Only in America: Big Burden on U.S. Hospitals

Not sure what to think of this one. Looks like hospitals are going XXXL with their equipment as patients grow bigger. You've got to be proud to be an American. One question comes to mind: Are larger people more prone to get sick or is this a general trend of fat-assness everywhere?

Buy Our Shoes, Just Not This One

Quick and silly entry. I received an email from shoebuy.com advertising a sale on athletic shoes. The email included a picture of a nice sneaker which awakened my consumer instinct (the one that my wonderful mother keeps yelling at me about). So, I searched all over the site for this particular shoe, with no success. Finally, for the heck of it, I wrote the customer support people over there, asking for the name of the shoe in the picture. The friendly folks wrote back saying they couldn't find it....


So here's quite a novel marking idea. Advertise a sale using a shoe that you don't even offer. That will whet their appetites!

To be fair, I had bought several pairs of shoes at shoebuy.com and have been very happy with the service. They even suggested a couple shoes that were "quite similar" (not really) to the one in the photo. But this is a little weird...

Mad About Scientology

Check out this video of the founder of Scientology. It's heavily edited, but it still gives a quite an unsettling picture of a man worshipped by Tom Cruise and other nutty celebrities. I remember seeing his bust at one of the Scientology "churches" I had the misfortune to visit many years ago. This is the guy who created the Super Adventure Club?


While we're at it, take a look at this long article on the "church" (aka the cult) in the Rolling Stone. One encouraging statistic: A recent survey found only 55,000 people in the entire United States who claimed to be Scientologists. That's including Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Kirstie Alley (where was Scientology when she gobbled all those burgers?) and all those other celebrities snatched by the nutties.

French National Champions a Headache for Europe

The Friday edition of WSJ Europe has an interesting coupling of stories on its front page today. First, a great article on the French drive to create national champions, which may not be so good for all of Europe. The article says France has more top-tier companies in key industries than any other country in Europe. But, paraphrasing former EU competition czar Mario Monti, who does that really help? The French citizens? The French economy? Or does it just fill the pockets of the French elite? It certainly doesn't do much for the European project France has been promoting for decades, at least on the surface. Not too long ago President Jacques Chirac told the East Europeans should know when to shut up, underlying the point that the French see the EU as theirs to run. So, I guess, what's good for the French elite, is good for the EU. Or something like that.


And, on the same page, we see that U.S. telecoms equipment company Lucent is in merger talks with French rival Alcatel. Looks like Lucent would get the upper hand. Wonder how well this would fit into the French economic model. I get a feeling this could get quite messy.

PiS'ed Off at Kwasniewski

Now Poland's ruling Law and Order Party (PiS) is going after former president Aleksander Kwasniewski, promising to look into alleged financial irregularities while he was the Minister of Youth more two decades ago under the communist regime. I'm no fan of Kwasniewski, but this is bordering on the absurd. Come on boys and girls, how about doing some governing instead of looking for people to go after. One of my fav Polish bloggers, beatroot, has a nice list of PiS's enemies.

Let's be frank here. Pretty much everybody associated with the old regime in Poland was dirty, opportunistic, or, even more likely, both. Despite this, Poles have voted for Kwasniewski twice in the last 10 years. Let it go, PiS, and investigate more recent corruption. There's plenty of it out there.

So, will Kwasniewski make U.S. his home now, with a base in DC? Whatever happened to his aspirations to become the next head of the U.N. Despite the frivolous nature of these charges, I'm sure they won't help Kwas at the U.N.

Tom Bans South Park: Part II

Tom Cruise again flexes his muscle in his galactic battle with South Park. The media is unsurprisingly playing up this one, but there's little mention of the fact that Cruise has already scored one by blocking the broadcast of the infinitely funny "Trapped in the Closet" episode outside the U.S. (as mentioned on this blog). Scary, but the cult wins again on this one. But even though Isaac Hayes is leaving the cast, the Chef shall return, at least in the new episode this week...

And for all you budding lawyers out there, here's an interesting column on whether Tom could win a lawsuit against South Park creators. The nuts at the Scientology church have often used lawsuits as intimation tools in the past, so I'm a little surprised Tom has not decided to sue here.

PS. Sorry, little late with this post, but I was out in sunny Costa Rica for a while. ;)

Kwasniewski to Teach at Georgetown

Interesting news at my Alma Mater. Former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski will start teaching classes at Georgetown University this Spring. Georgetown has attracted some of the biggest names in Polish politics in the recent past, including current head of the central bank Leszek Balcerowicz when I was still a student there. The university was also a home to Polish WWII hero Jan Karski.

Unfortunately I won't be heading to DC until Fall. And who knows where Kwasniewski will be then.

Google's Selective Disclosure?

Google has been accidentally releasing all kinds of market moving information lately, ranging from growth warnings by the CFO to plans for online backup space on a "GDrive". Now, among slides from an annual meeting with analysts the world's most benevolent company inadvertently posted a 2006 revenue forecast of $9.5 billion. Google followed up with a press release, saying the figures "were not created for financial planning purposes and should not be regarded as financial guidance."

That's interesting, because if this was any form of guidance, the Internet superstar could be guilty of selectively disclosing market-moving information to analysts. This from a company who has publicly refused to provide guidance since its flotation.

WSJ quotes UBS analyst Benjamin Schachter that the figure appears to line up with Wall Street average estimates. Well, no duh! If Google indeed shared this with them at a meeting in the early fourth quarter of last year, it's no surprise the numbers line up...

Streisand Can't Spell As She Rips "C Student" Bush

From the "You Can't Make It Up" Department. Barbra Streisand, that beacon of Hollywood wisdom, recently released a rant against George Bush, the "C student". Unfortunately the posting itself was riddled with spelling errors.... The note has been fixed by now, but here's a sample of the original.


Talking about shooting yourself in the foot...

WSJ: Hungry AT&T Could Help Vodafone

So WSJ's Heard on the Street dials in (sorry) with their take on Vodafone's hand after the announcement of the AT&T/BellSouth deal. The Journal thinks Vodafone will now be able to extract a bigger price for its stake in Verizon Wireless from Verizon. Clear enough, especially since Vodafone is also in talks to sell its loss-making Japanese unit. But despite the shareholder pressure I still have a tough time thinking that Vodafone (market cap $128 billion), the top cellphone company in the world by revenue, would back away from the world's largest market. Any private equity firms out there willing to partner up and grab Verizon (market cap $99 bln)? I know, quite a stretch, but still...

WSJ suggests Vodafone could instead buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom. But the Germans had recently said they're not big on selling anymore.

Long Live AT&T II

So the deal is official. AT&T will pay $67 billion for BellSouth to become the undisputed king of telecoms in the United States.

Here's an interesting tidbit. AT&T, former SBC, will now hold all of Cingular. In 2004, Cingular gobbled up AT&T Wireless and got rid of that brand. Now Cingular will disappear in favor of... AT&T. So we have two companies that bought AT&T brands and now will proudly carry the name of their acquisitions.

The combined company will bring together 4 of the 7 Baby Bells that were stripped from the original AT&T back in 1984. (See Timeline)

AT&T is Dead. Long Live AT&T

The Wall Street Journal is reporting in its online edition that SBC, which recently swallowed AT&T and renamed itself after the once mighty telecoms giant, is about to buy BellSouth. If it goes through, the deal would make the new AT&T an unquestioned leader in all kinds of telecoms services in the U.S. It will have full control over the top cellphone company Cingular and will dominate long distance and Internet services arenas. Oh, and by the way, it will have a market capitalization of $160 billion.

But don't expect a lot of anti-competion action, with the company being able to point to big wireless competitors -- Verizon Wireless, Sprint and T-Mobile -- as well as cable TV providers and Internet phone companies that are taking chunks of the telecoms market. So AT&T, at least in name, will again be the telecoms giant.

Wonder if this will put further pressure on Verizon to squeeze out its partner Vodafone from their joint venture Verizon Wireless. There's already been plenty of talk about the British operator pulling out, so maybe this will be the final push. Or here's a crazy idea. Maybe Vodafone, hurting from disappointing growth, would be interested in buying Verizon? They can't abandon the world's largest market, can they?

Another possible deal: Verizon buying Qwest.

What did Bush Know?

Interesting clarification from AP on their widely picked up report on the discussions ahead of Katrina. AP concedes President Bush was not told before Hurricane Katrina hit land that the storm might cause a "breach" of New Orleans' levees. Instead there was talk of an "overrun."

Now in some ways this reminds me of law school, where every little word matters. And I think it does in this case, too. Merriam Webster defines breach as "a broken, ruptured, or torn condition or area... a gap". Their definition of overrun is "to flow over". The crucial distinction, I would imagine, would be the amount of water that would get through and the kind of disaster it would cause. AP: "The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about flood waters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking."

Of course, I don't dispute the fact that both the governments at all levels displayed all kinds of incompetence that has exposed incredible vulnerabilities to disasters and other potential problems, including possible mass terrorism attacks. But we do have to be careful about not introducing inaccurate information to muddy the water even more.

Getting Lost in the Tech "Support" Jungle

New York Times' tech reporter David Pogue wrote a piece laced with sarcasm about trying to get tech support at Dell. I also had some serious problems with those guys after I bought a Pocket PC from Dell a year ago. Tons of calls, little result. Dell says they get awards for tech support and I always wonder how that could possibly be. My friend Vadim Makarenko even recounted my troubles in an article in a Polish daily on outsourcing to India. Believe me, Tom, Dick and Jane on the phone are chatting with you from Bangalore.

Just like Pogue, I have resisted buying Dell equipment ever since, even though Northwestern Law was offering a discount on their laptops. And I'm glad about that. My Thinkpad's fan recently got annoyingly loud. I placed one call, and the next business day a super nice female techie from IBM showed up at my door to install a new one. Not bad.

Butcher of Srebrenica Still at Large

Well, another rumor, another disappointment. Looks like Ratko Mladic is still out there. The rumor mill is still churning and maybe he will soon be captured. For now, The Hague will have to wait.

Mladic Ready to Surrender?

There's been rumors reported over the last 24 hours that one of the two most wanted Bosnian Serb leaders may soon be heading to The Hague for a trial at the Yugoslavia Tribunal. There's been rumors in the past that Ratko Mladic, the general responsible for the killing of about 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, was about to be captured. I remembered receiving several calls like that when I was on duty at the Amsterdam office before I left in July of last year. But this is looking like the big one. Great news!


On top of the genocide at Srebrenica, Mladic and the Bosnian Serb civilian leader, the crazy former psychologist Radovan Karadzic, are also indicted for 12,000 deaths during the siege of Sarajevo. That doesn't count thousands of other men and women killed in the war. These crooks, along with Slobodan Milosevic, perpetrated some of the worst war crimes since WWII. The trials at the Hague tribunal are not pretty, but they do show that the world, even if incredibly late, will not let these atrocities go unpunished.

Of course Slobo's trial still snails on and who knows when it will end. But, nonetheless, I am glad Mladic may be heading to The Hague very soon. Good luck to the reporters in the Netherlands who will have a lot of work on their hands soon.

Poland to Iran: No 'Research' to Back Holocaust Denials

When I see things like this I am proud to be Polish. Poland's foreign minister says the country would never allow Iranian "researchers" to "examine" the scale of the mass murder of Jews and other victims of the German Nazis on Polish soil during WWII. To give the slightest legitimacy to pseudo historians denying the Holocaust and the unprecedented destructions of human beings in Nazi death camps would be a crime in itself.

One of the most moving and painful experiences of my life was walking through deaths factory in Auschwitz. The wooden shacks, the collapsed gas room. It is beyond any understanding that just 60 or so years ago human beings were capable of such evil. And so I'm enraged that there are people out there who want to downplay the Nazi atrocities. Did the Nazis kill six million Jews or was it five and a half? I think you're missing the point.

Oh, and believe it or not, part of my tuition is supporting one of these Holocaust deniers right here at Northwestern. The university did condemn the comments and I appreciate the fact that the man should not be fired for views not related to his job. But it is still shocking that anybody educated could make these comments especially here in my own backyard.

Chicago Poles Wanted Trib to Cover Pres

Came across this note on some Polish community in Chicago complaining that the city's biggest daily, the Chicago Tribune, didn't do enough to cover the visit of Poland's President Lech Kaczynski. I mean the Polish president is here and it's not on the front page???

Of course not. There was no news coming out of Kaczynski's meetings with the Polish American Congress and the mayor. This is something that folks out there often don't catch. Journalists are not PR people. We don't cover every movement of a politician if he doesn't make any news. Now if he came with his twin brother Jaroslaw and did a little skit from the movie they did when they were kids, that would be something else!


The Trib did send its London correspondent to Warsaw to do a piece on Kaczynski, the conservative voice in Europe, before he came to the U.S.

Polish Catholics Not Crazy about New Madonna

Muslims, it seems, are not the only folks unhappy with news media playing with religious icons. In Poland, the Catholic church is up in arms about a pop culture magazine Machina superimposing the image of Madonna, the singer, over Madonna, the mother of Jesus. This is especially irritating to some Poles because the image used is the Black Madonna, Poland's most revered religious icon.


How do I feel about this? I think it's silly. Come on, people, get a life. And even worse, looks like some Poles are desperately putting themselves in line with fanatical Muslims calling for heads of anybody even remotely responsible for the Mohammed caricatures. For God's sake...

I Don't Get Jon Stewart...

Looks like I'm not the only one who doesn't get Jon Stewart. I tried several times to watch his show, even staying up late to catch it on CNN International when I lived in Europe. In my view he's mostly a self-righteous whiner and complainer with a "too-cool-to-care" attitude. Man, am I losing some serious cool points among my friends for saying this.


And I don't get Seinfeld. Probably for similar reasons...