Red Stripe’s newest ad campaign is absolutely cracking my ass up. Go to the Red Stripe site, put in your birthday*, click on the TV, and watch some. Inner You is by far my favorite, although Dancing is pretty close: “Red Stripe and Reggae - helping our white friends dance for over 70 years!”

The radio ads are a hoot, too.

* Go ahead and cheat…who’ll know you’re really 43?

Wonder if Sr. Kraptonite will notice this detailed study of the Halliburton/KBR Iraqi cleanup contract? Doubtful, I say…it blows all the past three months of over-heated bloviating about corporations running the executive branch under the Bush administration right out of the water.

For the record:
- The final payment is estimated to be in the area of $600MM, well short of the $7BB that Cheney was falsely accused of shovelling into his own pocket.
- The profit on the contract is capped at 3% — big whoop.
- The contract was awarded competitively — that competitive bid process just happened in 2001, not March of this year.
- Billy Jeff’s administration awarded similar contracts to H/KBR in 1997 and 1999. Now, Dick Cheney did profit from that, since he was CEO of the company at that time.

I certainly misunderstood the nature of the contract award process, so I’m not blasting OW for that. However, I did say (over and over) that we should wait and see what the outcome of the award was gonna be, and here we have it — a whopping $18MM profit (maximum!) on $600MM in revenue. Boy, if Dick Cheney were a share-holder (and he’s not, no matter how many time Ollie says he is), he sure would be pissed that he had to take so much crap from our glorious Fourth Estate for so little return.

Cabbie: Bryant was at Colorado hospital

Vail taxi driver Terry O’Brien, 38, told The Orange County Register he picked up Bryant and three bodyguards from the emergency room of the hospital about 2:30 a.m. July 2.

Oh, goodie…now it’s gonna get weird. Weird-er.

Two-Year Old Bottled Water? Yummy…

Professor Jeni Colbourne, head of the Drinking Water Inspectorate-said: “People have a perception-that bottled water is fresh because it’s been sealed in a bottle, unsullied by human hands. But in fact it has probably spent most of that time in hot warehouses and on hot supermarket shelves.”

This makes me laugh for many reasons. First is the idea that people will actually pay the super-premium for 16 oz. of water that is in a bottle with a cool logo and a fancy-pants name, as opposed to that which comes out of the tap at home for a fraction of a penny.

Then there’s the idea that something coming out of a cold case at the 7-11 could possibly, in any circumstances, be fresher than a city water system that moves THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of gallons of water every minute. Folks, if it’s in the 7-11, it got there on a truck, which was loaded with cases at a local distribution point, where a bigger truck dropped them off after picking them up at the rail-yard or a regional distribution center, which is where those cases end up after the bottles are filled, labeled, put in the cases, and scheduled for shipment by the bottler. I would guess that, at a minimum, most bottled water is AT LEAST a week old, and probably much more than that if you’re not in a major city with a bottler close by.

The third thing that makes me chuckle is that here at the ranch, all of our water is from a well that is sunk 300 feet down into the Trinity Sands watershed. I’ve got the “good sh*t” for the price of running a pump, and it’s just as pure and clean and sweet as anything on a supermarket shelf. And my darling bride STILL buys bottled drinking water. Makes me want to print up some pretty labels, slap ‘em on some plastic bottles, spend my day with a garden hose, and Get Rich Quick.