away. He admits it takes more than one conversation to convince someone to try it out. But Krug even tells musician friends to give away their music for a chance at better success in the long run.

“If [the music is] good, people will be turned on to it and go to the live shows and buy merchandise there,” Krug said. “The next thing you know, they’ll have 10,000 fans and they’ll be courted by record companies. You’re not going to make much money selling 100 MP3 singles on CD Baby…It’s a paradigm shift, man. There are a lot of people that don’t get it and they get upset at the suggestion that they give it away. But there’s a moment when they clue in.”

Atlanta: A hub of child prostitution

More evidence of how ineffective Georgia’s draconian sex offender law is, from Bob Herbert in today’s Times:

Atlanta, for a variety of reasons, has become a hub of child prostitution and other forms of commercial sexual exploitation of children. The overall market for sex with kids is booming in many parts of the U.S. In Atlanta - a thriving hotel and convention center with a sophisticated airport and ground transportation network - pimps and other lowlifes have tapped into that market bigtime.

“These guys are even going into rural Georgia and getting these girls and bringing them into Atlanta,” said Alesia Adams, a longtime advocate who has worked with the courts and social service agencies to assist young girls who are lured into the sex trade.

Kaffie McCullough, the project director of a federally sponsored intervention program, said Atlanta’s juvenile prostitution problem “is a lot bigger than anybody would really like to know.” The sex trade in Atlanta is “a huge, huge, huge industry,” she said, and the involvement of kids under 17, which is the age of consent in Georgia, is a substantial part of it.

Stephanie Davis, the policy adviser on women’s issues for Mayor Shirley Franklin, agreed. “Sex tourism is coming south,” she told me. “There is advertising that I’ve seen on the Internet and other places that actually targets the New York market, urging men to come to Atlanta for the day and fly back home that night.”

The risks for pimps and other exploiters of children are low, and the payoff is often enormous. Demand is increasing for younger and younger prostitutes, in part because of the cultural emphasis on the sexual appeal of very young women and girls, and in part because of the widely held belief among johns that there is less risk of contracting a disease from younger prostitutes.

Pubertal problems

The other day in the Times, a report that there have been clusters of cases in which children have prematurely developed signs of puberty, outbreaks similar to epidemics of influenza or environmental poisonings:

Increasingly - though the science is still far from definitive and the precise number of such cases is highly speculative - some physicians worry that children are at higher risk of early puberty as a result of the increasing prevalence of certain drugs, cosmetics and environmental contaminants, called “endocrine disruptors,” that can cause breast growth, pubic hair development and other symptoms of puberty.

Most commonly, outbreaks of puberty in children are traced to accidental drug exposures from products that are used incorrectly.

Dr. Dedekian’s first patient was evaluated for possible genetic endocrine problems and a rare brain tumor before the cause of her puberty was discovered. It turned out that her testosterone level was almost 100 times normal, in the range of an adult man. The same problem affected her brother.

The doctors realized that the girl’s father was using a concentrated testosterone skin cream bought from an Internet compounding pharmacy for cosmetic and sexual performance purposes. From normal skin contact with their father, the children absorbed the testosterone, which caused pubic hair growth and genital enlargement.