Wreathian

His salary approaches $50 million. With endorsements, he will make over $100 million this year. He is the first professional athlete to become a billionaire. He is watched by almost 400 million people each time he performs with a cumulative annual audience of over 60 billion ! He has won 7 world championships during 15 seasons of competition (including 5 in the last 6 years) and is in position to win another one before he retires. Now at 37 years old, ostensibly at the peak of his prowess and abilities, he is stepping down. Did you even notice ?

It used to be the case that marketers would exhaust every effort to make you feel better about yourself in order to push a product. Stretching the truth (lying), overstating benefits (lying), or even stooping to the use of eye-fooling photography (lying) were are common techniques. Perhaps the marketers took over product development or perhaps the product developers had their marketing caps on, but there is a new feature available on some HP digital cameras that allows you to make yourself feel better without a single lie being told by a single marketer. The technology actually slims down the subject of the photo. You heard it right - the camera makes you skinnier! HP claims the camera "can instantly trim off pounds", so maybe the marketers are still up to their their old tricks, after all. Most interesting side effect: You end up lying to yourself and everyone who sees your photos while the marketers go to sleep with a (mostly) clear conscious.

What are all the hip kids doing these days? Marketing their products on the streets, generating word of mouth , of course! Using pressure washers and urban soot, there has been a trend to "clean up" dirty city walls and sidewalks by adding advertising artwork. The most infamous are Vision Media's campaign (top right) for the 2006 Lotus Awards and O&M/London's Ultimate Fuel promotion (bottom right) for BP . As with most art, even etching commercial messages into dirt had its origins somewhere. This trend is usually linked with British graffiti artist Moose and his chemically etched Smirnoff reverse stencils (for which he was promptly disparaged and fined , mind you). It is brilliant that people are finding ways to gain attention while still bringing to light an issue of social consciousness. Those city bits are pretty filthy. Hopefully, local governments and homeowners associations will find cleanliness to be a higher virtue than homogenicity.

Customer surveys are great ways to figure out what your customers like or would change about your products, services, and people. Lots of companies use them to show off inflated statistics, but do they ever accomplish their ultimate goal - change? A new survey says no. Do you use surveys to allow your customers to tell you what they never will face to face? Do you use the surveys to identify areas of improvement or to pat yourself on the back? Lying to yourself only results in lying to everyone else.

... and calls the process of the "proud animals" being slaughtered "barbaric". Is Congress making subjective, ethical judgments on the value of a species? Have they considered what goes on in any abattoir? Actually, it overturns a bill put into law by President Bush two years ago enabling horses meeting certain criteria to be exported to Europe as food animals. The law allowed government-held, wild horses (about 20,000 of them) to be purchased, or as lawmakers called it "adopted", by the public. This was designed as a business opportunity, giving ranchers the ability to buy low from the government and sell high to Europe. After their session, all the legislators retired to the Congressional cafeteria for a hearty luncheon where a mixed grill of beef, chicken, and lamb was served. The Star-Telegram details it further with some interesting, and possibly out of context, quotations. The Onion brings their perspective by saying, "I support this rulin...

Microsoft released their new, iTunes-assassinating, world-dominating, vertically-integrated, proprietary-file-selling, line of mobile media players and software, called Zune . They blew their horns and released doves into the air. Then it broke. Zune is being rolled out to replace the ubiquitous Windows Media Player and to take on the formidable iTunes and iPod. Of course, Microsoft built in the most obvious feature to ensure an easy transition from the old player to the new one, right? Almost. They did manage to make the product and the packaging both look like bad, design-school, Apple knockoffs, though. Remember, Microsoft is involved. The old files from Windows Media Player are locked up by security devices inside the program to accomplish digital rights management (DRM). DRM is the effort to control distribution and piracy of copyrighted materials which became popular after websites such as Napster , Limewire , and Kazaa had teenagers sharing their entire music and movie ...

"Reverence for Life does not allow the scholar to live for his science alone, even if he is very useful to the community in so doing. It does not permit the artist to exist only for his art, even if he gives inspiration to many by its means. It refuses to let the business man imagine that he fulfils all legitimate demands in the course of his business activities. It demands from all that they should sacrifice a portion of their own lives for others." - Dr. Albert Schweitzer , from Civilization and Ethics