45. Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig announces the planned elimination of two teams by the start of the 2002 season. The downsizing triggers public outrage, a union grievance, a municipal lawsuit, congressional hearings, inquiries from three state attorneys general, and calls for Selig’s resignation.
56. Half.com places advertisements on the slips of paper inside fortune cookies at Chinese restaurants. Confusion ensues when some customers mistakenly believe that the advertisements, which offer $5 off a purchase at Half.com, actually entitle them to $5 off their dinner check.
63. Bottling the Stench of Death and Calling It Perfume: Philip Morris also attempts to counter antismoking measures in the Czech Republic by commissioning an economic analysis of the “indirect positive effects” of early deaths — savings on health care, pensions, welfare, and housing for the elderly. The company later apologizes.
65. Eleven years after McDonald’s announces that it has started cooking its fries in “100 percent vegetable oil” — and one month after a Seattle lawyer files suit on behalf of Hindus and vegetarians who interpreted that to mean that the fries are meat-free — the fast-food chain concedes that the “natural flavoring” in its fries is, in fact, beef fat.
74. NBC gives excitable superstar chef Emeril Lagasse his own sitcom, Emeril, a show so unremittingly awful that, after the pilot is shown to critics, one stands up at a press conference and asks NBC West Coast president Scott Sassa, “Can you explain how a show like Emeril has gotten as far as it has? I’m not asking that facetiously. I’m trying to understand the process.” Despite the pilot’s being taken in for retooling, the show is canceled after just seven episodes.
80. Sept. 11 Inc., “I’m Almost — Almost — Too Stupid to Ridicule” Division: At 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, a New Jersey restaurateur named Michael Heiden files a form with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to trademark the words “World Trade Center.” Interviewed by the Smoking Gun website, Heiden claims that Disney trademarked the term “Pearl Harbor” before producing that film [it did not], and that, “if they ever do make a movie [about the terrorist attacks], I’d like to get involved.”
81. Speaking of Pearl Harbor — a film budgeted at $135 million and scrutinized by countless Disney executives — nobody involved in its production thinks to question the scene in which Ben Affleck boards a train from Grand Central Terminal in New York to his airbase … in England.
85. Still Partying Like It’s 1999, Part 3: Peter Chung, a newly hired associate at the Carlyle Group, sends an e-mail to his friends bragging about his lavish new lifestyle. The e-mail — in which he boasts of the “hot chicks” he’s bedding and concludes, “CHUNG is KING of his domain here in Seoul” — is sent to thousands of other people and eventually makes its way back to his bosses. Chung, no longer king of his domain, is summarily fired.
86. A Finnish textiles conference, intending to invite a representative of the World Trade Organization to speak, instead accidentally invites Andy Bichlbaum, an American antiglobalization activist-prankster. He delivers a speech in which he expresses sympathy for the South in the Civil War, describes Mohandas Gandhi as a “rabble-rouser,” and disrobes to reveal that he is wearing a golden spandex unitard featuring a 3-foot-long inflatable phallus.
87. Apparently unaware of the group’s enmity for the corporate world, GM pays the British pop band Chumbawamba $100,000 for the rights to use the song “Pass It Along” in a Pontiac ad campaign. The band promptly passes along the money to a pair of advocacy groups, including one, CorpWatch, that intends to spend some of the money looking into GM’s social and environmental track record.
95. Having lured Mariah Carey with a $21 million signing bonus and an $80 million, five-album recording contract, EMI decides, after only one album, to pay her $28 million to go away. The net result: EMI pays $49 million for the soundtrack to Glitter.
Will
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