BP under Tony (“I want my life back!”) Hayward has looked an awful lot like the BP Director of Corporate Training showed the execs a whole bunch of John Cleese training videos and that the execs mistook “The Ministry of Silly Walks” as a guide to corporate communication. It would stand to reason that BP would need emergency PR help as the oil slick spread across the the Gulf coast. And who better than those crisis management wizards from Doonesbury, Uncle Duke and son. Finding work hard to come by in post-Bush Washington, BP seems like a heaven-sent client. The link is to today’s strip when Duke advises Tony Hayward to lose his British accent in favour of something pleasant, like “whatever that Gecko uses.” Gecko? No one at the breakfast table knew what Duke was referring to. A little web searching in the Urban Dictionary and we found it — a Geico insurance ad where a lizard uses a pleasant (with all the sharp edges sanded down) Australian accent to sell insurance and trust. Pretty funny.
Gary Trudeau has been at the top of his game of late. The Red Rascal series was amazing. Like Frank Rich, who has pleaded in this column that he can’t make stuff this good up, Gary Trudeau has post-Bush Fox journalism and its Tea Party enthusiasms in particularly good focus. There’s a nice segment on All Things Considered about Roland Hedley’s tweeting. Ubertwitters take note. By the way, there actually is a “program'” called Uber Tweet for Blackberry users; I couldn’t make something that good up.
NOTE IN PRAISE OF ACTUALLY USEFUL SOFTWARE: This post and a few recent ones have been produced in and posted from Windows Live Writer, a program that came with Windows 7 and was only recently discovered here. It is absolutely brilliant, useful, and well-designed software. A big thank you to the folks in Redmond. You’ve made our work here at Joe Briggs Place a whole lot easier.
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