nike FAIL (get it? anyone?)

[ETA: jgesteve updates that this is an art student's project of some kind and not actually an ad that Nike hired and paid for and ran in the magazine. CMYK is a design and graphics magazine, after all, so I guess they were showcasing someone's work rather than running this ad for Nike? Here's GLAAD on the subject, and here's CMYK's response as well. I don't know. Seems if I were Nike I'd be lighting up some phone lines to Legal, but it's hard to say whether the context made it clear that it wasn't Nike after all. I mean, evidently not, right?, a full page in a magazine? But surely the magazine knows what's fair use and what isn't. In any case, it appears we are to be angry at CMYK, its publisher Curtis Clarkson (who evidently didn't realize there was any homophobic reading of that ad copy, is how homophobic he is), and the jackass art student who thought that was a good tag line, but not at Nike. (For what it's worth, a snoop around the internets earlier today found me another "ad" in the same collage-y style with wonky type, in the CMYK showcase of someone named Nicolas Schmidt-Fitzner, with the tag line "when your son plays the tuba, nobody wins". Not as bad as the ballet one, if you ask me, but still no good.)]

jgesteve linked to a post of brewergnome's about a Nike ad that has got everybody so far pretty steamed. Let's have a look, shall we? (I grabbed the picture from brewergnome, but comments over there report, and a little more research assistance from Uncle Google confirms, that the ad is on p.10 of the latest CMYK Magazine.)



The copy, if its wonkiness and cutoff in the fold obscure it for you, reads, "the only thing worse than going to the ballet is going to the ballet to watch your son. raise a champion. nike kids."


jgesteve complained to Nike, GLAAD, and CMYK, and heard back from the magazine's president promptly, although I'm having a hard time seeing the responses as boiling down to anything but "We're not homophobic; some of our best friends are fags". You read it how you read it, of course. In any event, I'm glad my gear is Under Armour.

yays

Some months ago, I overextended a cable and knocked my trusty external HD from the lower shelf of the coffee table onto the floor. (Lesson learned! When the sucker is connected to a laptop, it lives on the floor. It can live on the table when it's connected to a desktop or to nothing.) Only one bit went flying, and I was able to put the case back together around the actual HD, but it's never been 100% right since then - remember how the old computer was saying the device could run faster if I plugged it into a USB 2.0 port, which is totally what its ports were, and we concluded it was something wrong with the computer, which it may have been -- but it was really not often recognizing the external at all, and now the new computer has taken to saying "Look, we can't fix this external, so we'll show you what's on it and we might let you play with it, but you can't. change. anything." Time, in short, to back that sucker up before taking even one more step.

Bought a 1TB MyBook on eBay for $137.50, yo, including shipping. It arrived today, and it's firewired up to Mr. Smith, and the old external is happily transferring all its data, and I will feel a lot better in the morning when it's all over on something sturdier (read: which I have never knocked onto the floor).