Hermès Finger Skating - seriously cool way to show a product line up!!

Mad Men character's fictional memoir set for real-life publication

Hard-drinking, philandering but charismatic advertising chief Roger Sterling from the hit American TV drama Mad Men is to have his fictional autobiography – which features in series four of the fictional series – converted into reality next month.

US publishing house Grove/Atlantic has spotted an opportunity and will bring out Sterling's Gold: Wit and Wisdom of an Ad Man by Roger Sterling Jr in time for the Christmas stockings of the many fans of the series.

Mad Men, which is set in the New York advertising world of the 1960s, has won widespread acclaim including 13 Emmys, and made a celebrity out of its curvaceous star Christina Hendricks. Actor John Slattery plays the character of Sterling, the womanising founding partner at the firm of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, who has used his charm on many conquests, including secretary Joan Harris whom Hendricks plays.

Sterling has "acquired quite a reputation among his colleagues for his quips, barbs, and witticisms", says Grove/Atlantic, promising the character's "pithy comments and observations amount to a unique window on the advertising world as well as a commentary on life in New York City in the middle of the 20th century."

Grove publisher Morgan Entrekin is a friend of Keith Addis, who manages Mad Men creator Matt Weiner. Even before series four was broadcast, Addis told Entrekin that the then-fictional book would be featuring prominently in the upcoming drama. Entrekin pounced, getting Weiner himself to write the preface for the book, in the voice of his character.

Typical one-liners you'll find in Sterling's Gold include: "Remember, when God closes a door, he opens a dress" and, "Being with a client is like being in a marriage. Sometimes you get into it for the wrong reasons and eventually they hit you in the face."

(credit: the Guardian)

“The Simpsons” Explains Its Button-Pushing Banksy Opening

Following-up on yesterday’s extremely viral and controversial Banksy opening sequence for The Simpsons, The New York Times speaks with The Simpsons’ executive producer, Al Jean. Some interesting issues are brought including how The Simpsons tracked down Banksy, the authenticity of the animation and the potential repercussions involving The Simpsons’ network, Fox. A list of questions and answers can be seen below.

How did you find Banksy to do this, and now that it’s done, how much trouble are you in?

Well, I haven’t been fired yet, so that’s a good sign. I saw the film Banksy directed, “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” and I thought, oh, we should see if he would do a main title for the show, a couch gag. So I asked Bonnie Pietila, our casting director, if she could locate him, because she had previously located people like Thomas Pynchon. And she did it through the producers of that film. We didn’t have any agenda. We said, “We’d like to see if you would do a couch gag.” So he sent back boards for pretty much what you saw.

Were you concerned that what he sent you could get the show into hot water?

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it for a little bit. Certainly, Fox has been very gracious about us biting the hand that feeds us, but I showed it to Matt Groening, and he said, no, we should go for it and try to do it pretty much as close as we can to his original intention. So we did. Like we always do, every show is submitted to broadcast standards, and they had a couple of [changes] which I agreed with, for taste. But 95 percent of it is just the way he wanted.

Can you say what got cut out?

I’ll just say, it was even a little sadder. But I would have to say almost all of it stayed in. We were thrilled. It was funny, I watched “Mad Men” last night and I wondered if this was my Don Draper letter to The New York Times. I knew just how he felt. But it was great to have a secret.

One of the things Banksy is known for is disguising his identity. How can you be sure that you were dealing with the real him?

The original boards that we got from him were in his style and were certainly by an extremely proficient artist. We were dealing with the person that represented him making the movie. I haven’t met him, I don’t even know what he looks like, except what the Internet suggests. And he’s taken credit for it now so I’m pretty sure it’s him. We went through the people that made the movie so I assume they would know how to get to the real him.

Even compared to how “The Simpsons” has mocked Fox in the past, this seemed to push things to a different level. Are you sure there’s no one higher up than you on the corporate ladder who’s displeased with this?

I think that we should always be able to say the holes in our DVDs are poked by unhappy unicorns.

Has Banksy’s criticism made you reconsider any of the ways you do things at “The Simpsons” in terms of producing the show or its merchandise?

I have to say, it’s very fanciful, far-fetched. None of the things he depicts are true. That statement should be self-evident, but I will emphatically state it.

A lot of the show’s animation is produced in South Korea, but not under those conditions.

No, absolutely not.

And even that closing shot of the 20th Century Fox logo surrounded in barbed wire?

Approved by them. Obviously, the animation to do this was pricey. I couldn’t have just snuck it by Fox. I’ll just say it’s a place where edgy comedy can really thrive, as long as it’s funny, which I think this was. None of it’s personal. This is what made “The Simpsons” what it is.

(credit: New York Times)

Land of Giants

American firm choi + shine architects recently received the 2010 Boston Society of Architects Award for unbuilt architecture for their project 'the land of giants', which they originally designed for the icelandic high voltage electrical pylon competition back in 2008. Making only minor alterations to well established steel-framed pylon design, the architects created a series of towers that are powerful, solemn and variable. these iconic pylon-figures will become monuments in the landscape.

The pylon-figures can be configured to respond to their environment with appropriate gestures. as the carried electrical lines ascend a hill, the pylon-figures change posture, imitating a climbing person. Over long spans, the pylon-figure stretches to gain increased height, crouches for increased strength or strains under the weight of the wires.

The pylon-figures can also be arranged to create a sense of place through deliberate expression. subtle alterations in the hands and head combined with repositioning of the main body parts the x, y and z-axis, allow for a rich variety of expressions. The pylon-figures can be placed in pairs, walking in the same direction or opposite directions, glancing at each other as they pass by or kneeling respectively, head bowed at a town.

Despite the large number of possible forms, each pylon-figure is made from the same major assembled parts (torso, fore arm, upper leg, hand etc.) and uses a library of pre-assembled joints between these parts to create the pylon-figures’ appearance. this design allows for many variations in form and height while the pylon-figures’ cost is kept low through identical production, simple assembly and construction.

(credit: Designboom)

all images courtesy choi + shine architects /

The Beauty Advantage:

Illustration by Paul Sahre

Most of us have heard the story of Debrahlee Lorenzana, the 33-year-old Queens, N.Y., woman who sued Citibank last month, claiming that, in pencil skirts, turtlenecks, and peep-toe stilettos, she was fired from her desk job for being “too hot.” We’ve also watched Lorenzana’s credibility come into question, as vintage clips of her appearance on a reality-TV show about plastic surgery portray a rambling, attention-obsessed twit, stuffed to the brim with implants and collagen. (“I love plastic surgery,” she coos. “I think it’s the best thing that ever happened.”) Creepy, yes. But for all the talk about this woman’s motives—and whether or not she was indeed fired for her looks—there’s one question nobody seems to want to ask: isn’t it possible Lorenzana’s looks got her the job in the first place?

Not all employers are that shallow—but it’s no secret we are a culture consumed by image. Economists have long recognized what’s been dubbed the “beauty premium”—the idea that pretty people, whatever their aspirations, tend to do better in, well, almost everything. Handsome men earn, on average, 5 percent more than their less-attractive counterparts (good-looking women earn 4 percent more); pretty people get more attention from teachers, bosses, and mentors; even babies stare longer at good-looking faces (and we stare longer at good-looking babies). A couple of decades ago, when the economy was thriving—and it was a makeup-less Kate Moss, not a plastic-surgery-plumped Paris Hilton, who was considered the beauty ideal—we might have brushed off those statistics as superficial. But in 2010, when Heidi Montag’s bloated lips plaster every magazine in town, when little girls lust after an airbrushed, unattainable body ideal, there’s a growing bundle of research to show that our bias against the unattractive—our “beauty bias,” as a new book calls it—is more pervasive than ever. And when it comes to the workplace, it’s looks, not merit, that all too often rule.

Consider the following: over his career, a good-looking man will make some $250,000 more than his least-attractive counterpart, according to economist Daniel Hamermesh; 13 percent of women, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (and 10 percent of men, according to a new NEWSWEEK survey), say they’d consider cosmetic surgery if it made them more competitive at work. Both points are disturbing, certainly. But in the current economy, when employers have more hiring options than ever, looks, it seems, aren’t just important; they’re critical. NEWSWEEK surveyed 202 corporate hiring managers, from human-resources staff to senior-level vice presidents, as well as 964 members of the public, only to confirm what no qualified (or unqualified) employee wants to admit: from hiring to office politics to promotions, even, looking good is no longer something we can dismiss as frivolous or vain.

Fifty-seven percent of hiring managers told NEWSWEEK that qualified but unattractive candidates are likely to have a harder time landing a job, while more than half advised spending as much time and money on “making sure they look attractive” as on perfecting a résumé. When it comes to women, apparently, flaunting our assets works: 61 percent of managers (the majority of them men) said it would be an advantage for a woman to wear clothing showing off her figure at work. (Ouch.) Asked to rank employee attributes in order of importance, meanwhile, managers placed looks above education: of nine character traits, it came in third, below experience (No. 1) and confidence (No. 2) but above “where a candidate went to school” (No. 4). Does that mean you should drop out of Harvard and invest in a nose job? Probably not. But a state school might be just as marketable. “This is the new reality of the job market,” says one New York recruiter, who asked to have her name withheld because she advises job candidates for a living. “It’s better to be average and good- looking than brilliant and unattractive.”

Remember the story about the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debate? It goes to show our beauty bias is nothing novel. At the time, radio listeners thought Nixon had won, but those watching Kennedy’s tanned, chiseled face on TV, next to a worn-down, 5 o’clock-shadowed Nixon, were sure it was the junior senator. There are various explanations for some of this. Plato wrote of the “golden proportions,” which dubbed the width of an ideal face an exact two thirds its length, a nose no longer than the distance between the eyes. Biologically speaking, humans are attracted to symmetrical faces and curvy women for a reason: it’s those shapes that are believed to produce the healthiest offspring. As the thinking goes, symmetrical faces are then deemed beautiful; beauty is linked to confidence; and it’s a combination of looks and confidence that we often equate with smarts. Perhaps there’s some evidence to that: if handsome kids get more attention from teachers, then, sure, maybe they do better in school and, ultimately, at work. But the more likely scenario is what scientists dub the “halo effect”—that, like a pack of untrained puppies, we are mesmerized by beauty, blindly ascribing intelligent traits to go along with it.

There are various forces to blame for much of this, from an economy that allows pickiness to a plastic-surgery industry that encourages superficial notions of beauty. In reality, it’s a confluence of cultural forces that has left us clutching, desperately, to an ever-evolving beauty ideal. Today’s young workers were reared on the kind of reality TV and pop culture that screams, again and again, that everything is a candidate for upgrade. We’ve watched bodies transformed on Extreme Makeover, faces taken apart and pieced back together on I Want a Famous Face. We compare ourselves with the airbrushed images in advertisements and magazines, and read surveys—like this one—that confirm our worst fears. We are a culture more sexualized than ever (Mad Men notwithstanding), with technology that’s made it easier than ever to “better” ourselves, warping our standards for what’s normal. Plastic surgery used to be for the rich and famous; today we’ve leveled the playing field with cheap boob jobs, tummy tucks, and outpatient procedures you can get on your lunch break. Where that leads us is running to stand still: taught that good looks are no longer a gift but a ceaseless pursuit.

Deborah Rhode, a Stanford law professor and author of The Beauty Bias, is herself an interesting case study. During her term as chair of the American Bar Association’s commission on working women, she was struck by how often the nation’s most powerful females were stranded in cab lines and late for meetings because, in heels, walking any distance was out of the question. These were working, powerful, leading women, she writes. Why did they insist on wearing heels? Sure, some women just like heels (and still others probably know their bosses like them). But there is also the reality that however hard men have it—and, from an economic perspective, their “beauty premium” is higher, say economists—women will always face a double bind, expected to conform to the beauty standards of the day, yet simultaneously condemned for doing so. Recruiters may think women like Lorenzana can get ahead for showing off their looks, but 47 percent also believe it’s possible for a woman to be penalized for being “too good-looking.” Whether or not any of it pays off, there’s something terribly wrong when 6-year-olds are using makeup, while their mothers spend the equivalent of a college education just keeping their faces intact. “All of this is happening against a backdrop of more women in the workplace, in all kinds of jobs, striving toward wage equality,” says Harvard psychologist Nancy Etcoff. “So we’re surprised—but we shouldn’t be—how this [beauty curse] continues to haunt us.”

Forty years ago, when feminists threw their bras into the “Freedom Trash Can” outside the 1968 Miss America pageant (no, they didn’t really burn them!), it was to protest the idea that women had become “enslaved by ludicrous beauty standards,” as the organizers put it. At the time, women still made up just a fraction of the workforce, and yet they were rejecting the notion that, in work or play, they had to be confined to the role of busty secretary—a mere office toy. A decade later, as women entered the workforce in droves, it was boxy suits, not bustiers, that defined their dress. But today’s working women have achieved “equality” (or so we’re led to believe): they dominate the workforce, they are household breadwinners, and so they balk at having to subvert their sexuality, whether in the boardroom or on the beach. Yet while the outside-work milieu might accept the empowered yet feminine ideal, the workplace surely doesn’t. Studies show that unattractive women remain at a disadvantage in low-level positions like secretary, while in upper-level fields that are historically male-dominated, good-looking women can suffer a so-called bimbo effect. They are viewed as too feminine, less intelligent, and, ultimately, less competent—not only by men but also by their female peers.

To add an extra layer of complexity, there’s the conundrum of aging in a culture where younger workers are more tech-savvy, cheaper, and, well, nicer on the eyes. Eighty-four percent of managers told NEWSWEEK they believe a qualified but visibly older candidate would make some employers hesitate, and while ageism affects men, too, it’s particularly tough for women. As Rhode puts it, silver hair and furrowed brows may make aging men look “distinguished,” but aging women risk marginalization or ridicule for their efforts to pass as young. “This double standard,” Rhode writes, “leaves women not only perpetually worried about their appearance—but also worried about worrying.”

The quest for beauty may be a centuries-old obsession, but in the present day the reality is ugly. Beauty has more influence than ever—not just over who we work with, but whether we work at all.

(credit: Jessica Bennett for Newsweek)

Le Froglet - a plastic-goblet-of-wine concept

When every member of the BBC's Dragons' Den panel says an invention is rubbish, most people scurry off back to their day jobs, vowing never to come up with a silly idea again.

But James Nash refused to give up on his dream and he is having the last laugh as Marks & Spencer struggle to keep up with demand for his 'cup-a-wine' concept.

Mr Nash's invention – a single-serve plastic glass of French wine with a tear-off lid – solves the problem of feeling like a glass of wine but not having a glass or a corkscrew.

Mr Nash first took the idea to BBC's Dragons Den last year only for it to be rejected out of hand. He asked the Dragons - Peter Jones, Theo Paphitis, Duncan Bannatyne, James Caan and Deborah Meaden - for £250,000 for a 25per cent stake in his business, Wine Innovations Ltd.

However, they gave him a torrid grilling and bowed out because they were unconvinced anyone would be interested. Duncan Bannatyne was particularly dismissive, saying: 'People don't want to buy wine in plastic glasses like that with a seal on top. For that reason, I'm out.'

The 187ml glasses equate to about a quarter of a bottle of wine, which adds up to 2.25 units and below the drink drive limit for most people of 3 units. They are bigger serving than the traditional small - 125ml - and medium -175ml - offered by most pubs and bars. However, they do not match the 250ml large glasses now offered by many wine bars.

The new M&S Le Froglet wine individual glasses, which each cost £2.25 for a Shiraz, Rose and Chardonnay, were launched just last week and the store has found they quickly sell out. The website cluelessaboutwine.co.uk said shoppers seem excited about the concept. 'Judging by the buzz in the shop I suspect that these may well be a hit,' it said. 'They look so off the wall that curiosity will force a purchase and then good old bourgeois convenience will take over.'

'This is a new idea, and what it does have the ability to do is to give the consumer a realistic portion, a more manageable drinking quantity which saves you spoiling a whole bottle for a glass. 'It also provides you with a nice collection of plastic picnic glasses. 'It does change the perception of wine, and could make a 'ready meal for one' a richer experience.'

However, the website did point out that the extra convenience does come at a price. If the same wine was bought in a full 75cl bottle the price comes to £5.49 versus £9 for the equivalent amount in four of the new packs. Mr Nash, who is based in Surrey, said: 'It was disheartening to be dismissed by all the Dragons, but I knew I had a great concept which would work in outdoor events, BBQ, picnics, concerts and wouldn't give up.

'I'm really looking forward to facing the Dragons again as 'the one that got away'. Hopefully sales of the product will show that they're not always right.'

An M&S spokesman said: 'The glasses are merchandised in our 'Food on the Move' section, which is obviously the aisle people on the go head to - particularly office workers. 'We think that they are proving popular with people who want to perhaps enjoy the summer with a glass of wine in the park as part of an impromptu picnic - either after work or for a relaxing lunch. 'They are also popular with commuters who want to enjoy a drink on the train home from work to wind down. We have found that they are very popular in locations popular with tourists.'

The M&S winemaker, Belinda Kleinig, said: 'This is a really exciting step for M&S – our research has shown that our customers really like the greater convenience of lighter weight bottles so we thought we’d take it one step further with great quality wine ready to drink from a glass.'

(credit: Dailymail.com)

KLM Comfort with a tough of Magic

Slick and attractive ambient work that really got people's attention by adding a little bit of magic to something otherwise totally lacklustre - an economy 'comfort' seat on KLM.

Agency: Rapp Amstelveen, Holland

Tampon-makers can't mention the V-word. Period.

For years, advertising for tampons and "sanitary products" have been shrouded in nebulous euphemism. So what happens when a US tampon-maker drops the coy messaging and goes straight for the jugular (so to speak)? Its ad gets banned by the major US television networks for mentioning the word vagina.

Even when the company substituted "down there" for vagina, two of the networks still wouldn't run the ad, so the company was forced to drop the idea altogether. That provoked Amanda Hess, author of The Sexist blog, to observe: "Now, the commercial contains no direct references to female genitalia – you know, the place where the fucking tampon goes."

An executive for Kimberly-Clark, the owner of Kotex, notes that US TV networks have no such compunction about references to "erectile dysfunction" in prime-time ads for Viagra and Ciallis.

The New York Times reports that the campaign – produced by the advertising agency JWT, part of WPP – for tampon brand Kotex was "a bit too frank" for US television:

Merrie Harris, global business director at JWT, said that after being informed that it could not use the word vagina in advertising by three broadcast networks, it shot the ad cited above with the actress instead saying "down there", which was rejected by two of the three networks. (Both Ms Harris and representatives from the brand declined to specify the networks.)

"It's very funny because the whole spot is about censorship," Ms Harris said. "The whole category has been very euphemistic, or paternalistic even, and we're saying, enough with the euphemisms, and get over it. Tampon is not a dirty word, and neither is vagina."

The amended ad shown above, "How do I feel about my period?", has a series of images parodying the stock images used in sanitary product advertising, and concludes: "The ads on TV are really helpful because they use that blue liquid, and I'm like, oh, that's what's supposed to happen." The ad debuted on US television this week.

Things are different in anything-goes Britain, where the makers of the Mooncup product have a website entitled loveyourvagina.com.

(credit: Richard Adams, The Guardian)

OK Go's 'This too shall pass' video. Rube Goldberg insanity at its best!

Directed by James Frost, OK Go and Syyn Labs. Produced by Shirley Moyers. The official video for the recorded version of "This Too Shall Pass" off of the album "Of the Blue Colour of the Sky". The video was filmed in a two story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The Rube Goldberg machine was designed and built by the band, along with members of Syyn Labs over the course of several months.

"It's like Beirut"

The expression "it's like Beirut" is a much-used comparison for everything from violent riots to a teenager's bedroom. Why do we still insist on associating Beirut with chaos?

When North East Lincolnshire Council announced this week it would be demolishing a notorious crime-ridden street in Grimsby, one resident said it would no longer be "worse than Beirut".

It's not the first time the comparison has been used and probably not the last. From Joe Public to world leaders, the phrase "like Beirut" is shorthand for chaos and decay.

Since 1991, the year after the Lebanese civil war ended, there have been more than 50 recorded usages of the phrase, according to Robert Groves, editor of Collins Dictionaries. It began with a reference to a Chicago slum on American National Public Radio.

Lebanese blogger Jad Aoun records usage of the phrase and mails the culprit a "looks like Beirut" certificate.

Last year he sent out about 30 certificates, mostly to the UK and US. But he says the phrase is also used in other countries, from Australia to India.

There is little doubt the association between Beirut and chaos springs from Lebanon's civil war. But it has been over for nearly 20 years and since then the world has seen countless other wars. So why don't people say "like Baghdad" or "like Sarajevo"?

The answer is partly down to timing. In the UK, the civil war was the first international conflict taking place in the age of 24-hour news. People were updated almost daily.

Ignorance

Since television news is a highly visual medium, the images coming out of Beirut had a lasting impact, says David Seddon, associate editor of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. Add to that the length of the war - it lasted from 1975 to 1990 - and the cultural impact becomes clear.

"The news was saturated with stories about Beirut for a long time," says Dr Youssef Choueiri, reader of Islamic studies at Manchester University.

Those stories also became personal due to westerners being taken hostage during the crisis, notably John McCarthy and Terry Waite.

"This idea of having British hostages in Beirut and no one could rescue them... turned Beirut into a lawless city," says Dr Choueiri. "It became the symbol for urban chaos."

That sense of chaos was exacerbated by ignorance of the overarching situation in Lebanon, argue some. It seemed like everyone was fighting everyone else.

"For people who didn't know about the Middle East, it was fairly baffling," says Mr Seddon.

More recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen "episodic bombings" - not civil war, says Dr Choueiri.

In addition, the association many westerners had with Beirut as a glamorous holiday destination made its transformation into a warzone all the more striking, Mr Seddon says.

Pre-civil war, Beirut was a sophisticated waterfront locale, similar to current-day Dubai or Monaco. So the descent of glittering, cosmopolitan Beirut into "appalling mayhem" significantly impacted the people who previously may have visited the city.

So although Baghdad and Kabul have suffered similar physical devastation, they had never really been considered glamorous urban vistas in the first place.

'Irritating'

"The level of physical destruction was pretty high," says Mr Seddon. "It did look to people in Britain rather like London after the world war."

But that physical destruction is no longer an issue in Beirut. Since the end of the war, the city has undergone a revitalisation of sorts and is a holiday destination once again. The New York Times named it one of its "44 Places to Visit" in 2009. Nearly two million people followed the advice.

The attempt to return Beirut to its pre-civil war image has been hampered by violent outbreaks in the capital in 2006 and 2008, says Dr Choueiri. But in his experience, the Beirut of today is cleaner and better controlled than people might expect.

"The image itself is shifting," he says. "This Lebanon is different. It's entering a new phase."

Such an outdated expression need to be laid to rest, says Mr Aoun. He uses his certificates to raise awareness of the accuracy of people's perceptions. He also believes there might be a simpler explanation for why we insist on using the phrase - laziness.

"It is basically a cliche and doesn't provide an accurate description of what they're trying to say," he says. "I can understand its use in the 1980s and 1990s, but in this time we can move beyond it."

Of the 30 letters he sent out in the past year, he has received four responses which he calls "generally positive." One British journalist responded: "I realised [it] was offensive towards Beirut, and could indeed be seen to perpetuate a negative image of the city."

Indeed, all Beirut's champions ask is that people stop and think before resorting to the outdated metaphor.

"We know that there are cities that are worse than Beirut," says Dr Choueiri. "[The saying] doesn't do justice to the long peace Lebanon has enjoyed since after 1990."

Plus, he says, it's just downright irritating.

(credit: Elizabeth Diffin, BBC)

Staple art

French artist Baptiste Debombourg used staples on a blank white wall to create this piece. Check out more of his work here.

Dust art

British artist Paul Hazelton creates delicate pieces of art from household dust.

Check out more of his work at the Saatchi Gallery.

Here's how the artist describes the inspiration behind his work:

"The dust of everyday life – the unavoidable and necessary by-product of living, engrosses me. Art, also an unavoidable and necessary by-product of living, engrosses me. Art, like dust, is a residue of life and therefore, the making of art is like an extreme act of self-exfoliation. For me, making art is a per-version of life that has many possible diversions. Sometimes these diversions take you somewhere unexpected, sometimes somewhere gross but you have to keep going."

(credit: Saatchi Gallery)