The Fake Society

Recording Industry's Last Hope: Fake Singers?

2006-12-21T10:22:00.000-05:00

Only one music act has moved more units than Justin Timberlake over the past two months. Hannah Montana is a tween sensation whose sales have left everything from Jay-Z's new album to the new Beatles remix in the dust. Last week she outsold even Timberlake by a 2-to-1 margin.

The best thing about Hannah Montana?

She doesn't exist.

Hannah Montana is a fictional character owned by the Disney Channel. She is embodied on TV by 14-year-old Miley Cyrus. Where the fictional pop star's voice comes from is anyone's guess. (But that goes for real pop stars too, so no beef there.)

Unlike Britney, she is presumably a virgin.

When it comes to protecting a profitable pop star from her own sexuality, nothing makes a music conglomerate's job easier than simply making the star fake.

Yet Hannah Montana recently played a concert before an adoring crowd. Well, kind of. Neither the star nor her backing group played any instruments, and the youngster "fans" were only allowed into the venue by promising to applaud on cue.

Which will, it must be said, prepare all of them for the spectacle of the next State of the Union speech.

Photo Unrealism

2006-11-30T14:14:00.000-05:00

Here is a photograph of a woman which has suffered no alteration beyond standard development-lab techniques.

Now, click here to see what her face looked like in the magazine spread it eventually wound up in.

But don't stop at her face. Check out her body alterations. Then have a look at the black man whose tummy got tucked beneath his white sweater. Look a little more closely and see how his afro was enlarged.

Our daily diet.

Whereas, Napoleon Dynamite was the best movie EVER

2006-10-18T09:45:00.000-04:00

I don't know how this slipped by The Fake Society when it came down the pipe last year. (Maybe it has something to do with TFS's one-month-old status.)

The legislature of the great state of Idaho was so pleased with Jared and Jerusha Hess's independent film, Napoleon Dynamite, that it resolved -- with an actual resolution -- to honor the movie's creators.

The pair were lauded for "showcasing the positive aspects of Idaho's youth, rural culture, education system, athletics, economic prosperity and diversity."

Want specifics?

-- WHEREAS, Uncle Rico's football skills are a testament to Idaho athletics

-- WHEREAS, Napoleon's tetherball dexterity emphasizes the importance of physical education in Idaho public schools

-- WHEREAS, Kip's relationship with LaFawnduh is a tribute to e-commerce and Idaho's technology-driven industry

Uncle Rico, you will remember, thought he could throw a football over a mountain. He also had deadeye aim with a steak.

State representatives and senators who chose to vote against the resolution would be defined, according to the bill's language, as "FREAKIN' IDIOTS!" (allcaps and exclamation point sic). They would also "run the risk of having the 'Worst Day of Their Lives!'"

In a recent report by the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis, Idaho ranked 50th among the states in the availability of psychiatrists.

Tired of big-boy pants?

2006-10-16T12:56:00.000-04:00

Are you overwhelmed at the office?

Do you have too many responsibilities?

Have you ever considered putting on a diaper, crawling into a king-sized crib, and cooing like a baby while you poop your pants?

If so, you are by no means alone.

The Internet, which as everyone knows is a series of tubes, is also a burgeoning marketplace serving Adult Babies.

Those would be people for whom a post-work martini is not enough -- you're not really unwinding unless you are incontinent.

Want to be a kid forever? Buy your XXXXXL onesies here.

Next step, a sturdy crib.

Finally, since you will soon have regressed to your pre-potty-trained days, you will need to find a role model. (Click on "Welcome to the Nursery.")

Only then will you be able to escape from reality with the completeness that even the worst shows in television history cannot afford.

I Wanna be like Yao

2006-10-11T09:42:00.000-04:00

The United States and China may be settling into a geopolitical rivalry, but the hoi polloi in both countries want the same thing: to be as tall or taller than their neighbors.

They just go about it differently.

In America, drug manufacturers have won FDA approval to market growth agents to more people. After all, tall folks seem to do better in love, riches, and possibly smarts.

In China, it is a surgical procedure that has gained popularity. Short people have their legs broken, stretched, and then wait two years for them to heal back. At which point some people expect their social status to rise along with their waistline. If you want to try it, though, hurry up; China is cracking down.

Of course, you can always just buy heightening shoes off the Internet.

The Shining, now with extra shine

2006-10-10T09:50:00.000-04:00

Fans of The Shining rejoice: Warner Brothers may have let the film's 25-year anniversary pass unnoticed last year, but they're making up for it.

The movie's coming back to theaters.

Only thing is, the MPAA has decreed that changes must be made to the horror tale if the studio wants to avoid an NC-17 rating.

Check out the preview.

Santorum's best ad

2006-10-09T11:46:00.000-04:00

Facing a double-digit deficit in his bid to keep his Senate seat, Rick Santorum (top Google search here) has been pounding the Philadelphia area with a very effective ad.

You can hardly watch this 30-second spot without concluding that challenger Bob Casey is the most corrupt public figure since Boss Tweed.

A bunch of men shot in grainy black-and-white are fingered as Casey contributors who have Jack Abramoff-sized moral compasses.

This one gave $100,000. That one is Casey's right-hand man, the subtitles claim.

Problem is, it's almost all false. One of the guys has been dead for two years. Another did make a campaign contribution -- to Santorum. And for once, the local news is there to debunk a commercial that's brought tens of thousands of dollars into its station's coffers.

A quasi-apple a day

2006-10-06T16:14:00.000-04:00

I buy a lot of my produce from a man who is possibly the most honest greengrocer in the world.

"Which of these tomatoes are the best?" I have asked him.

"Wait until next week," he has replied. "The yellow ones from Jersey are coming in. Those are the best."

It's not often a salesman talks you out of buying something that's actually better than what his competitors are peddling. But this man values quality, and he talks straight.

Yet he works in the world, and he bends to the market.

Which, apparently, means stocking Grapples.

A Grapple is a Fuji apple that has been soaked in grape flavoring to taste like grape bubblegum. It is The Fake Society's postmodern fruit of the day.

Some time ago I was standing in line at this grocery when a woman pointed to one of these monstrous creations and asked me what it was.

"You don't want to know," I told her. Then I really did stop talking. I didn't have the heart to tell her, or anyone.

She turned to the grocer.

"What is this?" she asked him.

He replied with one word that has ensured my lifelong loyalty to him.

"Garbage," he said.

Quench that Spirit

2006-10-05T12:38:00.000-04:00

The exterior of Mother Teresa's Home for the Destitute and Dying in Calcutta features a sculpture of Christ on the cross topped by two words in gigantic letters:

"I Thirst."

Here is a picture from Patagonia, Argentina, courtesy of Slate's wonderful Today's Pictures feature.

Switcheroo!

2006-10-05T10:00:00.000-04:00

As Mark Foley's IMs to Congressional pages detailing masturbation methods and penis size gain an even wider audience, the folks over at The O'Reilly Factor find themselves in a bind. How to deflect scrutiny of the Florida Republican onto the usual Democratic bugaboos?

Well, come to think of it, a single letter will do.

Identify the ephebophile as a Democrat!

The MacArthur genius grants went out too early this year.

Air ball

2006-10-03T16:03:00.000-04:00

For once a sports superstar is whining about something and the only sane response is, "Amen."

The NBA is switching to a fake leather ball.

"Microfiber composite" is what the league is calling it, but anyone who has ever played with leather has cause to be as upset as Shaquille O'Neal is.

"Feels like one of those cheap balls that you buy at the toy store, indoor-outdoor balls," Shaq says.

What's going to go up besides Spalding's stock and the satisfaction of the PETA rank and file?

Rebounds, predicts Dwyane Wade.

"All around the league, I think there's going to be a lot of bricks thrown up there early on," he says.

Usually fans have to wait until the season opener to answer the question, Can the NBA get any worse? Now we don't even have to wait until the draft.

Vote what?

2006-10-03T13:59:00.000-04:00

Campaign ads on TV don't have a reputation for being grounded in truth, but a recent one produced by the National Republican Congressional Committee takes the cake.

Accusing Democratic congressional candidate Lois Murphy of opposing a bill to supply American troops with body armor in Iraq, the ad cites "Vote 669, 12/19/05."

"Hard to believe," the announcer intones.

Hard indeed: Murphy isn't even in Congress. She's the challenger!

NRCC spokesman Ed Patru stood up for the ad even after Comcast pulled it from the air, saying that even if Murphy wasn't allowed to vote on the bill, she had spoken out against it.

Which she had -- because the GOP had attatched a rider to seeking to permit oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

What's next? How about a bill honoring motherhood and the Liberty Bell, with a rider attached giving Rep. Matt Foley unlimited text messaging minutes and the contact information of every teenaged page in Congress?

Something tells me Murphy won't like that one, either.

Dateline does Dallas

2006-10-02T13:18:00.000-04:00

Boob Tube déjà vu isn’t much of a hazard for someone who tunes into TV once every week or two, but strange things are afoot at NBC’s Dateline, which has been fishing in virtual-world waters to land real-world perverts.

Two Fridays ago I watched host Chris Hansen pop out from behind the drywall of some suburban McMansion’s kitchen to confront a series of men who had been lured by the promise of meeting an unsupervised, horny 12-year-old girl. One after another these men streamed in past the hidden cameras: carpenters, doctors, Marines, construction managers… all of them denizens of Internet chat rooms where dirty talk is the only reason to log in.

The next Friday it was the exact same show, just different faces.

The invitations hadn’t come from actual tweens, of course, but from Hansen’s grown-up confederates, posing as jailbait behind keyboards. They were lying to “catch a predator,” as the show’s tagline had it, but then again, most of these men were lying, too. This being a chat room and all.

I don’t know how often these kinds of interactions end with a real 12-year-old providing a time and an address to a complete stranger whose language is straight out of Bill O’Reilly’s loofah fantasy, but judging from the fact that none of the men I saw had ever let their chat room escapades take them out of the house before, it can’t be that often.

Presumably, real 12-year-old girls with access to home computers also have parents to provide some degree of supervision, but parents weren’t part of Dateline’s game.

Studiously avoiding phrases like “entrapment” and “thought crime,” Hansen made sure to pop out from the woodwork before these men even got to lay eyes on the person behind the screen name who’d invited them there. The game-show rules were simple: the men could sit at the kitchen island for as long as they wanted, but as soon as they left, police would snap on the cuffs.

In the meantime, Hansen got to read them passages from the chats and rebuke them for claiming that sex with an actual 12-year-old wasn’t in their plans.

Apparently Dateline has been peddling this storyline so long that some of the men had seen this happen on the show before.

As a viewer, meanwhile, I was treated to text snippets in snazzy fonts and a picture of a blurred-out penis – and over and over again, that compound noun, “12-year-old girl,” “12-year-old girl,” “12-year-old girl,” which is apparently such a sure thing where Nielsen ratings are concerned that the producers only had to drop one or two pictures of Polly Klass into the visual mix to keep the audience coming back after commercial breaks that were themselves dripping with sex-fueled sales pitches.

The men are just like you, Hansen kept telling me. They’re doctors! They’re office workers!

And after a while that seemed to be the real point. These men were just like me, so as long as Hansen assured me I was superior to them, I could spend an hour of TV time contemplating sex with pre-pubescent girls just like they had. All the excitement of that dirty talk, the implicit notion that there are actually 12-year-olds all over the country who want to please older men, perhaps on a lonely Friday like tonight – all that was mine to enjoy, but as an innocent viewer who could still feel clean at the end.

This was the quintessential American TV experience: righteousness and borderline kiddie porn in the same package, masquerading as a televised new magazine.

In between the last two Fridays’ shows, Iraq suicide bombings hit a record and a bill went through Congress legalizing some forms of torture.

But don’t expect the TV news to devote two full hours to anything less titillating than the lure of horny 12-year-old virgins.

Did Rumsfeld crib from Gideon's battle plan?

2006-09-27T15:03:00.000-04:00

When I decided to try reading the Bible from beginning to end, I did not expect to hit on any passages that would make me exclaim, "Just like Rumsfeld!"

Reflections of Bush 43, maybe. But Rumsfeld doesn't seem like the pious type. Not even falsly pious -- which actually begins to look like quite an attractive trait among the company he keeps in the executive branch.

But today I reached the seventh chapter of Judges. Here we have a bit of military strategy that's so far outside the box that it could throw Sun Tzu for a loop.

So Gideon, a lowly member of his clan and not even his father's favorite, gets a visit from old Yahweh, who recommends invading Midian, the kingdom to which Yahweh handed over the Israelites seven years prior on account of bad behavior.

Something of a skeptic, Gideon makes Yahweh do some trickery involving dew drops on a fleece, which is easy work for God, who has been known to inflict raining frogs and swelling of the groin in past adventures.

So Gideon sets off with 32,000 men.

Yahweh, however, thinks this too many. He's still miffed at Israel for breaking the covenant (again), and he wants there to be no doubt that this conquest is the work of Yahweh and Gideon, not Israel's assembled firepower.

So he convinces Gideon that Iraq -- or somewhere thereabouts -- can be conquered with far fewer troops than any sane commentator would recommend.

Gideon therefore tells everyone disinclined to fight to go up on the mountain and watch from there. Ten thousand men burn their draft cards and depart.

Still too many, Yahweh says, and proposes a curious litmus test. Gideon takes his men to the waterside and tells them to drink. Evidently there are two methods for this: kneeling and scooping, and sticking your face right in there and lapping it up like a dog.

Three hundred men lap up the water like a dog.

Yahweh picks them. Sends everyone who drinks like a normal person home.

Onward goes Gideon, who stations his skeleton crew around the periphery of Midian and tells them all the blow their horns and crack open their pitchers. (One wonders what the pitchers were for. Not for drinking, evidently.)

The men do this simultaneously, at which point something incredible occurs.

The Midians get so frightened that they slaughter each other! The ones who escape friendly sword-skewering flee!

There's no record of anyone greeting Gideon's army with flowers and candy, but otherwise this reads like the Rumsfeld doctrine. An invasion force a fraction of the size the generals want; willingness to use soldiers whose aptitude test scores aren't quite at the top of the class...

Of course it helps to have God actually on your side.

On the other hand, according to the footnotes in my version, the power of Gideon's clan eventually wanes far below that of the clan he didn't invite along on his crusade. Make of that what you will.

The Taking of Hybrids, 1-2-3

2006-09-26T11:28:00.000-04:00

The engineers at Lexus may not be proud, but the automaker’s marketing department must be. The company’s new hybrid offering, the Lexus GS 450h, has been given a fuel efficiency rating by the EPA, and it beat the Hummer H3.

By 6 miles per gallon.

Remember the bright future of hybrid cars? Models like the Honda Civic Hybrid and the Toyota Prius were rated at 48 and 55 miles per gallon. The Honda Insight was maxxing out at 66.

That may well be remembered as the past.

If television ads are anything to go by, consumers will have more choices of hybrid cars than ever in the coming year – but they shouldn’t expect to get much more than 30 or 35 miles to the gallon.

The Lexus gets 26. That’s actually 1.5 mpg LESS than the fuel economy mandated by the federal CAFE standards.

Remember when organic food wasn’t allowed to include preservatives and all that other junk that goes into a TV Dinner? Well, “hybrid” is the new organic. The adjective is on the road to having its meaning hollowed out, and entering its second etymological life with the content-free purity of an ad man’s buzz word.

If only that were the worst of it.

Wondering how Lexus can get away with producing a hybrid that doesn’t even meet the fuel economy grade for regular cars? Simple: The MPG number on the sticker of the car window isn’t the same one the automakers get to use for the Environmental Protection Agency’s purposes.

Here’s how it works.

The test for determining a car’s fuel economy was developed in the 1970s. It assumed that no one used air conditioning, drove faster than 60mph, or got stuck in traffic. Oh, and no one ever went up a hill.

In the 1980s, the EPA decided to change things – but not by designing a more sensible test. They were just going to revise the test results downwards by about 20 percent.

That’s the number that gets printed on the sticker.

But ours is a litigious society, and the automakers – who had already managed to elude a test that actually had a connection with reality – won a lawsuit enabling them to continue using the old, fake numbers to calculate their CAFE averages.

Cut to the current day, and it’s bad news all around. Recent tests indicate that our cars and trucks are getting even worse mileage than the decades-old averages we’ve been measuring them against.

Unsurprisingly, SUVs continue to underperform: Jeep’s Liberty Diesel 4WD, rated at 22 mpg by the EPA, got only 11 mpg in the more sensible test.

But the grade inflation on some hybrids is just as bad.

The Honda Civic Hybrid sedan might be on record with the EPA as getting 48 mpg, but in reality it’s getting closer to 26.

In 2007 it'll be cars versus reality for American consumers. Any bets on which one'll win?

A Modest Proposal

2006-09-21T10:46:00.000-04:00

As enlightened citizens have known for some years, America is facing a great foe and the military is not enough to disarm it.

Recent proposals to expand wire-tapping programs, deep-six due process and make it impossible to carry wine aboard airplane cabins are well-intentioned, but insufficient.

Not even killing Osama bin Laden will protect us, and the president should be lauded for his forward thinking on this matter. As he explained to a reporter back in 2002, "I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you."

(Kudos. The Hungarian prime minister has nothing on Bush.)

Indeed, killing every terrorist on earth wouldn’t be enough to protect us, and not because thousands more would rise to take their place.

The problem is more profound and unsettling.

Americans are falling down.

We are falling down, and dying.

Sure, driving off the road kills more of us than just falling down, but the new Evil Menace of falling down has sent 48 times more Americans to their graves than terrorism in the last decade.

Our countrymen are being felled, and falling down is the culprit.

If ever there were a time for the willing surrender of our civil liberties, now is the time. We need a sweeping new law, as bold as it is wise.

All able-bodied men and women should be confined to wheelchairs.

Not children, of course – that would be barbaric. Children will be provided with crutches. But everyone over the age of 21 should be given a wheelchair, free of charge, by the government.

State Farm has been lobbying for this for decades. The insurance industry guns for hire on Capitol Hill already have the legislation written. All it needs is a vote and a signature.

Big business wants it, the populace needs it. But as usual, partisan politics has ruined the day.

And as usual, it’s the Democrats who are to blame.

The liberals want the wheelchair age set at 18. We must protect every adult old enough to vote, they say. No age discrimination.

That is nonsense. Eighteen- to 21-year-olds already have a job, and that is to fight wars while abstaining from alcohol. News flash: You can’t fights wars in wheelchairs, friends. But crutches can be outfitted with secret rifles that fire bullets from the end.

That’s what we call synergy.

Nevertheless, once this important bill becomes law, we must remain vigilant. There are other dangers to be faced – dangers many times greater than that posed by terrorists.

There’s accidental poisoning, with a kill rate 46 times greater than terrorism.

There’s accidental drowning, dying from work, and the fearsome “walking down the street,” which cut down 52,000 of us between 1995 and 2005.

And never forget this: If you think dying from terrorism is bad, tell that to the families of people who died from a hernia. There are five times more of them than terror victims in America alone.

When are we going to get a memorial for that?

Hungarians are so Retro!

2006-09-20T10:25:00.000-04:00

Unbelievable stuff happening in Hungary right now. Budapest is evidently experiencing its most intense demonstrations and riots since the olden days when the Soviets would come in with tanks. And what the citizens are upset about also strikes a slightly 1950s, black-and-white-television note as well, at least with anyone following from the United States.

The government lied to them.

About the economy.

And the Hungarians are hopping mad.

How quaint!

But that was then, before the Fake Society (Hungarian Edition) found its façade riven by cracks of honesty.

In May, PM Ferenc Gyurcsany lied about the economy to win an election. This was, like, Biblical lying. “We lied in the morning, we lied in the evening,” he said in closed-doors speech, a tape of which just got leaked. He didn’t say whether he had lied for forty days and forty nights.

Oh, wait a minute – if only forty days and nights had been all!

“No country in Europe has been so blatant,” Gyurcsany added. “We obviously lied through the past one and a half to two years. And meanwhile, we didn’t do a thing for four years — nothing.”

And just like that, the Hungarians took to the streets, demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that they would never be tough enough to cut it in America, where we have been lied to for six years, and that’s just the most recent streak.

But back to Budapest, where there is literally a battle between truth and falsehood being fought with tear gas and water cannon.

Gyurcsany’s sudden mea culpa has apparently given him a credibility boost (!) – at least within his own party. “He has received ringing public endorsements from top Socialists,” according to a Reuters story today.

If you can read Hungarian, you can get the spin straight from the horse’s mouth, at the prime minister’s blog. There’s a quote from Nelson Mandela on the front page.

Gyurcsany, a millionaire, is definitely in the big leagues. He might even succeed in using his leaked lies to enact the fiscal responsibility that was merely faked up till now. He’s using the tape as a political tool, demanding fiscal responsibility. The real kind, I guess.

Meanwhile, he's shifting attention to the demonstrators. In a piece of rhetoric that could green Donald Rumsfeld with envy, Gyurcsany warned, “Radicals are using peaceful demonstrations to cover crime.”

Gyurcsany’s right. It’s the demonstrators’ fault for buying all that ruling party horseshit to begin with. If only his people knew how to behave once the lies were exposed, Hungary would be halfway to superpowerdom.

The Real World, Twice Removed

2006-09-18T15:19:00.000-04:00

You've gotta give it to MTV, which pioneered reality television with "The Real World" back when Generation Y was still learning how to mash buttons on the remote control (which turns out to be the only area in which they dominate their Asian counterparts in international standardized tests).

Now the network is bringing us a virtual reality show in which Web viewers can drop "avatars" of themselves into a Web-based environment that apes the quasi-reality show "Laguna Beach: The Real O.C."

The producers' fondest hopes: that imaginary money from the game will somehow spill over into the real world.

The real real world, I think they mean.

Read the story.

Tax Collectors from Bizarro Land

2006-09-18T10:39:00.000-04:00

Think the worst person the IRS can send to your door is one of its own agents? Wait until the agency unleashes a fleet of private repo men to collect back taxes, as a recent Bush administration initiative calls for.

This isn’t about weeping for delinquents who don’t pay their share. The ones really getting fleeced here are citizens who actually pay their taxes. In the annals of privatization scams, this has a shot at catapulting America into Russia’s league. Here’s how it works (NYT pay site):

Over the next ten years, the government will sic private collections firms on smalltime tax delinquents who owe less than $25,000. The firms get to keep about a quarter of whatever they collect. How does that compare to the cost of letting actual IRS agents do the job? The private contractors cost 8 times more.

It’s not because they’re more valuable or more efficient.

In ten years, the private collectors are expected to put about $1.1 billion into government coffers. If the IRS hired more revenue agents, they’d reap something closer to $87 billion.

The IRS is firing agents instead.

Why? Because whoever lobbied for this new government plum could rely on an insane accounting methodology that treats the IRS as a cost center, not a revenue producer. Hiring new agents counts as discretionary spending, which is being cut (like taxes, which apparently have been trimmed far enough that we can’t afford to collect them). Private contractors, on the other hand, are treated as profit generators since they get paid on commission.

One wonders what handbook the Bush administration is working from.

Perhaps Article XI of Benjamin Franklin’s memorable satire, The Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One.

The New False Positive

2006-09-15T13:56:00.000-04:00

Are top-notch scientific journals distorting reality?

Regularly, according to some passionate grumps at the tops of their own fields. Open an issue of anything from Nature to the Journal of Neuroscience, and one study after another will report positive correlations between one thing and another. Anything involving a single gene is likely to turn up in the newspaper – this gene puts you at risk for breast cancer; that gene might make you fat.

How about a gene that accounts for the apparent inability of published scientists to discover that one thing is not, in fact, linked to another?

So really, what about all the investigations that turn up a negative result – that find that there is no relationship between a condition and a bit of DNA, or a drug and a desirable effect? That’s important information too, but don’t count on seeing it in print. In some fields, upwards of 90 percent of published findings are reports of positive connections.

Who cares?

Well, how about women of childbearing age. As today’s Wall Street Journal points out, the skew toward publishing positive results resulted in the widespread belief during the 1990s that oral contraceptives were linked to cervical cancer. (Hardline religious conservatives were delighted.) But it turns out that multiple studies showing no link between the two had had trouble gaining traction with science editors. Negative results just aren’t sexy enough.

One wonders how many unwanted children were born to women unduly frightened away from the pill. How many abortions?

And is it any surprise that the educated public has embraced the notion that everything encompassed by the human condition stems from a particular gene?

So let’s hear it for the wise old grumps (or new young turks, rather) out to restore a bit of reality. Let’s hear it for the Journal of Negative Observations in Genetic Oncology. Let’s hear it for the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine.

If science can’t be kept real, what chance is there for Keira Knightley’s breasts?

Dart Board

2006-09-14T15:48:00.000-04:00

Politicians. Entertainers. Dinner Party Hosts. Restaurants. Magazines. Furniture. "Made in the USA" labels. Hybrid SUVs. California Ballot Referenda. The name of almost every bill in the House of Representatives. Tits. Expect to hear more about all these things soon.