Dress for success - the French way

It’s not easy being a powerful woman. Ask any of us in higher management positions.

Apart from performance pressure, we are also judged on our looks and outfits. Our male counterparts can show up in the same boring business suits day after day, growing beer bellies and losing their hair – but not us! We have to be “representative” without being “provocative”.

It’s the female powerhouses that get the most heat: Oprah has been ridiculed for her weight swings and fashion sense, while Dr. Phil Phony can be shabbily dressed and pudgy. Hillary Clinton is made fun of due to her trademark pantsuits, while Obama can drape his lanky frame with the same old, same old boring suit – go figure.

So I admire women in power that don’t give a damn and do as they please, especially if they are politicians with non-stop media scrutiny.

In the US, Condoleezza Rice is pushing the envelope in contrast to first lady Laura Bush.

In Europe, the only country where female politicians have this “je ne sais quoi” is not Italy (the Mecca of the Alta Moda), but France.

The most glamorous of the bunch is Rachida Dati (yes, that’s IS her real family name!) France’s Minister of Justice who, in her early forties, flatly refuses to go dowdy. When criticized for her addiction to designer rags, she replied that as the high-achieving daughter of poor immigrants, she had earned her Dior dresses. Way to go, amica!

Let’s face it, if Robespierre cum suis would have been female, they would have added “élégance” to liberté, égalité and fraternité (and less well-coiffed heads would have been severed).

Ms. Dati is the darling of her boss, French president Sarkozy who refers to her as “ma beurette” (French slang for a female immigrant from the Maghreb region -Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and not for “my little buttercup”).

But she is not the only glam puss - Christine Lagarde, France’s Finance and Employment Minister favors Chanel for state events, while the Senegalese-born Human Rights Minister, Rama Yade, likes to be decked out in Yves Saint Laurent.

And trust me; all of them are taken seriously!

We all know that clothes maketh the man – just take a look at the rigid power dressing code in ancient Rome. And the same applies to women – just ask Angela Merkel when she was running for Prime Minister.

For now, we less high-profiled women have to keep the delicate balance at work between excelling at our job while dressing as we please.

I just wish I was a French cabinet minister…..and being able to borrow haute couture!

How bad is Eliot Spitzer? Not bad at all if you think about it!

Just look at the facts.

One: Eliot Spitzer was having consenting sex with an adult woman. To boost the local economy, he paid her – which is a Good Thing. Not sure if an invoice for sexual favors includes sales tax or VAT in the State of New York – but if so, it benefits the governmental coffers. If our Spitzer-Bub filed it on his tax form as personal and not business expenses, the IRS will be happy, so no harm done there.
In short, our Eliot kept one woman from being on the dole while keeping the bucks rolling. (I wonder if she voted for him….)
We can furthermore assume that some peripheral items were involved in this encounter, including food, drinks and protection, and may be also some recreational items – Eliot looks like a guy who is into that kind of stuff. This benefits local merchants - again, a Good Thing!

Two: Spitzer is not exactly the best governor NY ever had. He just started his term, so his political elimination is a godsend! Let that nice Lt. Gov. David Paterson take over. He might not be the Sheriff of Wall Street, but he looks like a decent bloke.

Three: It makes the best news fodder since Clinton shared a cigar with Monica.
Let’s face it, the Death Match between the she-Clinton and Obama is getting ugly, Britney Spears as an ongoing train wreck is too boring and the Hilton chick is not so hot anymore, while the War on Terror gets as much coverage as my lazy cat.
Watching Silda Spitzer (nee Wall) during the press conference – that’s entertaining!
The elegant Harvard lawyer stood by her man, abide with a hubbycidal look in her eyes. With the rest of the world, I wonder how Sildaleh will handle it. The She-Clinton not only survived her scorned wife episode but even went on to push for becoming the most powerful woman in the world (move over Oprah), with cheating hubby in the Nancy Reagan role.
At the other side of the pond, the British wives suffering from the same loose pants fallout handle it with a stiff upper lip, serving tea to the newshounds camping outside their houses.

Four: It makes the French look good. After relentlessly slamming Sarkozy, the Americans outdid themselves with this one! You can say a lot about Monsieur le President, but he at least didn’t pay for Bruni….well, maybe he will down the line in hefty alimony, but Mme Sarkozy doesn’t charge her hubby per hour…..
What can I say? Eliot makes Sarkozy look like a standup guy! Ah, the irony……

Five: It creates a golden marketing opportunity for Las Vegas – where prostitution is (sort of) legal. Can you just see the ads? Las Vegas – the city where politicians can frolic FBI-free!
It is still a mystery to me why ES didn’t hop on a plane to Sin City, hire the top floor of say, the Wynn, and have a party there with the ladies of the night…..

So you see, we should not be too hard on Eliot Spitzer – in the end, he entertains us all!
(And we don’t even have to pay for it!)

Was the Queen amused?

Poor Queen Elizabeth.
It must be burden for her to visit the US.
Not known for her frequent visits across the Pond, I am pretty sure that she would have loved to do something else – visiting Scotland or an Irish horse farm.
Laura Bush, who is a smart woman, bullied her husband into organizing the state visit including a white tie event.
She (LB, not the Queen) went on national television explaining the menu and other stuff in boring detail.
(If I am not invited, what do I care about the food that is going to be served?!)
Wearing bright red lipstick that made her look like a hungry vampire, the better half of the Bush unit introduced the cooks.
Good for them – free PR once you want to open your own restaurant. Doesn’t Laura watch the “Top Chef” reality show?
It sounded in my non-American ears that Laura Dear got speaking lessons from Condi – unfortunately her clear speaking style was spoiled by the heavy Texan accent.
She kept referring to “Her Maaaaajeesstyyyy” – I wonder if the Oxbridge English speaking Monarch minded too much.
Or may be she is used to it – and finds it refreshing after the mumbling English of her eldest son….

Queen Elizabeth didn’t have much of a choice – it was 400 years ago that the Brits founded Jamestown, which became the first permanent British colony in America.
(If this was a Good Thing, I leave to the judgment of my readers on both sides of the Pond).

Our Senior Citizen Royal duly embarked (oblesse oblige) on a 6-hour or so flight, to meet Bush Minor and other Colonials during her one-week visit.
She didn’t exactly accumulate a lot of frequent flyer miles to the States – it was only her fifth visit in 50 years.
I don’t blame her – visiting a nation that broke away from the Empire by throwing lots of perfectly good tea into the harbor, doesn’t deserve a lot of Royal Attention. Leave that to upstarts like Fergie (the disgraced ex of her second son, not the Black Eyed Peas singer whom she never met).

Being a royal, she must be against presidents out of principle; and the American ones are so colorful! I am sure that her horse riding experience with former Prez. Reagan is still engraved in her mind as does the “talking hat” incident under Bush Pater.
(Bush Senior forgot in 1991 to place a footstool for the Queen to stand on. She was therefore hidden from the crowd looked like a talking hat; not exactly a crowd pleaser).

Since she is rumored to be a betting women, I am pretty sure that she made a nice little bet with her husband on her way over to see how long Bush would last before putting his foot in his mouth again.
It took the Defender of the Free World about 14 minutes into the state arrival ceremony before committing his (first) faux pas.
In all honesty, that might be a personal record for Bush.
He addressed the Queen with “you've dined with 10 U.S. presidents. You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in seventeen s -- in nineteen seventy-six."
The Queen might not be a spring chicken, but she is for sure not over 200 years old!
When the crowd started to laugh, Bush looked at the Queen and winked.
The Queen reacted in her regal way by smiling politely.
She also said something that sounded like "some year," or "you're near" or even "oh, dear."
As journalist Dana Milbank of the Washington Post put it:
“At least he didn’t credit her with signing the Magna Carta.”
(No Mr. President, that’s NOT a really, really big golf cart!)

For Bush, this state visit must be a godsend.
Let face it – the Queen is not going to grill him on the War in Iraq, his approval rate, Hurricane Katrina and his alcohol problem.

For the Queen, there was one treat in the program: visiting the Kentucky Derby.
Being a huge race fan, she was for sure more comfortable talking to jockey Calvin Borel than to the Bush people.
(Borel was later invited at the last minute to attend the state dinner – so Queen E. had at least one partner to have an interesting conversation with).

According to a Buck House spokesperson, she took an extremely close interest in the horses, but didn't place any bets. Smart lady – the horses were for sure more entertaining (and better looking) than a lot of the state dinner guests, and winning a racing bet in the US might have triggered another Boston Tea Party….

Exit of the I-man aka the Don Imus Fiasco

Unless you have been in outer space or you are Knut, the Berlin polar bear cub, you must have heard about Don Imus and his big mouth.
For those of you who are not familiar with this person – he was the CBS Radio talk-show host of “Imus in the Morning”.
His trademark was a combination of discussions about politics and culture, mixed with crude and vulgar humor.
So much for the taste of his listeners.
He liked insulting people on air - during an interview with former General Electric CEO Jack Welch and his wife-unit Suzy Wetlaufer about their book “Winning”, Imus referred to Suzy as "been around more times than a fan belt."

But when he started discussing the appearance of the Rutgers women’s basketball team, all hell broke loose.
Instead of applauding these women for being smart, ambitious and blessed with athletic bodies (Paris Hilton, eat your heart out!), he spouted racial slurs.

Ironically enough, this washed out, Caucasian, over-the-hillbilly borrowed words from the hip hop world – for reasons unclear to one and all.
How this could be perceived by Imus as even remotely funny or entertaining is a mystery to me. Obviously, the ‘60s were too good to him and must have fried the moral code part of his muddled brain.

This time, thanks to the public outcry, the whole issue went online, was shown on YouTube and reached a global audience thanks to networks such as CNN and Fox.
Needless to say, viewers outside of the USA were baffled and wondered how this washout ex-junkie was able to host a radio show for so long, raking in millions for his bosses, sponsors and himself.
Ah, American culture!
The issue was settled in a typical American way as well – the sponsors pulled their ad millions from the show, since their customers were upset.
Forget about Barack and Oprah taking the moral high ground – it’s the all-powerful dollar that settled the issue.
Ergo, exit Imus.

Imus is no fool – he issued a public apology that was promptly accepted by the Rutgers’ team.
This will leave his options open to move to another radio station or follow fellow shock jock Howard Stern to satellite radio.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Sirius and XM already started a bidding war.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if he already started penning his autobiography “from fame to shame” or something similar – and if anybody knows how to market it, it’s Imus himself!

The ones that should get a sweet deal out of it are –of course- the Rutgers ladies, who handled the whole issue with a lot of class.
I expect companies such as Dove and Patagonia to step in and use them as models for their products.
Charities should jump on the opportunity to have them as spokespersons.
If not, I hope that they all graduate with top marks – and may the lawyers among them sue bigots like Imus for every penny they ever made!

Something is happening in the State of Belgium

Belgium is known for its chocolates and waffles. Apart from that, it’s one of the least known countries in Europe.
OK, some art lovers might know that Van Eyck and P.P. Rubens hailed from what is now Belgium, but the little country squeezed between France and The Netherlands doesn’t exactly have a global image.
Since its creation and split from its northern neighbor, it has been divided between the Flemish (Dutch) speaking north and the French speaking south.
The Belgians are often the victim of jokes, but it’s rare that they are the ones creating a hoax.
But that is what happened.

December 2006, the national broadcasting company in French, RTBF , broke into regular programming with an urgent bulletin:
"Flemish parliament has unilaterally declared the independence of Flanders (the Dutch speaking part of Belgium)” and that King Albert and Queen Paola had left on the first air force plane available.
Grainy pictures from the military airport showed dark silhouettes of a royal entourage boarding a plane, possibly on their way to the Congo.
RTBF then aired an interview with secessionist MP Jean-Marie Dedecker, who proudly declared: "At last my dream has been realised".

The broadcast showed 50 or so jubilant demonstrators waving the yellow-and-black flag with the Flemish Lion outside the legislature.
A small crowd of monarchists rallied outside the royal palace waving the Belgian flag.

Only after a half hour did the station flash the message: "This is fiction."
Fadila Laanan, the Walloon media minister was the one who forced the station to run the disclaimer. Too little, too late.
Not only Belgians fell for the hoax, worried ambassadors asked what they had to tell their capitals.
As with Orson Wells famous “The War of the Worlds”, it took some time before people realized it was a hoax.

The program makers defended the hoax, stating that they wanted to spark a debate about the risk of Flanders' secession and the possible collapse of the country.
RTBF's news chief, Yves Thiran, told the BBC that the program was meant as a wake-up call: "Our intention was to show Belgian viewers the intensity of the issue of the future of Belgium and the real possibility of Belgium no longer being a country in a few months. We obviously scared many people - maybe more than we expected."

Not everyone saw it that way - Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt slammed the show, adding that it would only serve to increase tensions between Dutch-speakers in Flanders and French-speakers in Wallonia.
"It is very bad Orson Welles, in very poor taste," remarked his spokesman.
"In the current context, it is irresponsible for a public television channel to announce the end of Belgium as a reality presented by genuine journalists."

The good news: it brought Belgium to attention of the world and we don't have to memorize two new country names and capitals.

The bad news, mapmakers, text book writers, graphic studios, diplomats and last but not least Belgian royals loose out on new job opportunities!

Quel dommage! Wat een pech!

Humor as a weapon of mass exposure – the Borat success story

Sacha Baron Cohen is a brilliant Cambridge University-educated British comedian who is able to amuse most of us while irritating an entire nation.
You see, Cohen’s alter ego is Borat Sagdiyev, a television news reporter making a meager living in the struggling country of Kazakhstan.

In his brilliant parodies, “Borat” tells the world about his beautiful home country of Kazakhstan (a urine-drinking, Jew-hating, inbred society).
He is wonderfully political incorrect and gets away with it.
In the process, he exposes the hypocrisy of many.
No subject is safe - sexual orientation, religion, culture....it's all fair game.

In one skit, Cohen pokes fun at conspiracy theories by stating as Borat that “when in America he travels by car just in case the Jews repeat their attack of 9/11.”

To satirize homophobia, Borat asked an anthropologist: "Are you a homo sapiens? Because it doesn't matter if you are."

At a feminist gathering, Borat was political incorrect and misogynic by "innocently" extolling the virtues of Baywatch.

The branding of the Borat character is brilliant – just check out the Borat website and notice the misspelling, MySpace mentioning, and photo album.

Needless to say, the people of Kazakhstan were not amused.
The tourist department even shut down Cohen's borat.kz website.
(It was immediately redirected to www.borat.tv)

To boost their national image, the Kazakh government took out a pricey four-page full-color ad in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune today.
The special four-page insert entitled "Kazakhstan in the 21st Century" features a photo of the country's president Nursultan Nazarbayev on its front page shaking hands with President George W. Bush.
This piece of crisis management didn’t come cheaply – such ads are around $300,000 - $400,000 - Kazakhstan's per capita income was approximately $8,000….

To boost its image, Kazakhstan submitted its $50m tribal epic movie called Nomad, co-directed by Sergei Bodrov, Talgat Temenov and Ivan Passer, for the Oscar 2007 nominations.

Unfortunately for the poor Kazakhs, Barat beat them to it.
His movie “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” hit the theaters in November 2006 and already won raves from critics and fans alike.
The movie tells the story of our favorite Kazakh reporter, traveling from his dirt-poor, Kazakh village of Kuzcek (“3 mile north of fence to Jewtown”) to New York on behalf of the Ministry of Tourism.
He must observe the western way of life and report back with any information that could benefit his native land.
The plan is to stick with the culture of New York, but soon after Borat learns to use the television remote control he is compelled to take his journey to the west coast.
Seduced by "Baywatch" and learning of his Kazakh wife's death (via telegram) in a very short span, Borat makes his new mission to woo and marry buxom Hollywood starlet Pamela Anderson.

In the movie, Borat attacks many groups and subcultures as a bumbling foreigner and gains the trust of his interviewees.
Through his native questions, he cleverly coaxes brutally honest responses out of his interviewees, who are only too happy to tell him what they really think.
It’s not a pretty picture – one old rodeo guy would like “us to take care of gays here as they do in Muslim countries”.
It also shows how the Western ideal of freedom of speech can cause a global controversy.

Staying non-stop in character, Cohen wowed the crowds at the London premiere of his movie by stating:
"I have come here with Bilak, my 11 year old son, his wife and their child, and we are hoping maybe to put some chocolate make-up on the child's face and sell him to Madonna.
I am hoping that Madonna will be a very good father for it."

Cohen also unwittingly exposed the BBC as biased towards religion and politics.
In an exercise to check the attitude of its executive staff, the BBC presented its executives with the following scenario.
Suppose Sasha Baron Cohen participates in a BBC program studio program titled ‘Room 101’, where guests are asked for their opinions on different issues, and are allowed to symbolically throw things they hated in a garbage bin.
What would you, as our BBC executive do if Cohen decided to throw ‘Kosher food’, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bible, and the Koran in the garbage bin?

Not surprisingly, the BBC executives said they would allow everything to be thrown in the garbage bin, save the Koran, for "fear of offending the British Muslim community."
Enough said….

Going Plutonic

I love SF, which is a Good Thing, since I work in high tech (the science part) and my salary is fiction.
But even for Trekkies, the downgrading of Pluto is weird, really weird.
Poor Pluto was discovered in 1930 by 24-year-old American astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, Clyde Tombaugh.
The Naming Game soon started.
It was 11-year-old Venetia Burney, from Oxford, England, who suggested the name.
It was chosen from a long list that included Atlas, Apollo, Zeus, Minerva and even Bacchus. Needless to say, reporters of the New York Times pitched Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and intoxication.
I blame the International Astronomical Union, which had nothing better to do than shaking up our solar system.
They redefined “planet” as:
"a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit".
It seems that poor Pluto wobbles a bit and was therefore stripped of its planet status and demoted to a wannebee or “dwarf” planet.
I haven’t got a clue what that means – can Pluto grow up and become a proper planet?
I am also not sure what will happen to Pluto’s moon Charon. Will it become Ice Cube?
So our Pluto is out of the cosmic planet club, and globetrotting Luciano Pavarotti is in.
Good thing his family name starts with a P as well – makes us all less p-d off.

After 76 years, Pluto stepped down as a planet. Let’s hope that British Bess gets the hint and does the same for her son Charles.

Needless to say, people (I am referring to us Terrans, since I have no clue how the Martians are taking it. If the movie “Mars Attacks!” is anything to go by, not kindly, methinks) are not happy.

But the stripping of Pluto of its planet status launched a merchandise wave that would do credit to any presidential campaign.
Scores of Web-savvy entrepreneurs went on the Internet, selling Pluto memorabilia from T-shirts and mugs to bumper stickers and mouse pads.
Within 24 hours of the “bad” news, a wave of Pluto items appeared on Cafepress.com, (a San Francisco-area Internet company that prints T-shirts and other merchandise), including 200 designs on more than 1,500 products.
Many items and slogans related to Pluto's demotion and advocated its return with T-shirts proclaiming "Save Pluto" and "Stop Planetary Discrimination."

What the eggheads of the IAU didn’t understand, is that we ordinary people were quite happy with the nine planets we knew.
Let’s face it – does the downgrade bring us any benefits? Tax cuts, world peace, cure for AIDS? I don’t think so!
Au contraire, we now have to memorize one planet less and a few candidate planets more (including one called Xena, that unfortunately doesn’t have anything to do with the Warrior Princess).

To quote Dr. Hiroshi Kyosuke of the University of Tokyo:
"It seems counterintuitive to me that we should say Pluto is no longer a planet, yet Donald Rumsfeld is still Secretary of Defense. After all, Pluto has done no harm."

Hear, hear!
Pluto the dog, who made his debut in 1930, couldn’t agree more.
According to Disney insiders, he worries about the fate of this namesake and all the textbooks that must be rewritten.

Personally, I think that we can do a better job of classifying and naming planets than those spaced-out cosmos cowboys.

Mercury – Mini-me, since it’s small and fairly close to Earth.

Venus – Viagra, and let the pharmaceutical industry sponsor this hard rock.

Earth – Ego, since that’s what we have, in abundance.

Mars – Mars, since too many Mars movies have been made and we don’t want to upset our green neighbors, so we?

Jupiter – Juniper, since this berry gave us far more pleasure in the form of gin than this huge planet ever did.

Saturnus – Ringtone, if you wonder why, just have a look at its shape – Nokia can be a sponsor (“connecting aliens”)

Uranus – U2, for the mispronunciation by English speaking pubertal adolescents alone.
Great sponsoring opportunity for Bono as well.

Neptune – Loonytune, since only a loony could have named a gas ball after the god of oceans and seas.

Pluto – Exepluto, since it’s exit for the poor thing and it sounds like a really cool computer program (that is, as long as it’s not a Microsoft product).

For know, Pluto did one thing, that many of its fellow planets were not able to do – to get more coverage than the Klingon planets!