The Austin Chronicle published an article last week about the extent to which PR firms will go to garner positive press for the Department of Energy. The most recent campaign focuses on Yucca Mountain.
The article describes the experience of two engineering professors, one from Texas, one from South Carolina, who received letters from a Washington, D.C., PR firm that works for the Nuclear Energy Institute. The two simply signed their names to the documents and forwarded them to their local papers (The Austin American-Statesman and The State of Columbia, S.C.), where both similar-to-identical pieces were published as op-eds. The article rightly points out that, whether or not the professors agree with the points made, were a student to tag his or her name onto a paper written by someone else, they would be punished for their actions. And it goes beyond the two professors. "Further investigation has uncovered what might be called Big Nuke's vast op-ed conspiracy: A decades-long, centrally orchestrated plan to defraud the nation's newspaper readers by misrepresenting the propaganda of one hired atomic gun as the learned musings of disparate academics and other nuclear-industry "experts," the article says.
To read it, go to www.austinchronicle.com.
Phrase of the day: Trump time. Overheard at a Northwest Las Vegas gathering. Usage: a short period of time in which a team must work together, effectively and efficiently, to get something done.
Verb: "After yet another insurgent uprising in Fallujah, President Bush decided it was time to put his foot down. ‘Folks, their walk down the gang plank has ended,' the President announced. ‘Trump-time the defense. Blow the evildoers away.'"
Adverb: "In Trump-timely fashion, many porn industry participants went on hiatus after hearing their colleagues tested HIV-positive."
Slang: "'Dude, I'm gettin my new Hummer, trump' [ASAP]. Or, "Don't be trumpin' me [rushing]. Maybe we should leave this to the urban kids."
Overheard at a local grocery store:
Woman: "Have you ever had soy nuts?"
Man: "I've had sore nuts, but I've never had …"
Woman: "Oh, that's lovely."
Screams filled the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in pep-rally fashion. "Who are we representing?" came the question. "The Stratosphere!" came the response. It was belted out by a group of yellow-T-shirted men and women carrying pom-poms and water bottles as they made their way up to the Las Vegas International Hospitality competition, where they were to compete against 21 other properties in events like speed bed-making.
The emcee, wearing a purple shirt from the New York-New York, got the cleaning crowd all riled up. "What's the most important job in the hotel?" he screamed. "Housekeeping!" The crowd, numbering in the hundreds, replied. "We don't fill these rooms until they're clean!" the preacher shouted to the choir. And the games began. They made beds, tossed things at plungers, threw mops into toilets and vacuumed confetti, beaming the whole time. If cleaning is that easy and fun—well, let's just hope their bosses aren't paying too much attention. Their expectations and quotas could be a bit steeper next time the hospitality crews show up for work.
Soy vodka? Eeeuuuww. When this came into the office, the cry went up: Let's give it to A&E editor Martin Stein! He'll drink anything! And so he did:
I have fond memories of a well-meaning vegetarian friend trying to slip me a tofu hot dog in college, convinced I'd never be able to tell the difference between that and the good, old-fashioned American skin tube of abattoir sweepings. And I can still taste the Double Down's bacon martini my editor coerced me into drinking as some sort of sick initiation/welcome-to-Vegas assignment. So it was with a mixed feeling of dismissal and fear that I approached the tiny vial of 3 Vodka, a new product "distilled from soy isotopes." The bottle actually reads "isolates," but to my mind it could very well have been isotopes. Because it was still made from soy, and my Russian ancestral memory was not at all happy.
Iced, served with a drop of lemon and a spirtz of vermouth, it was surprisingly smooth. Vodka. From soy. This could change everything I think I know about vodka. I had visions of the next James Bond movie, with Pierce Brosnan chasing down crazed masterminds and bikini-clad bombshells, all the while with Birkenstocks on his feet and a Vote For Kucinich button on his lapel. Well, maybe it wasn't that good, but at least it finally wiped the taste of bacon-infused liquor from my palate.