Technically Incorrect

It's an odd tradition. Well, it is Britain, where they have a talent for clutching traditions like Posh Spice clutches many things with a D&G logo.

The particular tradition that fascinates at this time of year consists of really caring about which song is the best seller at Christmas.

Once upon a time, some of the greatest music ever composed was Britain's Christmas No. 1. Yes, Slade's "Merry Christmas Everybody," Mud's "Lonely This Christmas," and the slightly less melodic "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)" by Pink Floyd.

In recent times, Simon Cowell, a man with more tentacles than T-shirts, has timed one of his reality talent shows to coincide with the Christmas period.

No sooner is the winner announced than he or she has a song that is then downloaded beyond distraction straight to the top of something that is still quaintly called the Singles Chart. (Recent examples include the stunning Leon Jackson and Alexandra Burke.)

This year, Londoners Jon and Tracy Morter decided that something must be done. So they created a Facebook group, Rage Against the Machine for Christmas No. 1.

Sentiment in the snowy English shires was clearly strong. Because around 1 million people declared their belief in the cause. And Sunday it was announced to huge acclaim that the Facebookers had got their way. The Rage Against the Machine song, so CNN tells us, "Killing in the Name," is the No. 1 Christmas single.

It is not easy to defeat the intentions of Cowell. He is the man who dominates "American Idol" rather beautifully and the man who brought Susan Boyle to the world's attention through yet another pulsating show called "Britain's Got Talent." He is also the man who created "The X-Factor," another talent show designed to create instant fodder for Christmas. (Oh, of course it's coming to the U.S., did you have to ask?)

The Morters claimed on the Facebook group's page that the campaign was not remotely personal. Some might think this not entirely true, as the Guardian tells us that when they launched the group they said: "Fed up of Simon Cowell's latest karaoke act being Christmas No. 1? Me too."

Cowell, for his part, told a press conference that the Facebook campaign was "stupid" and "cynical."

You might be wondering why the Morters chose Rage Against the Machine. Well, Jon Morter told NME.com: "It's been taken on by thousands in the group as a defiance to Simon Cowell's 'music machine'. Some certainly do see it as a direct response to him personally."

So one machine has defeated another in the place where they always tell us the Industrial Revolution began. It's a touching Christmas story, isn't it?

As we all try to settle on our own definition of the word "enough," the enterprising work harder to stretch our definition.

Over the last days and weeks, I have been swamped with readers, friends, and some very strange people indeed sending me details of the latest attempts to make money out of Tiger Woods' fall from his graceful perch atop society.

So, in order to assist you with your final gift selections for the holiday season, I have created this post as a catalog of society's ingenuity.

In pride of place--or, as some might think, in place of pride--I have embedded the stunning new ad for BidHere.com. It features one of Tiger's alleged heart-stealers, Jamie Jungers.

Not content with rumors circulating that Jungers is in possession of naked pictures of the famous golfer, the delightfully blond-haired lady has performed in a quite breathtaking ad for online shopping.

Jungers explains that she can get brand-name products like Nikons and iPods at greatly reduced prices rather than go outside and "deal with the madness." Perhaps your Christmas madness is different from hers, but the way she deftly delivers each line of her script with passion and gusto will surely propel you to BidHere.com.

However, this is not the only attempt to commercialize a golfer's demise. Surely you, too, have considered gifting something from TigerCondoms.com.

The astute marketers from the people behind this venture, PracticeSafePolicy.com, issued a thoughtful press release: "With the holiday season in full swing, the clever and savvy jokers at Practice Safe Policy decided it is time for the people of this great nation to forget about minor concerns like the war, the recession, or health care, and instead focus on the truly important issue of the day: Tiger Woods's alleged transgressions."

Quite.

However, if you think that perhaps a premium Tiger Woods URL might be the finest thing with which to stuff a stocking, then might you have $1 million to make an eBay bid for TIGER WOODS SECRET LIFE.com.

If this seems like a little too much, perhaps a wander along to GoDaddy.com might bring you a finer bargain. If I read GoDaddy correctly, you can get NewTigerWoods.com for a mere $10.69 a year. AngelTigerWoods.com seems to be going for the same price.

But wait. You could choose to go to ArtToShirt.com, where you will find some fine examples of humor upon cloth. For example, a T-shirt adorned with the picture of a woman chasing a golfer and the words: "In the Rough...Again...and Again...and Again." It's a mere $12.85.

Amazon seems to have lost a little faith in a Tiger Woods figurine showing him pointing a finger. It has been reduced from $14.99 to $5.99. His fist pumping figurine has also been reduced from $14.99, but only to $8.95.

If you still feel uninspired, perhaps you might go back to eBay and drool at the Tame The Tiger Woods Bobblehead Doll.

For a mere $29.95, you can get a uniquely designed bobblehead with some astonishing features: A golf club wrapped around the Tiger's head; a bent fire hydrant ("Fire Hydrant Bobbles too!"); a base that reads "Tame the Tiger"; a bent steering wheel next to the Tiger; and, goodness, the top of base that will resemble cracked asphalt.

Oh, gosh, I have just read the small print. The Tame the Tiger Bobblehead will be not be ready to ship until April 15. Some things can just make you feel sad, can't they?

There are those who believe that Microsoft came up with the name Bing for its refreshed search engine after staring at the word "Bingo" for several days and then removing the last letter.

However, a small entity in St. Louis has decided that the name Bing was, is and always should be, theirs.

According to Ars Technica, Bing Information Design! has designs on some compensation from Microsoft, as it has used the delightful term, followed by a slightly less delightful exclamation point, ala Yahoo, since 2000.

Even to the most bleary eyes, Bing Information Design's Web site does not immediately stir confusion with Bing the search engine. Bing Information Design is "dedicated to taking tough, hard-to-define concepts and boiling them down into simple, easy-to-understand ideas."

So perhaps there might be those who would prefer a few pictures that would engender easy-to-understand ideas that might explain one thing: how could anyone confuse a massively promoted search engine from Microsoft with a minimally known company whose two founders "have over 25 years of experience in design, illustration, branding, information architecture and publishing"?

(Credit: Diego 3336/Flickr)

Bing Information Design's lawsuit says that Microsoft's Bing "causes confusion with regard to the relationship between the plaintiff and the defendant, confuses the public with regard to the origin of the plaintiff's services and dilutes the value of the plaintiff's trademark."

The lawsuit also suggests that Microsoft knew of the St. Louis Bing and that therefore Bing deserves "actual and punitive damages, including having Microsoft pay for corrective advertising to remedy the confusion it caused."

I am sure that many an ad agency would leap at the opportunity to create a campaign that says "Bing. The Decision Engine Decisively Not from St. Louis. And Decisively Lacking an Exclamation Point."

A Microsoft spokesperson told Ars Technica: "We believe this suit to be without merit and we do not believe there is any confusion in the marketplace with regard to the complainant's offerings and Microsoft's Bing."

It will be interesting to see what proof of marketplace confusion Bing Information Design's lawyers might offer. Has there truly been consternation in Missouri? Have people walked into Bing Information Design's offices expecting to find Steve Ballmer chewing on some ideas?

It will be also interesting to hear whose fine decision it was to put that lovely exclamation point after the Bing in the St. Louis company's name.

One should always have sympathy with the small fish in the big sea. But is this a slightly gratuitous attempt by Bing Information Design to gain a little cha-ching? One awaits the full evidence with an exclamation point in one's heart.

When you work at a marketing agency and someone asks you to design a Christmas card, your insides become enveloped by a feeling not unlike the morning after anesthetic-free appendix surgery.

So, in this festive and slightly flummoxing season, let us celebrate James Theophane Jr.

Not only is he blessed with a name that sounds like a domineering, elusive figure from "Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil", but he also has a heavenly talent for introducing art to technology and getting them to make out under the mistletoe.

According to his own telling of the story on Vimeo, Theophane was inspired by a bunch of obsolete cell phones that were lying around the office like art directors coming down after a Christmas party.

So he used them to create, in the beautiful British vernacular, a "mobile mobile" that hangs in his marketing agency's lobby.

It plays the sort of Christmas music that makes you want to shout very loudly at your local Starbucks baristas. However, through this medium, the effect is somehow inspirational rather than perspirational.

One can even play it live through one's Web browser at Xmas.lbi.co.uk/mobiletree.

His marketing agency, LBi, seemingly cannot decide whether its initials stand for Lost Boys International or London Beer Inebriates.

However, with the amount of work (detailed here) that went into creating this cell phone tribute to the end of 2009, the Lost Boys deserve one or two London beers. At the very least.

(Updated at 1:56 p.m. PST, after I put down my own bottle of Lapin Kulta.)

If you've ever spent a long night drinking with Finns, you may have noted that after the 10th beer, they can become jolly, effusive, and positively inventive. Well, please hark the words of Martti Roth, an alleged employee of Intel Finland, who thought of something rather special while under the influence of alcohol.

I am not libeling him, truly. Because Roth says he really did come up with the notion, while at a bar, that he and his Intel friends should create the world's biggest Intel chime ever by firing themselves out of cannons.

On the special Intel Cannonbells site, Roth declared: "I thought about the biggest, most exciting way we could create those five notes. And the longer I stayed in the bar, the more sense it made."

Roth says he is a field applications engineer. And his family has a history with cannons. No, not in some 19th century war, but, well, it sounds like a tragic story.

"In 1906, my great grandfather tried to fire himself from a cannon over the widest part of the river Vantaa in Helsinki," Roth said on the site.

I cannot imagine why he might have made this interesting choice. In answer to the question "did he make it?" Roth replied: "Some of him did. Funny really, but on the day [of the Intel Cannonbells launch], I really felt as though he was looking down on me and guiding me through the air towards that big, metal pipe. It was very emotional."

I cannot possibly suggest that Roth did this interview when still under the influence of the finest Lapin Kulta (supposedly Finland's finest beer). Or that, as some (including the site's disclaimer writers) might suggest, he is merely an actor.

Oh, all right, here's the full, tucked-away disclaimer: "All copy and videos are part of a marketing campaign for Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow. No Intel employees were harmed in the making of this film. All characters featured in the videos were played by actors specially trained in silly costumes and Finnish accents. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to fire anyone out of a cannon."

Still, I trust that the video will inspire you to aim higher in the coming year to create technological feats that will truly make a noise in the commercial world. Even if it might make you mistrust Finns a little in the immediate future.

Here is what has been reported.

According to Florida Today, a woman tweeted at 5:22 p.m. Monday about the fog over Brevard County in Florida. Some time between 5:22 p.m. and 5:38 p.m., her 2-year-old son fell into a swimming pool and was found floating in it.

911 records reportedly show that his mother called the paramedics at 5:38 p.m. Monday. At 6:12 p.m., she reportedly sent an update to her Twitter page, Military_Mom. It read: "Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool." (The tweet has since been removed.)

Her name is Shellie Ross. She is a regular tweeter and has a blog called Blog4Mom. Not long after she tweeted for her 5,300 followers' prayers, her 2-year-old son, Bryson, was pronounced dead.

At 11:08 p.m. Monday, she reportedly tweeted: "Remember my million dollar baby," along with a picture of her dead son.

(Credit: CC Appfrica/Flickr)

The Huffington Post reported that her tweets caused some people to offer little sympathy.

@jalynsandoval (whose Twitter page has since been removed) reportedly tweeted: "military_mom 's fault for not keeping an eye on her son while he was next to the pool. she was to (sic) busy with twitter i guess. RIP kid."

Shellie Ross, military_mom, reportedly replied to this tweet: "@jalynsandoval you are an ass, I was outside w/him and it took 2 sec for him to slip away, I hope U never feel this pain u ass."

Florida Today reported that Ross' friends describe her as "a fantastic mother who is devoted to her children." Moreover, Brevard County authorities reportedly describe it as an accidental drowning.

A child is dead. A mother sent Twitter updates. And some who don't know her criticized her actions.

This is what has been reported. Can anyone make sense of it? Should anyone make sense of it? Or does the very use of Twitter, given its public nature, make everyone fair game for even passing critics?

The minute you tweet, you sacrifice your privacy for the sake of some greater sense of connection, some greater sense of urgency. A tweet is a report, one that will subsequently be re-reported and re-interpreted.

They may call it social media. But the society it brings together isn't always one of your choosing.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but art, it seems, is whatever a court says it is.

The folks at Lucasfilm, creators of the "Star Wars" franchise, took the designer of the original Stormtrooper costume to court in the UK and had their light sabers thrust right back at them.

According to London's Times, Andrew Ainsworth, the man who originally created the helmets and armor for the first "Star Wars" movie, decided to capitalize on his design by selling replicas made from the original mold online.

Lucasfilm clearly thought Ainsworth's view of copyright was from a very strange planet. So, after taking him to court and winning in the US in 2006, it thought it would strike a further victory in British courts.

However, Britain can often show itself to be a constellation like no other.

So perhaps one should not be entirely surprised that Mr. Justice Mann and, subsequently, three more justices in the Court of Appeal, decided that Stormtrooper uniforms are not art, but mere industrial design. You see, art enjoys British copyright protection for 70 years. But industrial design is only worth 15 years of protection.

But is it art?

(Credit: CC Andrew Rueda/Flickr)

Lucasfilm promises it will now send its legal Stormtroopers all the way to the British Supreme Court. The company told the Times: "The judges in the case dismissed the creative efforts of film designers and prop makers in general, saying that props are the work of people who 'did not make it as artists' and not fine art that should be valued under the law."

Ainsworth was, at the time of the costumes' creation, an industrial designer. This is what he told the Times of his design: "I didn't even know it was for a film to begin with." At the time the costumes were made, the machine Ainsworth used was, he told the Times, "churning out kayaks and watersports stuff."

Almost every court case in the world these days seems to be about money rather than art. So it's hard to imagine that these fine judges didn't scratch their rather beautifully designed wigs and feel sympathy for Ainsworth, as he faced the conglomerated Darth Vaders from Northern California.

Surely they had heard that every part of moviemaking is supposed to be art-- even the making of bacon sandwiches on set. So their interpretation is, indeed, an interesting one.

If Britain's Supreme Court doesn't offer Lucasfilm relief, what might the Lucas Army do?

Perhaps it will create a new "Star Wars" movie--entitled "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones II"--in which the bad guys are movie prop makers who attempt to create a parallel universe called Replica World.

In the pulsating finale, The Jedi Master would take on the Prop Master in a weird industrial design facility somewhere west of, um, London. Surely you can hardly wait.

Selling isn't about telling people things. It's actually about making them feel something while you're telling them things.

I mention this because a new series of little Web videos have wafted beneath my browser. They come courtesy of Google. And they are advertising different aspects of the Chrome browser.

Now, I imagine that if I had to listen to Larry Page and Sergey Brin tell me about Chrome it might be enchanting. Well, for a couple of seconds. But it wouldn't be half as enchanting as these little works of art.

Each one centers on a positive aspect of Chrome--stability, speed, or security, for example.

Watching these things makes me think I'd absent-mindedly wandered into some museum of modern art and been seduced by illegitimate, slightly crazy offspring of Salvador Dali and the blokes who made Wallace and Gromit.

Strangely, these ads were actually outsourced to ad agencies, Bartle, Bogle and Hegarty and Glue. And, indeed, the movies seem like they were made with a bit of old bartle and a dollop of glue.

But wouldn't you love to see these things interrupt your NFL game this Sunday, rather than yet another car spot? Oh, come on, Google. You can afford it.

Playing fantasy sports can be as addictive as watching "The Biggest Loser."

My own lowest point was when I went to see the Golden State Warriors play the Los Angeles Clippers and cheered when the Clippers' Michael Olowakandi snagged his 10th rebound. I am a Warriors fan, but Olowokandi was in my NBA fantasy team.

It took a team of bullish psychiatrists and several wily girlfriends to remove me from this iniquitous pursuit, which is why I have some sympathy with Cameron Pettigrew and three of his fellow Fidelity Investments employees.

Actually, they are former Fidelity employees, as, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, they were all fired from Fidelity's Westlake, Texas office for playing fantasy NFL during their hours of employment.

Fidelity is the world's No. 1 sponsor of mutual funds. These are, I believe, the folks who tell you in their ads to follow the green line on your way to having hairy gray ears and a condo in Boca. It sounds like a sure thing, but we all know how this 401(k) thing can sometimes work out.

So perhaps you might find it curious that Fidelity frowns on gambling. And fantasy NFL, where money might be involved, is, according to the company, gambling.

"We have clear policies that relate to gambling. Participation in any form of gambling through the use of Fidelity time or equipment or any other company resource is prohibited," Fidelity spokesman Vin Loporchio told the Star-Telegram.

He added: "In addition to being illegal in a lot of places, it can also be disruptive. We want our employees to be focused on our customers and clients."

Righteous words, indeed. However, Pettigrew made some rather human points. "Firing a guy for being in a $20 fantasy league? Let's be honest; that's a complete overreaction," he told the Star-Telegram.

This whole thing started in October when e-mails pertaining to a different fantasy league fell before the eyes of Fidelity management. It was then that they realized that Pettigrew was the commissioner of an office league.

Pettigrew, however, said that managers and leaders played in at least 10 fantasy leagues around the office. This was despite the fact that Fidelity does have a policy against fantasy leagues, a policy that Pettigrew says was routinely ignored.

Even though Pettigrew says he never sent fantasy-related e-mails at work, it all seems to have come down to two IMs that Pettigrew received.

"One of my buddies sent me something about how bad Trent Edwards was playing or something like that," Pettigrew told the Star-Telegram. "So they called me in and talked to me for about 90 minutes on everything I ever knew about fantasy football. They interrogated me as though I was some sort of international gambling kingpin."

Shortly afterward, four league commissioners, including Pettigrew, were fired.

Corporations have many rules. Indeed, I know people in corporations who rather enjoy making up rules and enforcing them.

But perhaps the first rule should be to ascertain whether an employee's private behavior, even if occasionally on company time, actually does adversely affect his work performance. Or whether it might actually help it.