Bet on Bush
: Fortune points to opportunities to bet on war with Iraq.
: The Iraq Attack pool says March 3 is the day.
: Tradesports.com has a lot of activity on bets saying Saddam will be out by the end of April.
: BetOnSports.com’s odds say the best chance of invasion is between 2/22 and 3/14; they say ground attack will begin 1-3 weeks after the initial attack; and they say that Saddam’s likely status in June will MIA or political prisoner.
Reality is just life without a script
: TV execs call reality TV “unscripted” TV. Reality has a bad reputation.
: The Times has a list of this summer’s unscripted shows and lots of them: Roseanne returns; a Hilton sister trashes TV; lots of sex games; and a few talent shows.
: Mark my words: We will overdose on reality. It will not go away but it will fade away, starting this summer.
War with France? Jamais!
: Jack Kliger, the head of Hachette, the U.S. arm of the French publisher (and a nice guy with whom I used to work) tells the Media Industry Newsletter [via IWantMedia.com] that he sees no anti-French sentiment affecting his biz and further:
History lesson: France, says Kliger, “is the only major country that the United States has not been at war with” in noting past belligerents England, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, China (Korean War), Russia (“Cold War”), and even Canada (War of 1812).
Welcome, New York Times readers
: If you happen by here thanks to a link in today’s story about Google acquisition of Pyra/Blogger, my earlier posts on the topic are here and here. (And I repeat my standing caveats: I have no inside knowledge of Google’s plans and this is just a personal site.)
: And Washington Post readers coming from Howard Kurtz‘ mention of posts on American Candidate, you can find them here and here.
: And to those looking for parodies of Tom Ridge’s deservedly parodied Ready.gov site try try here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.
: Update: More gallows humor here.
French jokes
: It’s wrong, so wrong. But I’ll confess: I went searching for jokes about the French — timely fodder that they are — and I found plenty. (Now don’t give me any hell about this or you’ll only prove the the French and those who love them are humorless. I’m just hunting down the zeitgeist, folks. And I’m finding a surprising lot of it relating to the French.)
I found some classy bon mots from a snippet of a novel at Open Brackets by Gail Armstrong (who lives in France). Our protagonist at a novelty marketing company finds America in a jingoistic fervor and so he makes a killing with timely bumper stickers [some sure to show up on CafePress any minute] including:
1. Free the cheese!
2. All we are saying is give war a chance.
3. Typical: 85% of French people say Belgians invented fries.
4. I
