Movie Product Placement Pros and Cons: A Tutorial

It’s a little known fact that Nestor Bynum, President and CEO of the Mars Company personally turned down Steven Spielberg’s request to feature Mars’s M&Ms in a most positive light in his 1982 film “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.” Bynum’s woefully inept decision resulted in The Hershey Company approving the same request for their Reese’s Pieces, sales of which skyrocketed upon the film’s release.

After hearing of Bynum’s inexplicably dense business decision, he was summarily fired by his Board of Directors.

Landing on his feet, however, Bynum soon headed the Fava Bean Growers of America, where – determined not to make the same mistake twice – he hurriedly approved without review Orion Pictures’ request for a fava beans mention in an upcoming film. Sadly, that mention was 1991’s “The Silence of The Lambs,” specifically Hannibal Lecter’s line “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.” Fava bean sales plummeted to record lows, never fully recovering.

BILL

March to Madness

A certain former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives has reprimanded the President for making his NCAA men’s tournament basketball picks. Be honest now: who doesn’t love a morality lecture from a guy who cheated on his wife while she was lying in a hospital bed with cancer and then blamed his actions on his love of country? Now that’s character, and that is why this writer will be voting for Newt Gingrich for President in 2012.

BILL

Reason 1,291 Why I'm Single

I was in a conference room the other day and saw some earrings someone had left on a cabinet. I grabbed them on the way out, then set them on my desk with a note by them reading “YOURS??”

A female coworker came by, took one look at them and said: “These are picture hangers.”

BILL

"Red Riding Hood"

And remember, kids, when walking through the big bad wolf inhabited woods, always, always wear a very visible scalding bright crimson over most of your body.

BILL

"Red Riding Hood"

And remember, kids, when walking through the big bad wolf inhabited woods, always, always wear a very visible scalding bright crimson over most of your body.

BILL

A Side of Editorial With My Quake/Tsunami Combo Please

Funny how – with absolute, collective, knee jerk immediacy – we go right to the scientists to help steer us through the unsettling, dark reminders that we are all just riders on this mercurial and often ornery globe.

And yet… when it comes to the long-studied phenomenon of climate change, there are elements – I call them “rubes” for short - who consider these same scientists to be just flat out wrong, said disputation often spawned by no scientific background whatsoever.

Why the difference? The former requires no change of behavior; the latter is quite clear in stating we must.

BILL

Jolly Old St. Peter's Rule

I have a theory that if indeed there is a God, a heaven and a hell, if they can’t decide where your soul should spend eternity, they ask but one question of you: did you ever dress up as Santa for a group of innocent children?

If the answer is yes, they cast you into the fiery bowels of Hell for eternity.

BILL