The transcript of last weekend’s Radio Derb is now archived on my website.

In putting an RD podcast together I try to season the doom’n’gloom with some lighter stories.  Here, I’m a bit ashamed to say, was my favorite such last week:

Here’s one from the “overlawyered” file.

We all know that advertisers use sex to promote products. Well, here’s a company named Gildan Outerwear. They sell a line of women’s tights under the brand name Kushyfoot. By way of promotion they run a TV commercial of a young woman wearing their product, walking down the street writhing, moaning, and uttering things like, quote, “that’s the spot,” and, quote, “oh yeah, that’s it.” Meanwhile a chorus in the background is singing: “I’m super satisfied, super satisfied.”

A lady named Meng Wang of Queens, New York, not unreasonably took the implication to be that if she wore Kushyfoot tights she would attain the furthest shores of sexual rapture just by walking down the street. She hastened out to her local drugstore and purchased a pair for seven dollars.

Imagine Ms Wang’s disappointment when, on trying out the tights, the earth failed to move for her. She found an attorney willing to take her case, and launched a lawsuit seeking, quote, “redress for deceptive and otherwise improper business practices.”

At the speed the New York civil courts operate, it could take quite a while for this case to reach its climax, but that’s … only to be expected.

Regarding my venture into Twitter:  I resisted doing this for the longest time, partly because I already have more than enough—way more than enough—ways to waste time, but mostly out of instinctive refusal to take seriously anything named “Twitter.”

In my line of work, though, you need some way to alert the blog-reading portion of humanity that you just posted something.  I’ve been using an RSS feed and depending on people to pick up alerts from RSS aggregators like Feedly.com.

Now aggregators seem to be a declining technology.  People have been telling me for four or five years that I should have a Twitter account, and my level of irritation at repeatedly being told this has reached some critical point.  So there I am on Twitter, handle @DissidentRight.

I shall continue to post to my RSS feed, except when I forget; so if you’re getting alerts via Feedly or some other aggregator, they’ll still show up.

It’s possible—and it would be consistent with my life history in general—that I’ve arrived at the Twitter banquet just as they’re serving coffee, and that any day now friends will start harassing me to take up some spiffier, newer technology.  As before, I shall resist to the last ditch.