One day in early October, I walked through the Mall of America and was barraged by pink. It was impossible to escape. Nearly every store was selling something specifically for breast cancer awareness. Later that same day, I stopped at a Walgreens location and discovered that there was even a pink Snuggie.

Every time I encountered something pink, I was reminded that my mother was dead. My mother had died of breast cancer at the age of 38 in 1996–I was eight and my sister was five. Over 13 years later, my family is still experiencing the aftershocks of losing the person who glued us all together.

There is nothing that stops a company from slapping a pink ribbon onto a package and toting it as “breast cancer awareness,” when there is no donation to anything but the company. The pink ribbon is not regulated, and is easy to abuse.

Often, a portion of the proceeds are supposedly going towards research, and other times the product (in one case, General Mills’ Cheerios) mentioned that the company was going to donate money regardless of product purchases. In Yoplait’s “Save Lids to Save Lives” drive, you mail in lids from yogurt cups. A single lid fetches 10 cents for breast cancer research. If you sent three lids a day for four months, your total donation would be only $36.

I find it hard to swallow the sincerity of commercial interests. If marketing things for breast cancer awareness weren’t a guaranteed way to make money from consumers with a conscious, companies would not be doing so.

Wendy’s represent! Arby’s sucks! (Also available in red, it’s nice to have options.)

Club sandwiches!

All right, what the hell? There’s letters upside down and even backwards! I kinda want it.

A Michigan hoodie with “Pink” on the hood. On the sleeves, it reads “Go blue.”

This Holocaust chic barbed wire Star of David is available in sweatshirt and reglan jersey!

A perfect gift for the man who has everything, except self-respect.

All of these items can be found on a site called Light in the Box.

An act of sabotage “would explain why neither party is releasing any more details: for legal reasons dealing with the ongoing investigation to find the culprit(s),” one of the sources said. Due to the way Sidekick clients interact with the service, any normal failure should have resulted in only a brief outage until a replacement server could be brought up.

The very long outage of core functionality, followed by an incapacity to recover any data, both point to the possibility that “someone with access to the servers at the data center must have inserted a time bomb to wipe out not just all of the data, but also all of the backup tapes, and finally, I suspect, reformatting the server hard drives so that the service itself could not be restarted with a simple reboot (and to erase any traces of the time bomb itself).”

The tipster goes on to state that on the Microsoft side, they were clueless about Danger-related technologies. As such, the signs all point to a Danger (ex-)employee committing sabotage.

Well, this makes it more interesting. When it comes to a choice of Whimper vs Bang, I’d prefer to go with the Bang. I don’t want to have lost my data service access or all my contacts because someone tripped over a power cord, I want some massive drama along with it. I want the place to have burned down while suffering a Godzilla attack, that kind of thing.

Alleged details on the events leading up to Danger’s doomsday scenario are starting to come out of the woodwork, and it all paints a truly embarrassing picture: Microsoft, possibly trying to compensate for lost and / or laid-off Danger employees, outsources an upgrade of its Sidekick SAN to Hitachi, which — for reasons unknown — fails to make a backup before starting. Long story short, the upgrade runs into complications, data is lost, and without a backup to revert to, untold thousands of Sidekick users get shafted in an epic way rarely seen in an age of well-defined, well-understood IT strategies.

T-Mobile has refunded one months’ worth of data service charges to contract Sidekick users, which I didn’t get because I didn’t have a contract with my Sidekick. They will also be sending $100 “customer appreciation cards” to certain Sidekick customers, which can be used on T-Mobile products and services (including bills) only. There is no clear-cut criteria in place for who can expect to receive a gift card.

Today, T-Mobile finally admitted that all of our data is gone:

Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.

(The way it works is that while your information is on your phone, it’s not really stored there, it’s in the cloud. You sign-in to your account and the phone downloads your contacts. You can replace your phone without having to worry about contacts because they are stored in the cloud. However, if something happens to the cloud, you’re screwed.)

Too bad there’s probably something in fine print somewhere that prevents anyone from being sued over this.

I hit up Shmarya after finding a post he made on the exact same thing, but he said that no rabbis seem concerned about it.

I had figured it was either a deliberate attempt at faking a kosher certification where there was none, or simply trying to poorly explain what “halal” is to people either too sheltered or too stupid to Google it for themselves, but assumed it was the latter.

Just recently, I noticed that the little symbol has changed from saying “equivalent to kosher” around it, to “certified since 1987.” I wonder if someone complained?

2008’s most frequently banned book, for the third year in a row:

And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
Reasons: anti-ethnic, anti-family, homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and unsuited to age group

Wait, what the hell? How can a story about cute penguins be anti-ethnic? (As it turns out, Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel memoir about the Holocaust, also sans human characters, was similarly charged with being anti-ethnic.) I mean, yeah, “anti-family” is code for “GAYGAYGAY!!!” and it could offend your “religious viewpoint” if you view gay people as subhuman freaks, but anti-ethnic? Penguins? Huh?

Social Justice Librarian looked into the matter of anti-ethnic gay penguins:

I did hear back from the ALA OIF in response to my previously posted follow-up questions, and in summary:

• they can’t tell us what type of institution the “anti-ethnic” charge came from (but I assume it has to be public or school library, and more likely a school)
• but they can tell us it happened in North Carolina
• they don’t know of any books beyond Maus and Tango that have been charged as anti-ethnic but have non-human characters
• they’re not sure how the anti-ethnic category came to be, and
• it’s entirely possible that it was checked off by mistake on the report form for And Tango Makes Three

Swimming in fountain across from Union Station; Washington, D.C.; by Marion Post Wolcott 1938

• Anxiety, depression and alcohol and drug dependency cases might be more than twice as high as researchers currently believe.
• An immigrant from China with mental illness has finally gotten out of detention in America
• The “M” word in health care: mental illness and health care reform

There follows a most peculiar statement: “A hermaphrodite can perform a religious duty for a fellow hermaphrodite, but not for any one else.”

Some folks are shocked to find the rabbis even mentioning hermaphrodites, what the Gemara calls androgynus, but the truth is that this being of unusual gender shows up all over Talmudic discourse. Perhaps in the days before the “medical miracle,” when a procedure on the birthing table, a kind of grotesque circumcision, purports to solve this riddle of nature forever, the alternately-sexed were simply more present in everyday life. But what the rabbis lack in surgical technique, they make up for in the rigidity of their intellectual categorization. In every discussion, it is determined whether the androgynus will be treated as a man or a woman, depending on circumstance. Only one sage, the forward-thinking Rabbi Jose (pronounced Yo-si,) offers the suggestion that a hermaphrodite “is a creature unto itself.”

The problem with Obama being President is that now when he comes out on stage, “Hail to the Chief” plays instead of that dope-sounding intro from that U2 song. [More photos here, and Brandi has some, too!]