Absurd Candy Ads - How Halls is Taking a Sweeter Approach

"Candy ads these days tend to rely on surreal, absurdist humor. There's the Starburst ad in which a guy communes with a llama and the Skittles ad that shows a man with a prehensile beard. Cadbury actually owns another confectionary brand that uses nonsensical, dude-focused advertising: Check out the Stride gum spot in which a team of lederhosen-clad dancers assaults a young man in a parking garage."

Link to a cultural and marketing analysis on the new Hall's Ad

Moscow Mayor Promises a Winter Without Snow

Apparently, they already control the weather for two major holidays every year.

Read more here.

7 People Who Should Have Won the Nobel Prize - But Didn't

The list includes Ghandi and Vaclav Havel.

Listen to your favorite sitcom and movie quotes

Just search a character from your favorite TV show to listen to audio of your favorite quotes.

http://www.entertonement.com/

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Joe Biden read this poem today during a September 11th memorial service

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Teen Caste Systems in 80's film and now

This is why I love cultural criticism.

Any article that can show how teen culture has changed by comparing the social structure of The Breakfast Club to the structure of Mean Girls gets an A+ in my book.

"Mean Girls, too, offered an absurd litany of cliques—listed at one point by a supporting character as, “ROTC guys, preps, J.V. jocks, Asian nerds, cool Asians, Varsity jocks, unfriendly black hotties, girls who eat their feelings, girls who don't eat anything, desperate wannabes, burnouts, sexually active band geeks.” "

Complex Procedure = More Money for Doctors

The more specialized and difficult a medical procedure, the more Medicare money the medical office receives.

The following article argues that this creates incentives for specialist medical offices to recommend difficult procedures in order to receive more money from Medicare.

But more money for a specialist means less money for a primary care physician.

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