149 posts tagged “secrets”
Marketing is the massage. Again. Always claim to have knowledge of the unknown, because it is so much cooler to say you are using secret Urawaza rather than claim you're relying on Heloise's hints. To one up your friends, family or enemies even further, claim your life hacks are stolen from the "Ito Family Dinner Table" (second post) and hope your audience isn't familiar with Japanese television ... or the internet.
Perhaps a little secret (that you don't confess until you realize it made you dumber) is buying the "cheat notes" for Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Perhaps a big secret to not reveal is how your government helped undermine another. But when the little secrets are revealed the big secrets unravel and when the big secret is undone the little secrets spill out as well. The best example of that may be the Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick administration and personal life, the threads of which are coming ever more undone with the towel slipping further down every day on big secrets and little secrets.
You now have the opportunity to help General Electric, parent company of NBC, reap some advertising dollars and, at the same, time, expose your deepest darkest audiences for first a web audience and -- hopefully(?) -- a national, perhaps international audience. Goodie!
"Fears, Secrets and Desires" launches with viewer supplied info this spring and the juiciest bits will be reconstructed (with "creative reinterpreation") for a TV audience beginning October '08. Will people send in their own secrets or those of others? And, after the creative reinterpretations NBC spells out in the fine print, still be the submitter's secret?
Face it, you have you lost control of your secrets. Maybe (hopefully) not all, but your medical secrets are being fed to databases and you must begin to trust they will be handled only for your good (that infection yeas ago you've forgotten about is a necessary clue for a doctor you've never seen before about something scary) and not for your bad (some flunkie poking through your records uncovers something embarrassing or financially hurtful and shares).
You can pretend you will control your secrets just as the FBI and New York Police Dept. are trying to do with the highly publicized secret vault. But, ultimately, almost every secret on paper gets found by someone else and you end up with histrionics and pathos or, in other words, opera.
It may be right, but that doesn't mean it's fair to immediately assume that if a testy Bush says he doesn't want to talk about something and growls , "There were no secret deals," there were almost definitely secret deals ... and someone else will keep talking about it. In this case Jeb Bush a business is getting millions in Florida state (and then U.S. government) funding for something whose benefits are not immediately apparent to constituents.
Some still insist the number 13 is unlucky. For example, is it fate or coincidence that Czechs waited 13 years to learn the secret of who were the police collabortors? And what to think about The Secret sitting at No. 13 on Amazon's best seller list (at least when checked for this post)?
It's hard to know exactly what to think unless you know secret secrets of The Secret revealed, which seems to reveal the secret to knowing everything is a "pretend Scottish accent."
Normally, lies and secrets are different, but not according to author Susan Shapiro Barash, author of Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets. She defines them with a different take, at least for women: "Women use secrets to facilitate their lives in a culture that encourages us to be deceptive." In short they have to lie because civilization forces them. And who forces civilization to force the women who make up more than one-half of it?
They (those omniscient unknowns) say Fawza Falih has secret powers that can turn a man impotent. And, so the Saudi Arabian "witch" may lose her head -- swordwise, that is. While this sounds outrageous to [many, most?] western ears, we don't have to go all the way back in history to the Salem Witch Trials to consider how possible/probably innocent women (and men) have been treated when bad things happen. There is now a movement in Scotland to posthumously pardon a woman convicted for being a witch who gave away the secret that a boat was sunk. (Actually it was pretty obvious the boat sunk; it was just the British government didn't want the public to hear the bad news and so tried to keep it secret.)
The readier someone is to reveal a secret from the past, the more likely that secret will be like the sandwich stuck in a drawer and forgotten at work. While it was out of sight it may have gained pungency, but as a secret it has lost its ability to satisfy most tastes. And so we have Gennifer Flowers trying to squeak a few more shekels and nanoseconds of fame by auctioning her secret recordings of then-Governor WJ Clinton as her proof of their infidelitous amorousness.
The U.S. is in secret talks with Iran. Ostensibly about money laundering and terrorism, but beware! The last time we had secret talks there was the Reagan-era fantasy with Ollie North starring in the addled-brain fantasy of Iran Contra. And people died.
