This & That, Ceci et Cela

Interesting Reuters article on the rate of Asia's unpreparedness for Avian flu. One hopes more advanced western countries won't be slow to help, however economically threatened they are by Asian giants like China and India. Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but what if certain nations employ ill-timed adversarial tactics? I.e. taking on the view that a pandemic over there might undercut China's ...

Thoughtus Profondis (hey, the dictionary can only do so much. Sometimes, I gotta make up terms as needed); The reason why celebrity fragrance sells: Partly because they catch an audience inexperienced in scent. Inexperienced enough not to know/have tried that many fragrances, inexperienced enough not to realize that "star" X's fragrance smells just like fragrance M which was ...

These are some of the facts: The French national anti-doping laboratory tested urine samples taken from riders in the 1999 Tour de France, the first of seven that Lance Armstrong won, in an effort to refine its detection methods for the banned drug EPO. The original test, developed at the laboratory, was introduced in 2000 at the Olympic Games in Sydney and in 2001 in the sport of bicycle racing. ...

Lovely little etiquette postcards (via ChangeThis)

From Hugh MacLeod (HughTrain manifesto): "I am not in the factory-owning business. If I have something that needs to be made on a large scale, I'll call somebody up in China or Germany (probably the former). Let them worry about the machine operator's pension fund. I have better things to think about. So do Coca-Cola and Nike, which is why most of their ...