Publicity 101, plus two bonus musings

Today's Subject: How To Apologize When You Don't Think You Did Anything Wrong

So you snorted some cocaine off a hooker's breasts and then beat up a man who had no hands. So what? The whole reason you became famous was so that you could do these things with impunity. But the suits want you to issue a public apology. Well, then, it's time for you to issue what I'm going to call the "nopology," a phrase carefully designed to make it look like you're apologizing when you are, in fact, doing no such thing.

Nopologies rely on grammatical tricks and a positive bias from an audience that wants to hear your apologize. The oldest nopology in the book is "Mistakes were made." It's a classic because its use of the passive voice ensures that you never have to say who made the mistake. (Probably the guy with no hands.)

The next advance in nopologies is the "I'm sorry if…" phrase, here demonstrated by Annie Leibovitz:

I'm sorry that my portrait of Miley has been misinterpreted.

This is a brilliant nopology. It begins with the words "I'm sorry." The ignorant pukes out there will zone out after those two words: that's what they expected to hear from Annie. But look carefully at that sentence again.

I'm sorry that my portrait of Miley has been misinterpreted.

What is Annie apologizing for? She's sorry for the misinterpretation. In other words, she has not said that she's sorry for anything she did. She is saying that she's sorry for the way somebody else thought of her actions. This nopology is the greatest evolution of a ploy you may have used in grade school:

I'm sorry… sorry that you're an idiot!

(Please start using the word "nopology" in your daily life and we'll see if we can get this one in a dictionary someday.)

Bonus #1: Wal*Mart owns Ocean Pacific? When did that happen? Is this going to lead to a bunch of "California Games" players defecting to the Maxx-Out or Casio teams?

Bonus #2: If you're a sketch comedy writer, here's a premise for you. Yosemite Sam makes a guest appearance on "Deadwood."

Cue "Also Spracht Zarathustra"

People are starting to ask me "Won't you be excited to graduate?" Well, not really. Graduation is only a brief respite, because on May 21st, I'll be right back in those classrooms, with about two months to learn…



…all of this.

This summer is going to suck.

Rolling three consecutive doubles is a misdemeanor

I just played a game of Monopoly against the CPU. Here are some things I would've said during the game if I'd been playing against you instead.

• I bought Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues pretty early on, making me the "slum lord." But looking at Google Maps, it doesn't look like those two streets are actually any less ritzy than anywhere else in town:



(It also looks like Illinois Avenue has been renamed after you-know-who. Couldn't they name a street after Thurgood Marshall or Medgar Evans or George Washington Carver, just for a change?)

• People in the 1930s must have really liked math. There's no way most of today's players could keep track of mortgage amounts and 115% of the value of hotels.

• I can't remember when I made the change in pronouncing the name of the railroad from "reeding" to "redding." Probably after I started following English soccer.

• This game has a seriously inflationary economy. I wonder if, through the correct form of play, you could actually run the bank out of money, causing an economic crash - that's probably why there aren't enough houses and hotels to go around.

This isn't worth getting mad about, but I've got cabin fever

I was talking to a professor the other day and she said that we don't have enough shame in our culture, and that we could use shame as a powerful tool for deterrence of bad acts. Now, I was raised Catholic, so I got guilt instead. But my thorough knowledge of guilt translates well to shame, and I'm going to shame somebody right now for the benefit of all ten or so of you who read this blog.

Karen Springen of Newsweek is a bad journalist.

One of her recent "web exclusive" stories was the story of "My Beautiful Mommy." Springen wrote:

When she was pregnant with her son Junior, who turns nine this month, Gabriela Acosta ballooned from 115 pounds to 196. Acosta lost the weight but wound up with stretched, saggy skin. Even her son noticed it. He told her that her stomach looked "pruney," the result, he thought, of staying in the shower too long. So the 29-year-old stay-at-home mom scheduled a consultation with Dr. Michael Salzhauer, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Bal Harbour, Fla.

Acosta told Salzhauer that she wasn't sure how to talk to her son about the procedures she was considering. That's when he showed her the manuscript for his children's picture book, "My Beautiful Mommy" (Big Tent Books), out this Mother's Day.

She goes on like this for three pages. But there's an important detail that she forgot to mention.

Big Tent Books is a vanity press. They print the books and sell them back to the author, but don't distribute them to stores. This book isn't worth an article any more than some conspirazoid's self-published expose on the missing connection between JFK and Vince Lombardi.

If you see "My Beautiful Mommy" on a shelf somewhere or for sale on Amazon, it's only because Springen's non-story story brough the book to public attention. So, Karen Springen of Newsweek, what's the deal? Do you own stock in Big Tent Books? Or were you just trying to meet a deadline, comfortable in the knowledge that whatever you report, even if it's incredibly insignificant, technically becomes news? Is this something you're going to teach your classes at Northwestern?

See, now isn't shaming fun? It's more fun when you do it to a stranger. If I knew her I'd probably give her another chance, but I don't know her so to hell with her.

Fun Fact! (not actually a fact)

Zorro's real name was Oscar Olivares, but he changed it because it was too hard to draw an "O" with a rapier.

Yes, he supports Ron Paul

I'm going crazy. Really, really crazy. Crazy enough that I'm always on the edge of dropping my usual smartassery and just screaming and crying and flipping out.

But it is comforting to know that there are people crazier than I am, like the guy who's decided to compile the Library of Halexandria. Seems that he couldn't get just one batshit insane theory: oh, no. He's subscribed to all of them, from "kids with dyslexia and ADD actually have superpowers" to Lord of the Rings is actually about the Sumerian gods, whom you can contact when you get on a higher astral plane" to "the world is secretly run by international bankers." (And what religion would these bankers be?)

Anything for a few votes

Word has it that Hillary got over in Pennsylvania, but I don't think this promo had anything to do with it.



Seriously, "Hil-Rod?" She needs to get a manager to talk for her while she works on her mic skills. Maybe she can appoint Paul Bearer as her running mate.

Obama's goofy smirk lets you know exactly what he thinks about this PR stunt, while McCain actually goes to the effort of trying to sound a little bit menacing. He ends up using the voice that I would use when portraying the Big Bad Wolf in a children's play.