Day 1.027: Lettuce - listen

What would induce someone to buy a car with fake wood-effect transfers on it? No, I've no idea either - but someone somewhere in a marketing office thought it would sell, and it looks like they were right.

The hard-sell is big over here of course and charitable organisations are amongst the hardest. I have had more people than I can count phone me to ask me if I can just support their brave firefighters/veterans/victims/police deputies... I have now decided to just say no to people who phone me, but that does leave me either giving nothing to charity or having to decide who to give to. This evening we decided to give a modest donation to our local NPR station. This is connected in some way I don't fully understand with promoting the school and Exile #2 in particular is an avid listener, so it makes some sense.

In reality, NPR doesn't really make sense at all. It is non-commercial (hence the donations) but it does run 'statements' from major donors - these are not allowed to sell any particular product or encourage you to do anything so they are not commercials. Of course, as any student of Naomi Klein knows, these days the global market place is about brands not products and these statements certainly get the brand name out into the marketplace. None of this really matters when the programming is good and you don't get much better than the BBC News (a real breath of fresh air in the news world over here) and since we don't pay our license fee any more, it's probably reasonable for us to make a contribution.

We actually wrote a check, but had we paid with a bunch of greenbacks we could have (maybe) seen why they call it lettuce.