Good On Paper

Here at The Güey Watcher are proud to present you with our initiative to expand our business to the publishing world. That's right, coming soon to a bookstore near you The Güey Watcher Books. Right now we're busy working on building our author roster, but I think it's safe to present you with a preliminary list of the titles we'll be happy to bring you soon enough.

- How To Kill Yourself Or Die Trying, by Owen Wilson

- The Thin Red Line (Or Flashing For Dummies), by Britney Spears

- State Of Denial, by Clay Aiken

- A Body for Life, by Mo'Nique (we went with this title since we figured A Never-ending Ass might have turned off some readers.)

- The Purpose Driven Life, by Anna Nicole Smith

Hope you enjoy our selection and if you have any suggestion as to the authors and titles you'd like to see in our list, you're more than welcome to post in the comment section below.

* Click Here To Read More

News Roundup, April 22

- US families claim to be forced to pick between gas and food. Thank God there's still Taco Bell which gives you both in one.

- Sony comes up with wafer-thin TV. It's designed to make Vh1's programming look more substantial.

- Michael Bolton, Celine Dion make it to list of top ten most annoying singers. Showbiz moguls from Vegas are ready to contact the rest of winners who don't have a show deal already.

- Hillary connected to Angelina, Madonna by DNA. Sources rushed to clarify they were not talking about Bill's, but her own.

- Former Bush press secretary becomes TV pundit. People thought he was brilliant until they realized they weren't watching Stephen Colbert Click Here To Read More

Now, this would make a great T-Mobile ad.

From Gizmodo

The life of 20-year-old Emine, and her 24-year-old husband Ramazan Çalçoban was pretty much the normal life of any couple in a separation process. After deciding to split up, the two kept having bitter arguments over the cellphone, sending text messages to each other until one day Ramazan wrote "you change the topic every time you run out of arguments." That day, the lack of a single dot over a letter—product of a faulty localization of the cellphone's typing system—caused a chain of events that ended in a violent blood bath (Warning: offensive language ahead.)

To find out more on the story...
The surreal mistake happened because the ex-husband's cellphone didn't have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter "ı" or closed i. While "i" is available in all phones in Turkey—where this happened—the closed i apparently doesn't exist in most of the terminals in that country.

The use of "i" resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word "sıkısınca" he wrote "sikisince." Ramazan wanted to write "You change the topic every time you run out of arguments" (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, "You change the topic every time they are fucking you" (sounds familiar too.)

Emine then showed the message to her father, who—enraged—called Ramazan, accusing him of treating his daughter as a prostitute. Ramazan went to the family's home to apologize and was greeted by the father, two sisters and a lot of very sharp knives.

Injured and bleeding, Ramazan found Emine and killed her with another knife. He later killed himself in jail.

Apparently it's not the first incident of this kind caused by the damned dot on top of the letter i. The local press has pointed out that the faulty localization of cellphones in Turkey is causing "serious problems" when it comes to certain "delicate words" in Turkish, and they are calling to enhance localization of technology to avoid these mistakes.

Alternatively, the press could ask for banning knives from the homes of demonstrably stupid people. Click Here To Read More

Stuck

Maybe you have hear that joke about the guy that got stuck in an elevator for 41 hours... only it's not a joke. It happened to a poor fella, who was entrapped inside his office's elevator while the surveillance camera passively watched.



This video accompanies the story in the New Yorker.
... Click Here To Read More

ProcrasTV: A Minuteman Of A Different Kind

It was a matter of time time before a cheaper Chinese version of this song came around.


Now, Madonna says she only has four minutes to save the world... but from what? Maybe this hilarious fan made video will give you a hint.
Click Here To Read More

Juz Make Sure They Don't Find Out Mariah Has A New Album Out

America’s Global Image Stops Sinking in a Poll
By MIKE NIZZA
The image of America abroad, which has been battered in recent years by an unpopular war and other policies, appears to have stopped deteriorating, judging by a worldwide survey by the BBC and GlobeScan:

While views of U.S. influence in the world are still predominantly negative, they have improved in 11 of the 23 countries the BBC polled a year ago, while worsening in just three countries.

The average percentage saying that the U.S. is having a positive influence has increased from 31 percent a year ago to 35 percent today, while the view that it is having a negative influence has declined from 52 per cent to 47 percent.

Looking just at the countries that have been polled in each of the last four years, positive views of the U.S. eroded from 2005 (38% on average), to 2006 (32%), and to 2007 (28%); recovering for the first time this year to 32 percent.

Israel, Iran and Pakistan were even more unpopular abroad than the United States, rated negatively by more than 50 percent of respondents.

Russia, which has begun an image burnishing campaign of its own, showed the greatest rebound in the poll, with 37 percent of respondents viewing the country positively, up from 29 percent a year earlier.

A total of 17,457 people were interviewed in 34 countries between October and January, the BBC said; the margin of sampling error varied from 3.4 to 4.6 percentage points, depending on the country.

Last June, the Pew Research Center’s survey of attitudes towards the United States showed a deepening of distrust in the Muslim world, a trend somewhat reflected in the BBC-GlobeScan survey released today. Negative views have grown in Egypt and Lebanon, but positive views have grown in Turkey and Indonesia; even so, the figures in those countries remain more negative than average.

Kurt Volker, a State Department official who has been nominated for NATO ambassador, told the BBC that the American gains are “a lagging indicator of what we are doing, working together with European governments and other elites.”

Steven Kull, a polling expert the University of Maryland, had a different take, saying that the upcoming presidential election may be playing a role. “Views of the U.S. are being mitigated by hope that a new administration will move away from the foreign policies that have been so unpopular in the world,” Mr. Kull said.

TO CONTINUE READING...
But that theory was doubted by Nikolas Gvosdev of The National Interest back in January, when The Christian Science Monitor covered the presidential candidates’ plans for addressing the issue. “People have bought into a narrative that all this negativity is the result of one man, or maybe two men in the White House, the president and vice president,” he said. “But to suggest that on Jan. 20, 2009, everything will change to the world’s liking doesn’t take into account how the world has changed.”

Other experts have suggested that American policies regarding the Middle East, national security and Iraq would have to drastically change before hearts and minds would follow. Otherwise, it’s “Mission: Impossible,” as one observer termed Karen Hughes’s effort to address the problem as the State Department’s chief of public diplomacy.

She stepped down in November without many concrete signs of progress, while another diplomat was left disenchanted after trying hard to reverse the trend, as a Times article on her resignation summarized:

“This is the conundrum that I faced every day,” Price Floyd, a former State Department public affairs official, wrote in an op-ed article in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram in May, after he left the department. “I tried through the traditional domestic media, and, for the first time, through the pan-Arab TV and print media — Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Al Hayat — to reach people in the U.S. and abroad and to convince them that we should not be judged by our actions, only by our words.”

Is a full recovery even possible? Not according to Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner of France. “It will never be as it was before,” he said in an interview with The International Herald Tribune last month. “The magic is over.” Click Here To Read More