An Admiration for Yadda yadda nada !

Like any other advertisement, this ad has targeted those who are assumed to be the main consumers for this new SONY product – Noise Canceling Headphones. We see a young serious looking adult male who is in a plane, perhaps going for a business trip, and who is canceling the annoying noises in the plane by his SONY headphones.* My main objection is to the inaccuracy and meanness that this ad earns from just to be cool and appealing.

Inaccuracy: In any random public place, babies and mommies are not the main sources of noise (pollution or otherwise), let alone inside an airplane, where the plane’s engines make all the noise. The SONY advertisement decapitates a mommy and a baby and dehumanizes their heedless bodies with newly replaced megaphone heads. Here lets merge to the meanness part: Why a mother and a baby; couldn’t SONY beheaded two noisy adults? Couldn’t it be someone talking out loud with his cell inside airplane – which is both loud and against the airline regulations?

For you to believe that I am not going for the Romanic sentimentalism of motherhood here I give you a little personal explanation: I am not a mother, and personally I don’t want ever to become one.

Regardless of my personal choice on reproducing,** I love kids, babies and children; I admire any little growing human being, I love to see their changes, and I die to be a witness of their growing-up progress. I enjoy them and I learn a lot from them, kids. I do not like it when, in public places, people shush towards kids, role their eyes at their mothers or pass unpleasant glances towards a crying noisy kid who perhaps is having a disagreement with his/her parents. To me any sound from the baby is a voice; it is not a NOISE; to me it is talking. To me if the sound is from an older child, it is the most natural sound without which, any public place becomes a graveyard.

I believe a little bit of patience and compassion toward the younger members of the society goes a long way. After all, there was a day that we all were kids, how easy we forget!

SONY Ad for Noise Canceling Headphones, Austin, Jan. 2008

* I’ve mentioned in the previous post that this ad is cool, new and interesting.
** Personal references can be found in the inner circle of Soup & Salad and the Miracle of Cracker.

The Spices Of The Week:

1- I am reading two exciting and newly released books. The Spice Route, A History by John Keay is a well-written page-turner book that follows the steps of early travels and presents a new angle to ancient spice routes both to the East and to the West. I picked up this book merely because of my longtime interest in the history of food and cuisine and also my studies on the Silk Road. The second book is not considered a history book by many but it is a kind of history, history of Dreams; Dream I Tell You by Hélène Cixous. I have been following Cixous' writings for sometime now (here) so I am very excited. Beverley Bie Brahic translated this newly released book.

2- Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits are on view in Philadelphia Museum of Art. The occasion was Frida’s 100th birthday. Although She is not one of my favorite painters, I like some of her works and especially some of her self-portraits; her personality reflects itself boldly in her harsh forms and figures. And I don’t know why, when I see her works I immediately think of her husband, Diego Rivera! I think what Rivera accomplished in his murals and large scale figures, Frida did within her smaller canvases. The exhibition is on until May 18th 2008.

3- A bout a month ago I took a photo – here you only see a detail of it – from a billboard advertisement in the airport.

When I saw the ad, immediately I wanted to do something about it. To me, as a person who always enjoys cool, new and interesting ideas in advertisement and design this ad - that has all the above qualities - was just a dismaying display of intelligent. You may have seen this ad, if not feel free to guess what the whole picture is or what it advertises for or simply wait until tomorrow when I write about it.

The Daily Haiku

Anonymous: Green must be your favorite color,
Me: No, why?
Anonymous: !

The Green Haiku, February 2008

2008 Oscars

Before getting to my wish list for the 80th Annual Academy Awards I have two great regrets and that is I haven’t seen The Savages directed by Tamara Jenkins and Katyn by Andrzej Wajda yet. These are the two good movies I have failed to see so far. And I don’t want even to start to talk about my disappointments with Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street; I believe it was by far the worst film that I’ve seen this year no wait, I forgot to count The Brave One, but the latter did not get nominated for Oscars. Here is the link to the nominees for the 80th Oscars.

But here is my wish list for Oscars 2008:

For the best actor in a leading role I wish for Daniel Day Lewis to win. I think this year the hardest choice should be made in this category. For the best actor in the supporting role I put all my hopes on Javier Bardem, He is amazing.

I hope the award for the best actress in a leading role goes to Ellen Page, I haven’t seen The Savages yet though. And in the supporting role I loved Amy Rayan’s performance.

In Animated Feature category, Persepolis is my choice. Taxi To The Dark Side is my choice for the best documentary.

For cinematography I vote for Roger Deakins - No Country for Old Men.
For the best Directing, I very much liked There Will Be Blood directed by Paul Thomas Anderson; I think the Coen brothers did a good job in directing and I like their movie as a whole better but I think I will go with There Will Be Blood for the best director.

For best picture I will vote for No Country for Old Men. For the adapted screenplay, by sure I will go with There Will Be Blood. It was definitely very difficult to turn this story to a movie but Anderson did it beautifully.

For the best original screenplay, again I failed to see Savages so I will go with Juno; Michael Clayton’s screenplay was not that special to me.

Enjoy The Oscars Night!

Plagiarism: A Romantic One,

Couple of weeks ago I heard this story on NPR and it was so interesting and funny that I wanted to post it for Valentine’s Day, but then I forgot all about it. Well the story is like this: Three years ago Paul Tolme, freelance environmental journalist, wrote an article for Defenders of Wildlife magazine about endangered black-footed ferrets in South Dakota. In 2008, parts of Tolme's article were found in a romance book written by Cassie Edwards called Shadow Bear. This so far makes it a non-romantic plagiarism: Black-footed ferrets being a subject of conversation is not so romantic.

Before this copyright scandal broke out, Cassie Edwards was famous for her historical romance novels; today if you search her name on Google, her own site which comes up first in Google says: under construction. Her name in Wikipedia comes up second with a paragraph titled Plagiarism allegations. And the third on the search is Romance Novel Reviews - Smart Bitches, *an amusingly smart website that actually discovered this plagiarism. The discovery had an interesting process; apparently a reader got curious when she came across a section in the book where the author’s tone bizarrely becomes educational and instructive. This change of writing style got more evident because it happened at the peak of the story, where the two main characters were on the edge of a lovemaking scene. It was so different that the reader decided to search for sentences from that passage in Google; She found them in Tolme’s article. After this discovery, Smart Bitches decided to check other books by Edwards, and sadly, they found out about other cases of plagiarism by Cassie Edwards. You can find the whole package at smartbitchestrashybooks.

Couple of things interests me in this plagiarism story.

1- One may not know what plagiarism exactly is but we all know about copyrights and authorship rights at least because of many movies we have seen on video or DVD. Also it is really hard to go to any collage and still be unaware of the authorship rights. And in fact it is easier to use someone else’s writings, without it being called plagiarism mostly by including the sufficient acknowledgment rather than take the original piece and hide it. Now here, we don’t have a college student, we have a best-selling author whose job is to write, whose talent, perhaps, is to be creative and who should be aware of the rules of the game. To avoid being a hypocrite, I should admit that it is not easy to flawlessly follow the rules of copyright and to avoid false attribution. But I think one should at least show that he or she has tried to follow the rules.

2- On Talk of the Nation, January 21st, where I heard the story on NPR, an issue was raised that I think deserves more attention, and that has to do with two worlds being intertwined by this plagiarism: the worlds of two groups of readers- romance novel readers and nature-science readers. I like to know more about their feedbacks. Take a look at these comments left for Paul Tolme's article on Newsweek.

3- The other thing that was smart, besides the Smart Bitches, was Paul Tolme’s reaction to the whole thing. He used the publicity and the opportunity to once more bring up the issues concerning the black-footed ferrets. As far as I know there has been no legal action taken against Cassie Edwards, yet.

Badlands National Park, South Dakota, September 2007
A small population of black-footed ferrets live in this area.
I took the photo in our trip across the country. I loved the area; limitless.

*Candy and Sarah describe their website in this words: Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books, all of the romance, none of the bullshit. I like their style.