68 posts from January 2008

I can’t believe it. After two incidents spread over five or so years of Yahoo! being unable to answer my questions, Vincent at their customer support desk has finally done so!
   Now, one out of three support personnel actually reading your question is not very good (and the odds are worse when you consider that in 2002 no one could answer my question, and I must have been through three support staff then), but hope is not lost.
   For completeness, here was what he wrote:

I am sorry we were unable to direct you to the appropriate department. For information about forming a content partnership with Yahoo! in the United States, please complete the form at:

   http://add.yahoo.com/fast/yahoo/content/cgi_form

For information regarding other relationships with Yahoo! (e.g., advertising or adding your web site), please visit the Yahoo! Information Center at:

   http://docs.yahoo.com/info/

Whenever you have further comments or questions, please feel free to contact me.

   Thank you, Vincent!

 
My friend and distant relative May Yan contributed to this new book on Chinese cuisine, called Eating Stories: a Chinese Canadian and Aboriginal Potluck. It’s important for those of us in the diaspora not to lose some of our good eating habits and knowledge about traditional cuisine, and to be able to pass them on to the next generation. The way May described this book, it’s the sort of thing that I would regard as vital for my own well-being!

We occasionally Google the term Lucire to check for trade mark infringements, and another Lucire always comes up: Australian forensic psychiatrist Dr Yolande Lucire.
   Yola and I exchanged emails many years ago because she was intrigued by the magazine’s name. I found her personable and genuine—and very smart.
   She is very famous in her field in Australia, and often testifies in court as an expert witness. Her thinking can, from what I understand, fall outside the square, because she is perceptive enough to see beyond establishment lies and the commercialization of her profession by Big Pharma.
   Now there is a case where she testified, and the judge agreed with her, but her own professional committee, the NSW Medical Board Professional Standards Committee, is smearing her and ordering her to get psychiatric help.
   In other words, she’s being reprimanded because she tells the truth, and that truth isn’t something corporate interests and the establishment want to hear.
   Philip Barton writes on his blog, ‘Dr. Lucire testified in court about the direct relationship between SSRI antidepressants and violent crime and suicide amongst young people.’
   The establishment didn’t like that.
   Now, Yola wouldn’t have testified this if she didn’t find this in her own research and unlike so many others, she simply refused to cover it up.
   Maybe the Committee would like to teach her how to fake the results of her own scientific tests.
   ‘Whilst the judge found in favour of Dr. Lucire’s testimony her own organization reprimanded her and ordered her to get psychiatric help.’
   In short: say something Big Pharma disagrees with, and it will say you need help.
   Maybe Ritalin and other drugs help some people, but even as a layman I can’t discount the possibility that Yola’s own research is right.
   Galileo had the same run-in with the Church over that whole “the earth is round” gag, and, in time, Big Pharma might be seen to be backward and pathetic.
   I may know zilch about psychiatry, but I know a malicious smear campaign when I see it. Stay the course, Yola.

Now that Sen. Barack Obama has taken South Carolina, I am hearing from some media reports (the MSM seems to be very pro-Hillary Clinton) that he only won because the state has so many black Americans.
   Bollocks.
   Did Washington state once have an Chinese–American governor because it had so many Asians there?
   Obama won because people are suffering from CFS: Clinton Fatigue Syndrome. He is right: people associate the Clintons with a partisan past and younger and more cosmopolitan voters are sick of it.
   As we go into Super Tuesday, there are media claims that Sen. Obama will not take them because these are places where Sen. Clinton polls well.
   My belief is that he will take them because people will vote for someone who looks victorious, and bugger the issues. I am sorry for all the bloggers who think otherwise, but remember, if you are blogging fluently, you are probably already part of the smarter group of citizens that analyses the issues. Most people, sadly, do not even think about the issues and can be swayed by rhetoric and appearances.
   Sen. Obama is facing an MSM that wants a Hillary win so badly that it will look for justifications for why he won nearly double the number of votes that Sen. Clinton did. We are already seeing headlines about voting machine rigging.
   How out of touch the MSM has proven to be so far on this presidential race—and how they look like they are still wrong.
   While I am not so naïve as to think that Sen. Obama’s skin colour won’t be an issue for 100 per cent of the population, it’s far less of an issue than the white, middle-aged, male management of the MSM believes.

Once upon a time, Lucire supplied content to the AltaVista Entertainment Zone, back in the day when AltaVista was the top search engine. Then, for years, Yahoo! News Full Coverage would use Lucire headlines, until its site was rejigged. These days, Google News does a reasonable job of spidering our news coverage, but I noticed at the end of 2007 that Yahoo! News Full Coverage still had a fashion page. I asked if we could recommence our old relationship, on January 2.
   I have had experience dealing with Yahoo! before. Earlier this decade, one of our Yahoo! Groups went missing, even though we never broke any of the terms and conditions. The group shell was still there, just all its messages were deleted. We kept sending questions and all Yahoo!’s personnel could do was copy and paste from FAQs we had already read, none of which were appropriate. It’s why we contacted the support team in the first place—duh!
   It’s sad to know that nothing has changed this decade. And that’s sad. I remember when founders Jerry and David were answering questions personally and when they first listed our sites.
   Here is the dialogue with the salutations, technical details and conclusions omitted. Note that they never answer the question and tell me things that anyone with an IQ around the level of a marijuana-smoking Rastafarian politician might know.

To Yahoo!, January 2, 2008
Years ago, Yahoo! News Full Coverage quite happily linked to us:

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/Entertainment/Fashion_and_Modeling/feature_articles/9

Then one day around 2002 or 2003, it stopped, after a site rejig.
   I want to say that we at Lucire (www.lucire.com) are still churning out articles and op-eds nearly daily, and Yahoo! News would be more than welcome to tap into one of the internet’s longest running fashion news sources.
   How would we best recommence our earlier partnership? …

From Heather at Yahoo!, January 3, 2008
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! News.
   All company press releases and news stories available on Yahoo! originate from other sources. We cannot take individual press releases and add them to our service.
   If you are interested in having your press releases show up on Yahoo!, contact PR Newswire and/or Business Wire. For a fee, either of these services will make sure hundreds of news services are aware of your company announcements.
   Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! News.

   Well, thanks for giving me answers to a question I never asked, Heather. And thanks for telling me stuff I already knew. Did she even read my question? I replied pretty soon afterwards. Maybe, I thought, I made it too hard, even though I had chosen a category for my question that had nothing to do with what Heather told me.
   OK, simplify, Jack. Maybe she was just too busy, maybe the silicone from her fake tits had been eating its way up to her brain, maybe she had had a fight with her boyfriend during the lunch hour.

To Yahoo!, January 3, 2008
That was not my question, though I appreciate you have a selection of stock answers.
  For many years, Yahoo! News Full Coverage linked news articles, not press releases, from our publications. This stopped without explanation about four or five years ago when the site was rejigged.
  I am simply asking for Yahoo! News Full Coverage to recommence linking our stories.

From Derek at Yahoo!, January 4, 2008
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! News.
   We appreciate you contacting Yahoo! News regarding this issue & apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
   Please be assured that we are aware that the local news module does not always appear.  The information you have provided will be forwarded to our Production team and/or content provider for review.  Any necessary changes will be made as soon as possible.  If we can be of further assistance, please let us know.  We appreciate your patience as we research the issue.

   What? Or, in modern internet parlance, WTF?! Did I mention anything about a ‘local news module’? Derek, are you as illiterate as Heather? Were you too preoccupied after reading a penis enlargement email? Are you going through some withdrawal because the doc took the heroin away?
   Since this sort of BS happened back in 2002 with the Yahoo! Groups service, you can see I was getting impatient.

To Yahoo!, January 5, 2008
Your reply does not address the original issue, either. I know it's easy (and Yahoo! practice) to copy and paste answers from your database (and yes, we know when you do this), but I wouldn't write you if it was already covered in your FAQs.
  Please address the original question. It remains at the end of this email.

   Anything?
   Anything?
   Yahoo! seems to have placed this in the “too hard” pile because it has nothing left to copy and paste from.

To Yahoo!, January 17, 2008
May I please ask after a response to this issue? Please do not copy and paste. As you can see, I have had two stock answers already, neither of which are intelligible given the question.
  The original question is at the end of this email. I would appreciate it if it was read intelligently and answered intelligently. The category is partnering with Yahoo! News, which should at least narrow the topic down for you.

   Nothing.
   Today:

To Yahoo!, January 28, 2008
With respect, may I please get an answer?

   I’ll keep this up. People need to know how lousy Yahoo! gets. And I’ll be happy to dig out the earlier experience with Yahoo! Groups if they push me to.
   What also gets me (beyond the fact that Yahoo! staff are illiterate) is that among the questions is a category you can choose (which I did) called ‘Partnering with Yahoo! News’. This would normally mean that even if these idiots are copying and pasting answers, there must be a set of them relating to the topic. Otherwise, why would the category exist? They seem to be going out of their way in providing answers from another category.
   Last time we just shut the group down and moved all our company groups off Yahoo!. We win, Yahoo! loses.
   So, why are people buying their stock again? With this sort of behaviour, Yahoo! looks like a company heading south fast, pissing off netizens left, right and centre. Eventually it’ll get to another person, then another person, and so on, and so on, and so on. (Thanks to another Heather for that one—Heather Locklear.)
   Well, at least I don’t live in Red China and Yahoo! isn’t passing on my confidential information to the People’s Secret Police there so that the Politburo throws my ass in jail and takes my organs for Communist Party members. I guess I should be happy.

The National Security Council has warned that a US spy satellite is going to crash to Earth and the media are speculating whether it has a nuclear reactor.
   As someone who grew up in the 1970s and who can remember the hysteria at the end of that decade, I can only say: ‘Aaarrrgggh! Skylab! Aaaarrrggghhh!’

This seems to happen every now and then and it’s got me paranoid.
   In 2006, I posted some photos here on Vox privately and they still managed to show up publicly. Last week, the first private Lucire Thailand post still wound up visible to Google—where I saw it today—even though I had marked it ‘Friends and family’ here.
   Be very careful of private posts. I suspect it’s because I post to groups that the Thai post became visible, but I don’t ever remember that happening before.

Another Ashes to Ashes clip is up, thanks to The Daily Telegraph.
   DI Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes) arrives at the Met’s office and tries to access files on Gene Hunt’s PC. She knows what’s going on because she’s listened to Sam Tyler’s tape in the wake of what happened to him in 2007. She realizes the mind will fashion conduits back to the real world and reaches for a ringing telephone …

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/ttv/lifestyle.jhtml?bcpid=1365140359&bclid=1363192395&bctid=1390827201

   Articles on the series appear in both The Times and the Telegraph. Since Vox won’t let me link these words for some reason (it is really buggy these days), here they are separately:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article3241252.ece
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/01/26/sm_ashestoashes126.xml

   Can you tell I’m looking forward to the new series?

[Cross-posted] I’ve had to keep this under wraps till today, but since we’re about three weeks from launch, I now have permission to let you all know of this nice development at Lucire: the launch of a new magazine, Twinpalms Lucire, for a specialist market in Thailand.
   It’s been such a smooth process working with Miguel, who has done a huge load of work on the new print magazine. And I take my hat off to Twinpalms Phuket, which has been very accommodating of our own wishes. The Twinpalms brand appears first for various historical and contractual reasons.
   Richard Machado’s first shoot for Lucire, ‘Papillon’, re-appears on the cover.
   If you look inside the magazine, Miguel is very much a proponent of the Swiss grid and Helvetica is the main typeface. It’s very different in feel to Lucire in other countries, but I still love what he has done. It’s a classy, elegant production.
   There are plenty more articles saved up for the next issue, too. We plan on the title being six-monthly.

Lucire launches in Thailand

International fashion magazine collaborates with Twinpalms Phuket and Asia Design Consultants for latest country

Lucire, the international fashion magazine headquartered in New Zealand, has announced that it has collaborated with the Twinpalms Phuket resort and Asia Design Consultants Ltd. to see an extra print edition in Thailand.
   Twinpalms Lucire launches February 20 with 5,000 copies distributed through the Surin Beach, Phuket resort and its sister properties.
   The magazine has features on fashion, lifestyle and travel, with a lesser emphasis on beauty when compared to Lucire’s other print editions.
   Miguel Kirjon of Asia Design Consultants oversaw the production and editorial mix, in collaboration with Lucire founder and publisher Jack Yan, deputy editor Sylvia Giles and assistants Dominique Whittaker and Ashleigh Berry.
   Many of the Lucire articles had been commissioned by Laura Ming-Wong, the magazine’s editor in New Zealand.
   Mr Yan says, ‘This is another small step in growing the Lucire brand, targeting it at an aspirational audience that says, “I want to be a step ahead.” We’re confident that the Twinpalms audience will love our mixture and socially responsible approach to fashion and lifestyle reporting.
   ‘I’m also delighted that Miguel has created a unique look founded in the Swiss school of design. It’s very different from the home edition and it’s a classy production.’
   In addition to its design direction, Mr Kirjon has commissioned many additional, original articles for the Twinpalms’ side of the magazine.
   Twinpalms Phuket is a member of Small Luxury Hotels of the World, one of the most exclusive collectives of hotel properties internationally. The resort is privately owned, with a private beach club and an enviable location next to Millionaires’ Cove.
   Lucire started as an online fashion magazine in 1997 and is notable for having diversified into print, rather than adopt the print-to-web approach of its competitors. Its Webby-nominated website remains a popular destination for fashion leaders, while the print magazine is regarded as a luxurious and socially responsible publication.

The titles to Blake Edwards’ The Tamarind Seed are a great example of the late Maurice Binder’s 1970s’ work. This spy film, with music by John Barry and starring Julie Andrews (the real-life Mrs Blake Edwards) and Omar Sharif, is little known and one of the very few times Edwards did not collaborate with composer Henry Mancini. The visuals and the theme work beautifully and Binder shows his preference by this time for Swiss typography (the use of Helvetica for one). In the past I had shown some 1960s’ Binder work, but I think there’s still a lot of modernist beauty to this 1974 film’s opening.