Posts tagged publicity

Today in “You can’t make this shit up”: Baker Hughes, a giant oil-field services company that provides hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) products and services, has donated $100,000 to the Susan G. Komen Foundation in support of breast-cancer research. And in the most egregious example of pink-washing we’ve ever seen, the company is producing 1,000 pink drill bits that will “serve as a reminder of the importance of supporting research, treatment, screening, and education to help find the cures for this disease.” There’s at least one weird little thing about this pairing: Fracking, one of the services that Baker Hughes provides and the drill bits are used for, has some serious links to cancer itself.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/fracking-co-makes-pink-drill-bits-for-cancer.html

But Ragnarok is not a joke. It’s a story of terrible fear, annihilation, though with a hope of rebirth. The dread of it runs through many stories in Norse myth - the knowledge that for the gods this destruction will come, inevitably and irrevocably. In Snorri’s Edda, the story is also deeply sad: Ragnarok begins with a family grieving helplessly for their dead son. (Couldn’t fit that in the press release, I guess.) Can we not take that seriously? If nothing else, can we not maintain a basic level of respect for a belief system different from our own? How can we ever hope to understand the Vikings, or any past society, if we turn their mythology into a joke?

http://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/a-rant-about-ragnarok–2014.html