Yeah, sure, why not? “Customers of fast food restaurants could be offered a free statin along with the burger, salt and ketchup, to mitigate the meal’s damaging effects on the heart, doctors suggest. Providing the cholesterol lowering drug with every burger would help combat its artery clogging tendency, they say. The statin would perform a function equivalent to a filter on a cigarette or a seat-belt in a car. People will continue to pursue unhealthy habits but with a slightly reduced risk.”

Jeff Greene, the credit default-swapping millionaire Senate candidate for Florida whose best man was Mike Tyson and who is running on the platform that he is an “outsider,” which may not be totally crazy, is today dealing with the big banner headline: “Jeff Greene’s yacht holds the secrets: Sexcapades or Sabbath?” Green’s talking point: “There’s a million people not working in Florida. Why are we talking about the yacht all the time? I care too much about my country to spend all my time talking about a yacht and Mike Tyson.” I appreciate the sentiment! Sort of. Except the sentiment is sort of “please stop talking about my 145-foot party yacht and my $24 million house in Palm Beach, there are people who have no jobs.”

Is the Steven Slater story taking a turn for the worse? Passengers on the flight where America’s hero made his dramatic exit have talked to the local Fox affiliate and they paint a very different picture of the man who has captured our nation’s heart this week. One passenger goes so far as to claim that Slater actually ROLLED HIS EYES at her when she asked for a paper towel. In light of these allegations, do we somehow need to reevaluate our decision to make Slater the symbol of the frustrated American worker who has had enough and decided to take matters into his own hands? It says here no. The guy let loose a sweary monologue over the PA, grabbed a couple of beers, pulled the emergency chute, exited the plane and then sped home to have sex with his boyfriend before the cops came. I don’t care if he rolled his eyes so hard they fell out of his head: this man is a HERO.

TED: Just Admit It

The September issue of Fast Company contains a breathless look at TED and the viral-video nature of clips featuring its flagship conference’s 18-minute lectures — known as TED Talks — by Anya Kamenetz. I spent a good part of this afternoon trying to figure out why this piece, which calls the network of conferences and videos “the new Harvard” in its URL but curiously backs off that claim in its actual headline, got my outrage-o-meter popping. Let’s find out!

Early on, Kamenetz says that she “would go so far as to argue that [TED] is creating a new Harvard — the first new top-prestige education brand in more than 100 years.” Wow! But many breathless paragraphs later, she concedes that the videos, which are the way that those people who haven’t been invited inside the conference’s sanctum experience the brand, have their limitations: “An 18-minute presentation, no matter how expert, can’t accommodate anything overly theoretical or technical — the format is more congenial to Freakonomics than economics.” So, it’s really more like correspondence school? Or sitting in Barnes and Noble and reading the books that inevitably result from these videos going “viral”? (Or, really, their tables of contents?)

And then there is the self-congratulatory sheen that every person involved in the story possesses, which somehow especially rankles during the discussion of said videos being free of charge for the non-invitees. Which, well, you get what you pay for (see the aforementioned note about Freako/eco divide). And it’s not like TED is a completely “no, thanks, we don’t need your money anyway” endeavor; isn’t there a complicated matrix of admission policies that is involved with letting people in the door? Where, as Kamenetz notes, this happens:

It’s “networking extraordinaire — just a total bonanza,” says Cyndi Stivers, editor of Entertainment Weekly’s EW.com. And out of that networking comes action. Wired magazine was born there. An Inconvenient Truth got a big push at the conference. Researchers and not-for-profits find sponsors; writers and scholars find agents and publishers; Web geeks find a path out of obscurity. Esra’a Al Shafei is a 23-year-old from Bahrain who runs an online hub for journalism and free expression called MideastYouth.com. In 2009, she was made a TED Fellow at the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford. “TED gives you a sense of credibility,” she says. “I’ve been running Mideast Youth for four years, but before the fellowship, nobody talked about it.” TED connections have led her to sources of money and technical and moral support that helped her launch CrowdVoice, which tracks voices of protest around the world.

The lack of interpersonal connection afforded by just watching videos while you’re at home (if you have the time, that is) is apparently being rectified by TEDx conferences, which are satellite events around the world in which “at least 25% of the content must be existing TED talk videos.” (Keeping the branding alive, of course.) Many of them are free; the New York event will require those people who are accepted to pay $100, because in this city every piece of networking has to have a price tag attached. Kamenetz does note, though, that it’s hard to “keep up quality control if you let everyone play.”

And you know, perhaps the breathless thesis laid out by that SEO-baiting URL is correct. Maybe TED is like an elite college in a way — you apply for the right to pay money and hang out with a bunch of people who were also able to pay money (and a few people who got in on just smarts), and then the people who weren’t up to snuff can get just the “teaching” part of the equation.

So why am I so annoyed by Kamenetz’s lofty claims, then? Was it the lede, in which you could see her patting herself on the back as she described her “discovery-seeking brain [getting] a little hit of dopamine in the middle of the workday”? Was it the fact that Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert speaking “on creativity” is one of the talks being touted? Was it the claim that this is somehow a “new model” of education, when it really isn’t? Was it the idea, vaguely inferred by Stivers’ quote, that TED helped bring forth the absolute clusterfuck of comment-baiting gallery-listicle hybrids that is the current iteration of EW.com? Was it the closing revelation that the organization’s next big step is — gasp! — a social network (or, rather, “a set of tools that will allow people to hold conversations and plan meetings through ted.com”)? Or is it just that in keeping with the Fast Company editorial direction of Extreme Extremism, everyone involved sounds a bit, well, smug? Actually all those questions could probably be combined into one: “Are these people just getting a little too excitable about the beautiful view from inside their bubble here?” You can probably figure out the answer.

[Via]

“In the midst of the drama around the mosque that’s being erected two blocks from Ground Zero, a few details have been left out that provide some clarity as to the purpose of this project. Specifically, the project will be the country’s first certified ‘green mosque,’ in full compliance with stringent LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards, which is why organizers have named the project Park51, rather than the oft-cited ‘Cordoba House.’”
-Whether or not it ever actually gets built it all, give a hand to the folks behind the GROUND ZERO TERROR MOSQUE, who seem to know exactly what buttons to push. I hope next they announce that they’re going to be staffed solely by pregnant women who are here from Mexico to have anchor babies.

“They have plundered the world in the last 500 years and the young lad in charge now is even more stupid than his predecessor. It’s as if God has made this nation servants of America and Zionists. England has nothing. Its inhabitants are not human, its officials are not responsible, and it doesn’t even have any natural resources. (They are) a bunch of thick people ruled by a mafia.”
-Mohammad Reza Rahimi, vice president of Iran, upset the British Foreign Office with his comments about that nation. Knifecrime Island’s man in Tehran, ambassador Simon Gass, responded that “when a high-ranking official who represents the Islamic Republic of Iran makes such insulting remarks about the people of another country, it reflects badly only on the person who made such remarks.” It is unusual that the government reacts to Iranian rhetoric, but, as the Daily Mail points out, “calling the British ‘thick’ is new.”

The Scotsman reports on a new workplace survey with some surprising results: “THE glass ceiling that once stopped women rising to the top of the business world may have been broken but employees of both genders still think that men make better bosses, a new study has claimed. Two thirds of the nation’s employees, both male and female, agree they would rather work for a man than a woman.”

Well, fair enough. And I sympathize with harried journalists who have to write up “studies” which are barely-disguised press releases as news. But you go a couple of paragraphs further and something interesting happens.

The criticisms levelled at female bosses included that they are bitchy, hormonal and incapable of leaving their personal lives at home.

A third of those polled claimed women in charge are “loose cannons” ready to stab colleagues in the back at any time, and who constantly feel threatened by other people in positions of authority.

Okay, it’s a little direct, but fine. Then…

The study also showed 37 per cent believe women make terrible bosses because they can’t help but bitch about senior management and people they employ.

What’s going on here? I mean, it’s jarring, right? Is “bitch” now established as a perfectly acceptable synonym for complain? If I didn’t know better I would almost think that someone has a female boss and he’s working out his feelings about her in his prose. She sounds like a real ball-buster.

Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich had a Snapple for lunch. I know you were wondering.

I have been wondering about Denny’s Fried Cheese Melt ever since I first heard of the bread/American cheese/mozzerella sticks concoction earlier this week. Why pair American cheese with the mozzerella sticks, and not something more compatible like, say, provolone? Why does the official image of the sandwich make it seem like the cheese within each layer is completely unmeltable, thus food-styling away one of the biggest competitve advantages of the grilled-cheese sandwich as opposed to, say, a BLT? (Hands up if you thought those were chicken fingers inside the sandwich.) Will the marinara sauce have any spice beyond salt in it? And, perhaps most importantly, how would it stack up nutrition-wise against its clear antecedent, the Double Down? Well, that last question has been answered by an intrepid journalist: “CBS News correspondent Jeff Glor reported the cost to your diet is 895 calories and 34 grams of fat.” “Reported!” That makes it sound like dude had to do some digging, which makes me hope that the Mysteries Of Bad Unmeltable Cheeses will be unlocked sometime soon. [Via]

Gay couples in California should hurry up and get married, like, RIGHT NOW, as Judge Vaughn Walker, who ruled the ban on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional, has denied a motion to stay the judgment. Like, seriously, just go do it. [UPDATE: You’ll have to wait until August 18th.] Because let’s be honest, we’ve only got a few months left of equality and respect for human rights in this country and then we’re all pretty much screwed. You might as well get some nice cookware out of it while you still can.