The idea here is that you can look at something and take it at face value: See a homeless person? Probably a lazy drunk. Hear a youngster speaking gibberish? The schools are failing. In both cases, what's going on may be entirely different, but you'd have to dig just a bit deeper to get at the truth. Maybe we have a few examples right here...

Shockumentation

The Benetton company has a tradition of running edgy ads. Their new $15 million campaign, called "Food for Life," focuses on the faces and bodies of the world's hungry and continues Benetton's emphasis on making people think just a bit harder.

Here's an example, showing an armless man whose metal prosthesis terminates in a spoon. More examples are available at the link above, or at Benetton's site, which includes the background stories of the people in the photos.

Is Benetton exploiting misery to sell clothing, or are they using their prominence to focus attention on problems and stir people to action? Perhaps they're doing a little of both, but what's noteworthy here is how the campaign decontextualizes the images by placing them against a neutral background, and shoots the pictures from an angle equal to or slightly lower than the subjects' eye level.

That, photographers say, produces images that are more respectful than photographs shot from above.

Kinda Important

If you've been paying even the slightest attention to all this "war with Iraq" stuff, you may have heard something about some "high-strength aluminum tubes," which Iraq was alleged to have purchased for the purpose of constructing nuclear weapons. Colin Powell referred to these specifically in his February 12 address to the U.N. Security Council. Turns out that this information was faked evidence. The series of letters in question were given to U.N. inspectors by Britain and then passed on to U.S. intelligence. But the forgers of the documents made lots of errors, "including names and titles that did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters were purportedly written."

"We fell for it," said one U.S. official who reviewed the documents.

"Close scrutiny and cross-checking of the documents, the letterheads on them, the signatures on them, led us to conclude with quite absolute certainty that the documents were false," an IAEA official said.

The Politics of Pronunciation

Speaking of Saddam Hussein, how do you pronounce his first name? Is it "SOD-um," or "sah-DAHM"? Here's an article about that question and what it means when people pick one version over the other. For the record, the Arabic pronuniation is "sah-DAHM." So why does Bush and rest of our administration go for the "buggery" cognate? Wouldn't it be polite to use the correct form?

"It's the solicitous thing to do. It suggests a care for and a familiarity with a culture. It's a concern about the opinion of others."

A Dog, a Pickup, and a Divorce

Anything else common to country music? Oh yeah, "Kill Iraqis." Once again we've got a war anthem on the way: Darryl Worley's "Have You Forgotten?" Although it hasn't been released yet, you can get a preview here in real audio. Give it a listen if you haven't eaten yet. What you've got here are lyrics structured around a heart-rending chorus of "Have you forgotten how it felt that day, to see our homeland under fire and the people blown away?" What you've also got is a conflation of Bin Laden and Iraq, which probably plays well to people who like things simple and uncomplicated. Darryl Worley's Website doesn't explain why the singer decided to do this, but demand for the song by radio stations is intense, and the Nashville Tennessean newspaper says the song is "racing up the country charts with a bellicose message of vengeance."

The Pen Is Mightier than the Sword

If you've got one of these pens, anyway.

Now pay attention, 007. Over 1,200 of these bullet-firing ballpoints have been seized from the home of a German entrepeneur in Bamberg.

The pens could carry only small bullets, but were capable of killing their targets if they were just a few metres away, according to police spokesman Detlef Puchelt.

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