Weekly round up week ending June 27

Of course I had to re-write this post. I started it on Thursday and was planning to pay tribute to Farrah Fawcett (with a RIP for Ed McMahon), but then when we lost Michael Jackson too, I had to change my plans, as I felt driven to pay homage to these three influences on my childhood.

So with that done, I move on to other stories and events for the week (before it exploded).

I have to credit Chris Brogan with this one. Dunkin Donuts has come up with this awesome idea called a Dunkin Run. The idea is that you are going to do a coffee run for your friends or office mates and instead of running around writing down people’s orders on a slip of paper, or having others hand you a piece of paper with their order with goodness knows what kind of handwriting, you can send an email (or text) out to a list of people with the time you are going to do the run and provide a link to where people can place their order for you run. Then you can print it out or download it to your phone and off you go! You can even update your Facebook with your run status as well as set-up email lists and favorites, it is a really cool idea! I wish Starbucks did the same, no Dunkin Donuts around here!

This past week the mystery of the whereabouts of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford were resolved when he was caught by a reported at the Atlanta airport returning from Argentina. The fact that he took a few days off to visit his mistress does not bother me, that is his business. The fact that it was an unscheduled vacation not even his staff knew where was is a big problem. That part is unacceptable for a governing official. (And then again maybe someone on his staff did know but wasn’t saying, but that has not been what was reported).

Governor Sanford’s announcement came one day after Senator John Ensign of Nevada (R), apologized after revealing last week that he had an affair with a campaign staffer and was resigning from the GOP leadership. Again, maybe it is the French influence on me, but I just don’ think politicians should lose their jobs because of affairs. Doctors, lawyers, CEO’s don’t, why should these guys (and gals)? This is a private, not state matter, to be dealt with by the family and the family only.

Speaking of French and politics, of course I can’t go a week without commenting on something happening in France! This week was the cabinet changes affecting most of the ministers, or as I am calling it: Let’s all do the Sarko shuffle (sung to Let’s all do the Super Bowl Shuffle). Where it isn’t really fair to pick on President Sarkozy because this is not an action that is unique to him.

It is one of the oddest thing about the French government if you ask me. The President can change his ministers around any time he wants. It’s weird, the people he assigns don’t even have to have a background in the subject matter. I guess it is because most politicians (and industrial leaders) come from the same university and people must think that is enough (I don’t but that is another story). The President 3 top ministers kept their positions, but all others were changed and 8 were basically fired to be replaced by 8 new ones.

One of the most interesting additions is the nephew of former President Francois Mitterand. Frederic Mitterand, the first openly gay minister, will be Minister of Culture. He wrote a great book on the Cannes Film Festival and I have watch him in interviews a couple of times, it’s a good choice. Rachida Dati won a seat in the European Parliament (also know as Siberia) so she has been disposed of and Yama Rade was changed from her high profile position of as the Secretary of State for Human Rights to the Minister of Sport! Poor girl! I totally disagree with these moves.

Normally there are plenty of Twitter stories all week long, but there seemed to be some nuggets I thought might be interesting to you. Peter Faceinelli (or as I know him Mr. Jennie Garth!) of Twilight fame(?) had a bet (boring) with one of his buddies, Rob DeFranco to see who if he could reach 500,000 followers by June 19th. If Peter lost he would have to give up his Twilight director’s chair, and if Rob lost he had to dance down Hollywood Boulevard in a bikini (not boring). Peter won, so the resulting You Tube video should be entertaining, in any case he is twittering the experience.

In sports news, it appears that Shaquille O’Neal found out that he was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers when someone tweeted Shaq and asked if it was true. He stated he had not heard that! Some way to find out! It wasn’t like it was a huge surprise, it had been a topic of discussions during the basketball season. At least he is taking it well!

On the scary side, one of the top Twitterati, Guy Kawasaki had his Twitter account hacked and it was used to send out a link to porn which then contained a trojan virus. On the same day I read about this, another social media maven, Connie Reese has closed now made her account private which she announced to her subscribers in an email explanation which included the story of an author friend of hers, Sherrilyn Kenyon, who had her Twitter account highjacked the week of her latest book release and it still remains unresolved. Keep your heads up out there!

Transformers 2 is out! I love action movies, and producer Michael Bay does great ones (in my opinion): Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, Bad Boys, The Island…and of course the original Transformers. We are going to see it in IMAX this weekend and I cannot wait! I am NOT a fan of Shia LeBeouf, but I thought this story was darling. During an appearance on msnbc, Shia was introduced to a fan from outside, who Matt L. and Meredith V. brought in to meet. She wanted to know what kind of girls he liked and if he had a girlfriend, then he asked what she was doing the rest of the day, it was cute!

Well, this post is already very long, so I am going to call it done.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the RSS feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.