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Confessions of an American spin doctor in China

Regular readers will recall that Imagethief became a father earlier this year. Having a child requires new parents to undertake many new responsibilities. These include the obvious, such as the care and feeding of an infant, and some things that you really just don't think much about in advance. Among those are the bureaucratic hoops that the parents of new children have to go through, especially in China.
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Predictably for Skype, the mainstream coverage of the TOM.com keyword trapping scandal has grown, with associated reputation damage for the former naive idealists at Skype and their parent, E-Bay.
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If you don't know the story, you can read up on the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal (and again in the Journal here, with more focus on the backlash for Skype).
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Although Imagethief is not particularly religious, he is by descent a card carrying member of The Chosen People. He was therefore highly amused by the two following videos:

Jon Stewart, in one of his all-time great rants, on congress breaking for Rosh Hashana this week, at the height of the economic crisis:
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Most PR people will tell you that pitching bloggers is a bit different than pitching mainstream journalists (although now that many mainstream journalists have blogs the line is blurring). If you pitch a mainstream journalist badly, say by misjudging his interests or poorly researching his beat and articles, he'll ignore you, or perhaps hang up on you. A blogger will often mock you publicly, publish your pitch e-mail and shame you or your agency by name.
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I don't normally go for the straight Chinglish stuff, but this one is worth sharing. Via Language Log:

Full explanation at Language Log. A better translation of this might be, "The world's biggest sporting celebration is about to burst forth!" But even so, the copy writing is, shall we say, unfortunate.

Hat tip: Bishop Joey

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A note to San Francisco-based readers: The San Francisco Film Society is hosting a screening of my brother's documentary "Full Battle Rattle" on October 17. Details on the venue and a link to ticketing are on the San Francisco Film Society Website. The description of the film:

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