While the headline on the BBC article, Ninja kitten band win Coke battle, could be interpreted many ways, the basic story is that Joel Veitch of Rathergood.com has received a settlement from Coca Cola over the unauthorized use of one his band’s songs and associated animation in an ad in South America.

Joel’s work is definitely an acquired taste, but it’s nice to see that he has been compensated for his work and creativity.

While I gave the general English translation of the word in an earlier post, Dr. Cole provides a short lecture on its meaning and derivation and an overview of the Arabic language.

This is the part of the State Of The Union where a President with a popularity of 28% introduces invited people who have actually done something, so that the audience will applaud with real fervor.

While “claptrap” is currently defined as “pretentious but insincere language” it originally described something injected into a performance to guarantee applause, literally a “trap” to capture “claps”. The last six SOTU speeches have been examples of both definitions.

Update: If you care, here are the transcripts of what the Shrubbery read and Senator Webb’s response.

[If you go quickly you will see that in the caption on the picture of Senator Webb says: “Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, whose son is serving in Vietnam, beat Republican George Allen in November’s elections.” I guess CNN has fired all of their fact checkers and editors who know the lad is in Iraq, not Vietnam.]

Scorpio at Eccentricity is in the process of moving to http://scorpio-eccentricity.blogspot.com, and will do it after the archives are moved over. [Update: the move is complete.]

Steve Gilliard & Jen of News Blog have already moved to http://www.thenewsblog.net leaving their archives at the old place. Apparently Blogger won’t move more than 1000 posts to the new version of the software, so the “big guys” are forced to make decisions.