OMG, it's enough to split one's head. Marketers are now creating secrets for the sole purpose of being discovered because a "secret" is something people will share when they won't talk about being advertised to. "I figured", said Jordan Weisman, head of 42 Entertainment which created Nine Inch Nails covert campaign, "that if the audience discovered something, they would share it," he explains, "because we all need something to talk about."
It could have been the perfect secret. Nobody knew when, why, or by whom secret cameras were put up. Nobody gave permission for them to be in Newton (Mass.) South High School.But they could still be discovered by curious students. And now the secret is revealed, a minor scandal ensues and -- soon, we are told -- the cameras will come down.
Secrets are revealed in many ways. But by a dream? A British reporter was allegedly asleep on the job when he began to track down a secret British nuclear test.
Maybe another Brit could dream where Osama Bin Laden's son, Omar, and loony wife Zaina Muhammad (known as Jane Felix-Browne to her previous five husbands) are planning to settle. And maybe then s/he could wake up and that craziness, as well as everything inspired by Omar's father could be stricken from the record of reality?
As with many who steal, Hasidic rabbis believed their secrets wouldn't be revealed. Not that they had anything to hide in laundering money, if you asked them. A knowledgeable observer commented on their rationalization of "higher authority" masking "venal and selfish aims."
What lengths will some women go in pursuing beauty? In Iran, they'll go underground to secret salons. Business sites that operate under the constant threat of exposure, the constant bullying or occasional murder of beauticians and even the random explosion by fanatics whose concept of beauty does not allow for the idea that it might be in the eye of the beholder.
The secret of winning the lottery -- at least in Florida -- is out. Terry has it and shared it with the paper, which now shares it with you, unless, of course, you'd rather believe the secret of winning big is moving to a sparsely populated Spanish village? Maybe ever lottery, every drawing, has its own secret?
Santa reveals that his dream of becoming an Olympic lugeist was doomed when he steered himself into the arctic ocean thus forcing him to turn to charity, among other secrets in a Q&A with the Binghamton (N.Y.) Press & Sun-Bulletin.
You can lie and belittle right out (and perhaps reduce workplace tension) in the open and hurt nobody with a shared secret language. So, hearing (or saying), "We got a code brown on a Hasselhoff FLK and he's giving the O-sign," in a hospital corridor could be describing something hilarious, as long as you don't overhear doctors describing your condition.
Who still trusts when the public information is silly (for want of a better word) and the private information and the alleged explaination of why and/or how the public info is perfectly rational is secret? Some do, whether it is the secret strategies of the U.S. Prez or the secret formula the UAW is using to justify their (mis?)management of the auto workers trust health fund. It has two obvious problems:
1) $36 billion is currently unfunded.
2) Solvency depends on health care inflation falling to 5 percent by 2013 and sticking, even as it has nearly doubled that rate in recent decades.
And those are the public assumptions. Imagine the brilliant leaps of faith still to be uncovered.
** Big Jo doesn't care about the big scandals, just your personal ones. **
If all your secrets were like Santa what would you do when people you cared for asked you about them? You could outright lie; tell the truth; tell the partial truth; create a myth about them; or obfuscate and hope the question would go away for now, forever. And all those are the strategies recommended -- with training aids -- "When Kids Want the Lowdown On Santa."
