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Last week’s death of Sen. Edward Kennedy seemed to spell the end of the so-called “Kennedy dynasty.” With Ted’s passing, we are faced with no Kennedy in the Senate or the White House for the first time since 1952. We are headed towards a new, uncertain future.

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The Boston Herald is reporting that there is serious pressure being put on Vicki Kennedy, the senator’s widow, to consider accepting appointment to the vacant Senate seat, and that she is “very much interested” in it.wholesale gogglescheap nfl jerseys

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who was close with Kennedy, said on CNN that “Vicki ought to be considered. She’s a very brilliant lawyer. She’s a very solid individual. She certainly made a difference in Ted’s life, let me tell you. And I have nothing but great respect for her.”ugg boots

Echoed Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), perhaps Kennedy’s closest friend in the Senate: “Whatever Vicki wants to do, I’m in her corner. …She’s expressed to me her own sort of reluctance to fill in for Kennedy, but she could change her mind. If she did, I’m for it. I think she’d be great.”
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Another Kennedy possibility is his nephew, former Rep. Joseph Kennedy II, son of the late Robert Kennedy. According to the Herald’s Edward Mason,

Joe Kennedy’s impressive performance at his uncle’s wake Friday was taken as a sign the former congressman may be a contender for the seat the family first won 57 years ago.

Kennedy confidante Phil Johnston told the Herald that Kennedy family members and friends are pitching both Vicki and Joe on a Senate bid.

“They’ve been urged to do so by friends and family,” Johnston said.

I’d love to see my brother Joe get it,” Douglas Kennedy told the Herald Friday.

Another Democratic operative said of Joe: “After that speech, I thought that’s the best he’s ever given. Based on that, you have to think that he’s thinking about it.”

Joe Kennedy left the House after 12 years in 1998, following unflattering reports over his desire to have his first marriage annuled so he could marry a former staffer in a Catholic ceremony. He also heads Citizens Energy Corporation, a non-profit that provides discounted heating oil to low-income families. The oil has mostly been coming from Venezuela; a connection to the Venezuelan government and President Hugo Chavez has the potential of becoming a political liability.
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A special election must be held between 145 and 160 days of a Senate vacancy, which would put it in January. It was Ted Kennedy’s wish that the state legislature change the law to allow the governor — Deval Patrick (D) — to make an interim appointment to serve until the special election. Kennedy also wanted the appointee to pledge not to run in the special election, which is of dubious legality.

Until 2004, the governor had the power to make an appointment, but the legislature took it away that year because (1) Sen. John Kerry was running for president and had a strong chance of winning, and (2) if he did, a Republican governor — Mitt Romney — would have had the power to name Kerry’s Senate successor, and that didn’t go down well with the Democratic legislature.

As for the special election, here is the Herald’s list of likely Democratic candidates: state Attorney General Martha Coakley, Reps. Stephen Lynch & nike air maxMichael Capuano, and ex-Rep. Marty Meehan. Republican contenders

We turn now from old T-shirts to new T-shirts and the controversy they can cause. Remember a couple of years ago when Abercrombie & Fitch had to stop selling some of its T-shirts when a group of teenage girls said the slogans on them, <a href=”http://www.cheap-nike.net”>cheap nike</a>like I Had a Nightmare, I Was a Brunette, and Who Needs Brains When You Have These were offensive?nike fans
Well, now comes Macy’s Department Store, which has decided to pull its latest fashion statement tees with the slogan, Brown is the New White, which apparently concerned a number of Latino shoppers.cheap james shoesnike men shoes

Here to speak with me about the mistakes some companies make in their marketing efforts is Dr. Ed Rincon, president of Rincon & Associates, a multicultural marketing research company. He is also an associate professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and he joins us from KERA in Dallas.

Mr. Rincon, welcome.
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Professor ED RINCON (Southern Methodist University, Dallas; President, Rincon & Associates): Good to join you today.

CORLEY: Well, first let’s talk about the Macy’s T-shirt. What do you think the company was trying to do, and why was it so maddening to some?

Mr. RINCON: Well, from the Web site description of the manufacturer and their relationship with Macy’s, they were very much trying to attract a young, chic Latina shopper to their stores by introducing some, I guess what they consider non-traditional clothing and shirts and other accessories that also had some quote, unquote, “very non-traditional” types of taglines on the shirts themselves.

CORLEY: Mm-hmm. Well, I know you don’t speak for Macy’s, and we’ve trying to get in touch with the company as well, but what do you think this slogan exactly meant, or this tagline meant – Brown is the New White?
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Mr. RINCON: You know, that’s the mystery of marketing research, is that it can mean different things to different people. Now, the phrase Brown is the New White can mean, for example, that Hispanics are replacing whites as the demographic group in power, in numbers, in presence in the U.S. Another reading on what that meant is that Hispanics really, really aspire to be white.

CORLEY: So in one sense it’s kind of an affirmative, empowering statement, and in the other sense, not so much?

Mr. RINCON: Right. The second one is the one that has a potential to be offensive, because we know from the past 30 years of research that we’ve been doing with Hispanics – not just here in the U.S., but in other countries, too – that they have a very strong sense of their own cultural identity, and being white is just not one of those items that’s in their inventory of aspirations. So this could have the potential to offend Hispanics, particularly those in the U.S. who are very proud of their culture and cultural values and the implication or the insinuation that white is what they aspire to be is simply not correct.

CORLEY: Dr. Rincon, isn’t there a history of companies trying to be edgy or hip to attract customers, and how do they try to determine if what they are doing may be insensitive?

Mr. RINCON: It’s not clear that they all do their homework. I’ve done a number of studies with apparel manufacturers as well. And for the most part, the people that are doing it right actually bother bring in consumers that represent their target market – either through focus groups or some other mechanism – and they actually show them some of their apparel collection, some of their theme lines and their colors, because they’re truly interested in selling their products to that particular demographic. I would say that…

CORLEY: Can you give us an example of that, maybe?

Mr. RINCON: I can’t name a specific company, of course, but I can’t talk in general that one manufacturer, for example, is designing a particular line of clothing for Hispanics, and they very much want to know the colors that Latinos want because their – the appeal of the color spectrum is very different for Latinos than compared to non-Latinos. So if they’re only going to produce three or four shirts, for example, it’s very important for them to hit the right one, depending on what Latinos want.

The other thing that is important is lifestyle and fashion. What a teenager wants in the way of a T-shirt, for example, is going to be quite different from what an adult wants. So if you’re planning to sell to teenagers, you better make sure that you convene those types of consumers so that you — they can see the wardrobe and evaluate the pricing, evaluate the colors, the sizes, and other aspects of that wardrobe.

The bottom line is you need to get a handle on what that consumer – what appeal that apparel line is going to have with that consumer and their likelihood of buying that and…

CORLEY: Mm-hmm. Go ahead. I’m sorry.

Mr. RINCON: …one of the important things is how they plan to buy it, and this is one disconnect that I think Macy’s made with this collection here. We know from our research that a certain type of Hispanic shops at Macy’s, and it’s not likely that the shopper that they were targeting with this line of T-shirts was going to shop at Macy’s, anyway. So I’m not sure that Macy’s really understood who their target consumer was for this line of clothing.

CORLEY: Is this the case – in this specific case, and in other cases as well – of especially where you have companies trying to attract people of color, of needing more folks in the marketing industry or the advertising industry, or who work for the company who are also people of color?

Mr. RINCON: That’s true. We do know that in many department stores the salespeople don’t necessarily reflect the shoppers in that community. Banks, for example, have been criticized for that for many years. We also know that the store environments sometimes can be somewhat uncomfortable. In fact, Macy’s does have a history of, for example, in New York just a couple of years ago, the attorney general cited them for the racial profiling of Latino and African-American customers in their Macy’s New York stores.

So it’s kind of a reflection of perhaps a lack of judgment about how to deal with ethnic consumers. It’s not just understanding what they want to buy, but also when they come to shop there, it’s not clear that their personnel know how to handle the new shoppers.

CORLEY: I don’t want to just pick on Macy’s. I mean, this is the latest incident where we’ve seen a company kind of withdraw some merchandise that the public has found to be offensive…

Mr. RINCON: Yes.

CORLEY: …or had some problem with. Are there other examples that you can think of where a company has – trying to target a Latino – a Latino market has made a similar mistake?

Mr. RINCON: To be honest with you, there’s very few – many of the – in the class that I’ve been teaching on Hispanic marketing at SMU, I have kept pace with a lot of new product innovations, particularly in the clothing area. And in large part, what you’re seeing is many of these lines of clothing that are designed for Latinos, they tend to be offered through Web sites. And you don’t see as many of these manufacturers distributing their clothing lines through, say, top-box retailers.
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And that may a disconnect between the retailers and their expected – the expected demand. It’s kind of like a catch-22. How do you know Hispanics are going to buy it? It says, well, the only way you’ll know is to put it in the store to see if they buy it, because if you’re not doing any research, that may be the only way to find out.

But there haven’t been too many of these bloopers – as I call them in my classes – because they’re really – the apparel industry is just, in the past few years, starting to introduce clothing apparel that has a specific cultural dimension that’s targeted to Hispanic shoppers, see.

So that industry has been slow in bringing new product innovations. But I think they’re fumbling around, thinking that, like in the case – in this case, the company that manufactures these T-shirts is based in Mexico. So, I think there was a presumption there that because they’re a Mexican-based company, they ought to know Hispanic shoppers and what they want in the U.S. But I have pointed out in the past that sometimes there’s a great disconnect between Mexican-based companies and what has U.S.-Hispanics are really looking for.

CORLEY: Dr. Ed Rincon is a marketing expert and the president of Rincon & Associates in Dallas, Texas. Thanks so much for joining us.

Mr. RINCON: Thank you.

CORLEY: We called Macy’s corporate offices again today for a response to the T-shirt controversy, and a spokesman for Macy’s South issued these comments, quote, “We are constantly looking for unique and differentiated merchandise that will resonate with our customers as hip, current and trendy. It is never our intention to offend. We have had feedback from our customers and have responded to them by removing the one style they found objectionable.” End.puma fans

(Soundbite of music)

CORLEY: And that is our program for today. I’m Cheryl Corley, and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Let’s talk more tomorrow.

Last week’s death of Sen. Edward Kennedy seemed to spell the end of the so-called “Kennedy dynasty.” With Ted’s passing, we are faced with no Kennedy in the Senate or the White House for the first time since 1952. We are headed towards a new, uncertain future.cheap adidas shoes

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The Boston Herald is reporting that there is serious pressure being put on Vicki Kennedy, the senator’s widow, to consider accepting appointment to the vacant Senate seat, and that she is “very much interested” in it.adidas shoes

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who was close with Kennedy, said on CNN that “Vicki ought to be considered. She’s a very brilliant lawyer. She’s a very solid individual. She certainly made a difference in Ted’s life, let me tell you. And I have nothing but great respect for her.”pumas shoes

Echoed Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), perhaps Kennedy’s closest friend in the Senate: “Whatever Vicki wants to do, I’m in her corner. …She’s expressed to me her own sort of reluctance to fill in for Kennedy, but she could change her mind. If she did, I’m for it. I think she’d be great.”
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Another Kennedy possibility is his nephew, former Rep. Joseph Kennedy II, son of the late Robert Kennedy. According to the Herald’s Edward Mason,

Joe Kennedy’s impressive performance at his uncle’s wake Friday was taken as a sign the former congressman may be a contender for the seat the family first won 57 years ago.

Kennedy confidante Phil Johnston told the Herald that Kennedy family members and friends are pitching both Vicki and Joe on a Senate bid.

“They’ve been urged to do so by friends and family,” Johnston said.

I’d love to see my brother Joe get it,” Douglas Kennedy told the Herald Friday.

Another Democratic operative said of Joe: “After that speech, I thought that’s the best he’s ever given. Based on that, you have to think that he’s thinking about it.”

Joe Kennedy left the House after 12 years in 1998, following unflattering reports over his desire to have his first marriage annuled so he could marry a former staffer in a Catholic ceremony. He also heads Citizens Energy Corporation, a non-profit that provides discounted heating oil to low-income families. The oil has mostly been coming from Venezuela; a connection to the Venezuelan government and President Hugo Chavez has the potential of becoming a political liability.cheap puma shoes

A special election must be held between 145 and 160 days of a Senate vacancy, which would put it in January. It was Ted Kennedy’s wish that the state legislature change the law to allow the governor — Deval Patrick (D) — to make an interim appointment to serve until the special election. Kennedy also wanted the appointee to pledge not to run in the special election, which is of dubious legality.

Until 2004, the governor had the power to make an appointment, but the legislature took it away that year because (1) Sen. John Kerry was running for president and had a strong chance of winning, and (2) if he did, a Republican governor — Mitt Romney — would have had the power to name Kerry’s Senate successor, and that didn’t go down well with the Democratic legislature.chinese kongfu

As for the special election, here is the Herald’s list of likely Democratic candidates: state Attorney General Martha Coakley, Reps. Stephen Lynch & Michael Capuano, and ex-Rep. Marty Meehan. Republican contenderscheap shoes

It was inevitable. Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi television reporter who became infamous for throwing his shoes at a nimble former President Georgecheap shoes/t-shirts W. Bush last December, was himself the target of a copycat shoe-thrower during an appearance in Paris.

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“He stole my technique.”

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Television reporter Muntazer al-Zaidi was in Paris to promote his campaign for the “victims of the US occupation in Iraq” when a fellow Iraqi critic turned the tables on him, shouting: “Here’s another shoe for you.”

The thickset man with an Iraqi accent made a brief speech in Arabic during the question and answer session, defending US policy and accusing Zaidi of “working for dictatorship in Iraq,” before throwing his shoe.

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The missile was thrown hard at Zaidi’s head, but he managed to dodge it and it bounced harmlessly off a curtain erected behind the speakers by the event’s hosts, the Foreign Press Welcome Centre in Paris.

Zaidi’s brother grappled with and slapped the man, whom witnesses later described as an asylum-seeker they know only as “Khayat”, before venue staff and brand t-shirtsbystanders separated them and the aggressor was hustled away.

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“When I used this method, it was against the occupation. I did not use it against a compatriot,” bwith shoesZaidi complained. “I always knew the occupier and his lackeys would stop at nothing to get to me.”

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DANIEL HOLLOWAY: Hey, Mike.

PESCA: Let us start with “The Love Guru.” I will provide some background. Months ago, this movie, “The Love Guru,” cheap adidas shoes

googi jeansreceived possibly the worst review in history from the Spiritual Science Research Foundation. Those folks came up with a chart in which making “The Love Guru” got you 30 demerits, which would put you in the second region of Hell for 1,000 years. This was equal to murder, by the way. Watching it for entertainment and without knowing the spiritual science/significance would give you two demerits, sentencing you to the nether region for 100 years. So, those folks, some Hindus, not liking “The Love Guru,” how about you, Dan?cheap jordans

HOLLOWAY: I’m with the Hindus.
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PESCA: You’re with the Hindus?

HOLLOWAY: Oh, yeah! I think 1,000 is being charitable.

PESCA: Oh, wow.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah.

PESCA: Man, I think Mike Myers is a comic genius. How did he misstep so badly?

HOLLOWAY: You know, Mike Myers is, or was, at one point, a comic genius. However, if you think about the amount of new material that Myers has put out, it’s fairly limited. He’s kind of returns to the well over and over again. And his last good, original idea that he came up with was the original “Austin Powers” film, which was probably about 10 years ago.
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PESCA: Yeah.

HOLLOWAY: At this point. This is his first crack at something…

PESCA: He’s funny as “Shrek.”

HOLLOWAY: He is funny as “Shrek.”

PESCA: He does a funny Scottish ogre.

HOLLOWAY: But again, we’re three deep into the “Shrek” movies, also. I mean, we’re about seven or eight years removed from those.

PESCA: Yeah.

HOLLOWAY: Myers is – you know, he famously had a spiritual awakening long time back with Deepak Chopra, and people have been saying this movie is inspired by that. I wish he had stayed spiritually asleep so that…

(Soundbite of laughter)

PESCA: Or at least funny.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah. Or at least funny, you know. Be spiritually awakened, but also be funny. And what this movie does really is make you very hyperaware of the fact that a lot of Myers’ comedy is based on mugging for the camera. He actually mugs more than any other comic actor I can think of, even Jim Carrey. I mean, think about Wayne, Austin Powers, all these characters, they spend a lot of time looking into the camera…

PESCA: Well, Wayne’s on TV so he knows about it. But even when he’s not, he’ll turn and give it an arched eyebrow, yeah.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah.

PESCA: So let’s get a clip. Here’s “The Love Guru” himself, in a flashback, studying under Ben Kingsley, who is attempting to undo any good karma he may have achieved by playing Gandhi.

(Soundbite of movie “The Love Guru”)

Sir BEN KINGSLEY: (As Guru Tugginmypudha) Deepak, why do you want to join the Tugginmypudha ashram?

Unidentified Actor #1: (As Deepak) To seek my true self.

Mr. MIKE MYERS: (As Pitka) Kiss ass.

Sir KINGSLEY: (As Guru Tugginmypudha) Maurice, why do you want to join?

Unidentified Actor #2: (As Maurice) I want to become a guru so girls will like me. Then I will like myself.

Sir KINGSLEY: (As Guru Tugginmypudha) Deepak, you will enjoy love in all forms. Maurice, you must wear this chastity belt.

(Soundbite of elephant trumpeting)

Unidentified Actor #2: (As Maurice) Chastity belt? That sucks!

(Soundbite of gong)

HOLLOWAY: You’re going to Hell, Pesca. I saw you laughing during that clip.ca jeans

PESCA: Well, I was laughing because we were having this huge discussion about the use of the elephant noise as comic punctuation.

(Soundbite of laughter)

PESCA: Pashman says, no, the donkey is the funniest sound. Chillag says, I’m sticking with the elephant noise. But I guess it didn’t help this movie that much.

HOLLOWAY: I laughed between – I didn’t keep exact count, but I know it was at the least five, at the most ten times, throughout the movie. That was it.

PESCA: Was it…

HOLLOWAY: And I laugh at everything, so…

PESCA: Was it, indeed, religiously offensive?

HOLLOWAY: It was offensive in its badness.

PESCA: I got you.

HOLLOWAY: There’s a little bit of a racial stereotype that Myers is playing off of. But…

PESCA: Is it worse than Apu, who, you know, “The Simpsons” deals with him and…

HOLLOWAY: But the difference is Apu is funny.

PESCA: Apu is funny.

HOLLOWAY: You know?

PESCA: And they also really show honest elements of Indian culture, in a sense.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah. And you get to know, you know, Apu, like all of “The Simpsons” characters, begins as a caricature and ends up becoming a real character.

PESCA: Right.

HOLLOWAY: You know, this is just – I don’t know what this is, but it’s not funny. And there’s a lot of people who are going to go to hell for this movie.

PESCA: What about Verne Troyer, the original Mini-Me? They keep making fun of him in this one?

HOLLOWAY: Mini-Me is back as a hockey coach. And he gets thrown across the ice. He gets punched in the nuts. He gets – you know, he’s a midget and he gets abused for it. And oh, oh God, that’s so funny. The midget’s being picked on. The little guy.

PESCA: Little person Verne Troyer.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah.

PESCA: OK. Let’s go on to a movie that might be funnier just because that last one wasn’t. “Get Smart.” Did you get “Get Smart”?

HOLLOWAY: It’s like, you know, get – what’s the good, you know, headline-y pun I can make? Get mediocre, get kind of stupid.

PESCA: I wish they would get smart?

HOLLOWAY: I probably walked away with a more favorable impression of “Get Smart” than I would have in any other week.

PESCA: OK.

HOLLOWAY: Because after seeing “The Love Guru,” I could watch commercials and be more entertained. So it’s not – it’s a competent movie that’s not very ambitious. It’s basically a riff off of the “Mission Impossible” films.

PESCA: Steve Carell versus Don Adams. How did they stack up?

HOLLOWAY: I’ll be honest. I’m not 138 years old, so I don’t remember the original “Get Smart” television show. I saw a couple of episodes as a kid, but I do have to put that out there. I don’t remember Don Adams.

PESCA: What about Tennessee Tuxedo? It’s basically the same character. Don Adams played him.

HOLLOWAY: From the Hanna-Barbera cartoons?

PESCA: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

HOLLOWAY: It’s – Carell is playing Carell, you know? I think the character – from what I’ve seen of the character, the character suits him very well. cheap adidas shoesYou know, he plays an intelligent but not quite bumbling guy, but sort of – if there’s a difference between bumbling and stumbling. He’s mildly bumbling.

PESCA: A couple of letters separating him. Let’s hear how Maxwell Smart bumbles undercover.

(Soundbite of movie “Get Smart”)

Mr. TERENCE STAMP: (As Siegfried) Who are you?

Mr. STEVE CARELL: (As Maxwell Smart) My name is Nudnick Spilkas. Who are you?

Mr. STAMP: (As Siegfried) I am Siegfried.

Mr. CARELL: (As Maxwell Smart) I understand that you’re the man to see if someone is interested in acquiring items of a nuclear nature.

Mr. STAMP: (As Siegfried) How do I know you’re not controlled?

Mr. CARELL: (As Maxwell Smart) If I were controlled, you’d already be dead.

Mr. STAMP: (As Siegfried) If you were controlled, you’d already be dead.

Mr. CARELL: (As Maxwell Smart) Well, neither of us is dead, so I’m obviously not from control.

Mr. STAMP: (As Siegfried) That actually makes sense.

PESCA: So let me ask you this.

(Soundbite of laughter)

PESCA: How can you give it a mediocre review if you’re howling in here as you listen to that clip?

HOLLOWAY: Because I just had a “You’re going to Hell” spoken into my headphones!

(Soundbite of laughter)

PESCA: All right. How’s Anne Hathaway?

HOLLOWAY: Oh, Anne Hathaway’s legs are a prominent feature of this film.

PESCA: That’s good.

HOLLOWAY: In a way, it’s a movie about Anne Hathaway’s legs. Anne Hathaway is about how she is in every movie. She’s there, and she’s a little cold, and well lit.

PESCA: She’s there, she’s square, get used to it.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, yeah.

PESCA: All right. Here’s my Steve Carell insight. I think the guy is hysterical, just as great a “Daily Show” correspondent as can be. I don’t know anyone who I regard – I have such high esteem for comedically who’s just been in a series of comedic movies that I have just no interest in seeing. Because even Steve Martin punctuates the movies that you don’t care about, the kiddie movies, with some good ones, but Steve Carrel is just consistently in movies that I don’t care about. You know, is he torpedoing his career going after the big blockbuster “Evan Almighty,” “Get Smart,” et cetera?

HOLLOWAY: Here’s my theory about this. This is something me and my wife worked out one day talking about the same thing, is that Carell gets all of the comedy street cred in the world that he needs from “The Office.” And after having done “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Little Miss Sunshine,” he doesn’t need any more film street cred. He just goes in twice and year and cashes a paycheck, does a big bloated film and goes back to shooting more “Office” episodes. And you know, it’s greedy, but it’s not, you know, the motivations aren’t admirable, but you know, you can’t fault him because he still is doing good work elsewhere. It’s just not in motion pictures.

PESCA: You saw a piece of marketing this week called “Kit Kittredge,” the first theatrically released “American Girl” movie. From an ad in the New York Times, this is a limited release today. In five theaters, you could see the movie about – what is it? Like six days before everyone else could see it on Wednesday? And if you go, it’s 20 dollars for a ticket, but you get a special gift.

HOLLOWAY: What could that gift be?

PESCA: I don’t know!

HOLLOWAY: Do you think it’s a doll?

PESCA: Ah, I just heard it’s a T-shirt.

HOLLOWAY: T-shirt? Would they really? Just a T-shirt?

PESCA: Just a T-shirt, not even a doll.

HOLLOWAY: Just go to the store and get one.

PESCA: Is it a T-shirt for Kit? No. We don’t even know. Oh, it is for Kit.

PATRICIA MCKINNEY: Yeah, it’s a T-shirt for – a children-sized T-shirt. Supply is limited. You have to redeem your ticket stub to get a T-shirt.

PESCA: Yeah, supply is limited to how many people can fit in those five theaters.

MCKINNEY: I looked this stuff up for you, Mike.

PESCA: Thanks. So what did you think of the movie?

HOLLOWAY: The movie is, you know, it’s – I guess it’s good for little kids. There’s not – thankfully, I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know whether to expect an actual doll being, you know, sort of sold in the film. There’s not. It’s set in the Great Depression. Kit Kittredge is played by Abigail Breslin and she’s a – she wants to be a reporter. She’s nine years old, or whatever. She’s trying to write newspaper stories for the Cincinnati Register.

PESCA: Yeah, that’s cool, that’s the backstory of the real doll. I know all about the “American Girl” dolls, but go ahead.

(Soundbite of laughter)

PESCA: She’s from Cincinnati!

HOLLOWAY: Let’s get into – no wait, why do you know about the…

PESCA: I once did a story on the “American Girl” phenomenon, and it’s crazy! And they have a quasi-Broadway show. And as I told you, as we were chatting off the air, the escaped slave doll sings the best song in the Broadway show.

HOLLOWAY: As she should.

PESCA: Yeah.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, anyway, so it’s set during the Depression. And she has adventures with hobos, lots of hobos.

(Soundbite of laughter)

HOLLOWAY: And apparently the Great Depression was all about hanging out with magicians and dance instructors and hobos in your backyard.

PESCA: And let me also point out that Alan Arkin was in “Get Smart,” Steve Carell was in “Get Smart,” and Abigail was in this movie. That’s three costars of “Little Miss Sunshine.” Thank you, Dan Holloway. And that is it for this hour of the BPP. cheap adidasWe are always online at npr.org. I’m Mike Pesca.

We have with us now the winner of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. His name is Tyler Hinman, and he joins us from the NPR bureau in Chicago.
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HANSEN: I’m well. How are you?

Mr. HINMAN: Doing pretty well.

HANSEN: Third win in a row, huh.light snow

Mr. HINMAN: Yeah.

HANSEN: So, what’s your secret? How do you do it?

Mr. HINMAN: It’s a lot of practice more than anything else.cecilia I just do a lot of puzzles and try to learn something new when I see it.

HANSEN: Really? Did you learn anything new this year?
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Mr. HINMAN: Nothing springs to mind immediately. Fortunately, I was able to do everything that I came across. In the final puzzle, one of the clues was secesh – S-E-C-E-S-H – and it’s a lot easier when you hear the clue aloud than when you read it, because when you read it you’re likely to mispronounce it as I did. And the answer turns out to be reb, because secesh, of course, is short for secessionist.

HANSEN: Ah.

Mr. HINMAN: And that was a – error that tripped up a lot of us because it crossed an ambiguous entry – carpenters tool – all of us had level, which was the easiest answer to come up with, and it turned out to be bevel, with that B in reb.

HANSEN: Wow. So those were the pitfalls, some rather diabolical clues in the final puzzle, yeah.

Mr. HINMAN: Oh. That’s right.kappa shoes

HANSEN: You know, the final round has been described as a contest between you and the constructor, not you against the other contestants. Would you agree with that?

Mr. HINMAN: More or less. Really, you’re just trying to get to the puzzle and hope it’s good enough.

HANSEN: Yeah, and was it hard this year compared to the two years before, harder?

Mr. HINMAN: It’s difficult to compare because each has been difficult for its own reason. But yeah, this year was – this year was very hard. I think it actually took me longer than either of the other two championship puzzles. It was very close to the time.

HANSEN: Yeah. Do you have a good luck charm?

Mr. HINMAN: Yeah. Actually, I’ve worn the same T-shirt on Sunday for each of the past three years – not every Sunday over the past three years, but every Sunday at the tournament. There’s a Web site called homestarrunner with some very funny flash cartoons, and there’s a character on there named Trogdor, who’s a dragon. And I have a shirt with that character on it that I’ve worn every Sunday at the competition that I’ve won.

HANSEN: You’re not like the baseball players who, like, won’t wash the shirt or…

Mr. HINMAN: Oh, I wash the shirt. Yeah.

HANSEN: Okay. Tyler, what do you do when you’re not doing puzzles and crossword tournaments?

Mr. HINMAN: I work nights, actually, as a bond trader in Chicago. Still, kind of, going through – I had some growing pains in that regard, trying to get better at it so I can make a decent living off of it, but it’s interesting work.

HANSEN: Yeah. So after you win a tournament like this, do you, sort of, fast from crosswords for a while or do you get right back into it, you know, the next day?

Mr. HINMAN: Oh, I still do them. I might not do as much speed solving. Right before the tournament, I tend to do a little more training on paper with a stopwatch and so forth. I won’t really do that as much after the tournament. I’ll do the same number of puzzles, but it’s more likely to be at a more leisurely pace so I can enjoy them a little more.

HANSEN: And can Will assume that you’ll be showing up at next year’s tournament in Brooklyn?

Mr. HINMAN: That’s the plan.

HANSEN: Tyler Hinman, three-time American Crossword Tournament champion. cheap bags
Congratulations and good luck next year.

Mr. HINMAN: Thank you so much.

It’s MORNING EDITION from NPR News on a Friday morning. I’m Steve Inskeep.foot lockercheap brand t-shirts
It’s not considered polite to say something bad about somebody’s hometown.brand t The man we’re about to meet is certainly polite, even though the hometown in question is Mogadishu, the capital of war-torn Somalia. It’s the bullet-riddled town where he is selling T-shirts reading Beautiful Mogadishu.cheap eyeglasses

Turns out the T-shirt artist is a man who can tell you something about what went wrong in Somalia. NPR’s Gwen Thompkins visited his Mogadishu studio.

GWEN THOMPKINS: Every month, Abdul Cotter Awaiz Abdi(ph) writes the word beautiful Mogadishu in black paint on hundreds of ordinary gray T-shirts. He seems ordinary. He has an ordinary face, an ordinary nose. But Abdi’s eyes have an usual depth of perception.
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Mr. ABDUL COTTER AWAIZ ABDI (T-shirt Artist): (Through translator) Due to a civil war, I decided to show the people another idea that Mogadishu was beautiful and to make the people remember that Mogadishu was once very beautiful.
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THOMPKINS: Fittingly, Abdi calls himself and his business Happy Arts. But he’s not slaphappy. He knows what the city looks like now.

Mr. ABDI: (Through translator) Mogadishu is not beautiful now because it was destroyed and there is trash everywhere.

THOMPKINS: In a loud, wobbly studio of corrugated metal, Abdi is artist, journalist and historian. He makes money from T-shirts in some fairly routine pastoral scenes. But for years he’s been painting other vivid canvases that he almost never shows and refuses to sell.

Abdi has been working in secret to make a pictorial essay of what went wrong in his city.

Mr. ABDI: (Through translator) I (unintelligible) in beautiful Mogadishu. I was also recording all the civil war. And at the end of the civil war, if I am lucky (unintelligible) at that time, I will show the people how the people were killing each other and how it was going.

THOMPKINS: Mogadishu, a once magnificent city by the sea, used to have its own lido overlooking the Indian Ocean. Statues of Somali heroes stood high overhead near spectacular stone houses of government. There were gelato shops and ice cream stands, frangipanis, aneme(ph) trees and bougainvillea too.

But civil war and anarchy has had a leveling effect on this ancient city. Riding around town with Abdi, he points out his old art school near the parliament building of former dictator Siad Barre’s military regime. The school was a modest building at the end of a leafy street. It survived Barre’s ouster from power in 1991 but the building could not survive the warlords who followed.

Once rival clans got to fighting, nothing was out of bounds. The art building is now in ruin, all shards and crumbles.

Mr. ABDI: (Through translator) When in 1990 there was a war between two main clans, Hawiye and Darod. Then that fighting was happening in this area, we left from the area. Then we came back in 1991 when Darod was ousted from the city and Hawiye was still (unintelligible) here. Then at that time there was another war between Hawiye itself. cheap adidas shoesAnd at the end in 1995, it was bombed and it collapsed.

THOMPKINS: Abdi wants to get going.

Mr. ABDI: (Through translator) I get sad whenever I see the building because even now I am shocked. I don’t come here mostly because I don’t like to see my school collapsed. It makes me feel uncomfortable.

THOMPKINS: The next stop behind a row of corrugated metal shacks is, well, nothing. There’s a tall tree and a spit of brown dirt not much wider than a game of hopscotch. This was where Abdi was born, in a house under this tree. The house was destroyed by artillery fire in 1991.

(Soundbite of car horn)

THOMPKINS: Hang a right by the presidential palace and ride about five minutes. There’s a windy and wild street there with a playground on one side and what looks to be an abandoned gas station on the other. There are lots of children here. This is the place where a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter went down on October 3rd, 1993.

It was part of a U.S. military operation, backed by the United Nations, to capture top lieutenants of a warlord who’d proclaimed himself the president of Somalia. In all, 18 army rangers and other Special Forces died in the incident, now called the Battle of Mogadishu.

This is what the street sounds like today.

(Soundbite of wind)

THOMPKINS: The Islamic Courts Union kicked out the warlords last year in the second battle of Mogadishu. They didn’t know what to make of Happy Arts and so in the end they left Abdi alone. Now that Somalia’s Transitional Government has come to power, Abdi says he hopes to one day mount an exhibition telling the world about his hometown.

Mr. ABDI: (Through translator) I (unintelligible) at the end because I saw Mogadishu when it was very beautiful, but my children see only the destruction. Ijordan shoes wish also some time in their life they see Mogadishu very beautiful and (unintelligible).

THOMPKINS: It takes an optimist to tell the story of this city by the sea.

Gwen Thompkins, NPR News, Mogadishu.

Now, we’re going to look at a couple of economies in the Caribbean. Even a casual glance out the window of an airplane tells a story.
handbags Haiti and Dominican Republic share an island, but seemingly little else. Haiti is deforested and shockingly underdeveloped. The Dominican Republic is lush and green, its big cities filled with modern buildings.air jordan shoescheap kappa
Our Planet Money team has been wondering how two countries so close together could have such radically different economies. They found part of the answer in the tale of two men who make T-shirts for a living. Here’s Chana Joffe-Walt and Adam Davidson.china cheap air jordans

CHANA JOFFE-WALT: George Sassine was on TV the night before the earthquake. And he said this. He said, this is the closest I have ever been to satisfying my dream. In fact, George Sassine said, this is the single best moment in Haitian economic history.
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George owns a T-shirt factory in Port-au-Prince. And he said a couple of years of political stability in Haiti, that counts for a lot, and a new focus on jobs instead of aid meant thousands of Haitians would get new jobs making even more T-shirts.

George said this as he walked through rows of women sitting at sewing machines making three, four bucks a day in a country where most people live on less than $2 a day. It was a dream George had been working on for 35 years, and it felt like it was finally happening.
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Mr. GEORGE SASSINE (President, Haitian Association of Industrialists): Things are moving. The fans were turning. The lights were on. People are walking back and forth, sewing…

JOFFE-WALT: Busy and bustling.

Mr. SASSINE: …and all my phones were going at the same time. I was planning on a visit by Irish businesspeople on that Sunday – coming Sunday. cheap air jordansI just had the Koreans and before that, Brazilians. So things were moving, you know, and I had so many things to do. And now, as you can see, it looks like death.

JOFFE-WALT: The earthquake tore apart one of the factory walls. Everyone had gone home for the day, but George’s office is now a pile of rocks.

ADAM DAVIDSON: OK, Chana, now I want to take us across the border into the Dominican Republic and introduce you to another man with a dream about T-shirts. His name is Fernando Capellan. He’s the CEO of a company called Grupo M. They’re now a full-service business. That means they turn yarn into cloth. They dye that cloth. They cut that cloth into shape, sew it into T-shirts that they themselves have designed. And then their logistics experts get those T-shirts from the Caribbean to your store in Nebraska. His business now is, as they say, several steps up the value chain from the dream he started with.

When Fernando started out, his dream was exactly what George’s is: to build a simple, cut-and-sew factory where people with low skills make low wages, simply sewing T-shirts.

When Grupo M was a baby, was it where Haiti is today? You know how to sew. women shoesYou know how to cut.

Mr. FERNANDO CAPELLAN (CEO, Grupo M): Yeah, we know how to…

Unidentified Man: It was a cut, sew, fit shop.

Mr. CAPELLAN: Yeah. It was only cut and sew, basically. Cut and sew.

DAVIDSON: If I came to you in 1986 and said, I don’t need cut and sew. I need you to design it. I need a logistics plan. I need…

Mr. CAPELLAN: I couldn’t make it because it had – everything in life evolved.

JOFFE-WALT: When George and Fernando were young, 1960, Haiti and the Dominican Republic had the same per capita real GDP. It was equally likely that they would both get their dreams fulfilled.

DAVIDSON: By 2005, per capita GDP in the Dominican Republic had tripled.

JOFFE-WALT: In Haiti, it was half what it had been in 1960.

Mr. SASSINE: And look at me, look at him.

JOFFE-WALT: Here’s George Sassine again, in his empty factory.

Mr. SASSINE: I’ve had a – coup d’etats. I’ve had hurricanes. Now, I have an earthquake. So…

DAVIDSON: It’s not that he’s smarter than you?

Mr. SASSINE: No, he’s not smarter than me, no. It’s just – it’s…

JOFFE-WALT: He works harder than you?

Mr. SASSINE: No. No, on the contrary. I work harder because he – fortunately, for him, his country, his government was behind him. Me, I’ve been having governments against me all my life.

DAVIDSON: Fernando now has all sorts of new big dreams. He wants to design and make more expensive clothes, move into higher-end stores in the U.S. He wants the Dominican Republic to become the preeminent apparel producer in the Western Hemisphere.

JOFFE-WALT: George has adjusted his dream, too. wholesale adidas shoesToday, he just wants to reopen sometime soon, and he wants to get back to where he’s already been.

I’m Chana Joffe-Walt.

DAVIDSON: And I’m Adam Davidson, NPR News.

Every year at the summit of leaders from Asia and the Pacific Rim nations, the presidents and prime ministers put on shirts that reflect the host nation’s sense of style and gather for what have become light-hearted photos.

The Associated Press calls it the “funny shirt photo.” The 2004 photos of then-president George W. Bush and other leaders in Chilean “Chamantos” are well remembered.
President Barack Obama, attending his first annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, was in Singapore yesterday for this year’s funny photos. The garb: Silk tunic shirts with mandarin collars, in a choice of red or blue-gray.

Of course, there’s also been work to do at the summit. NPR’s Scott Horsley, who’s traveling with the president on Obama’s 10-day trip across Asia, says Obama “became the first American leader in decades to sit in the same room with Myanmar’s military ruler.” According to one of Obama’s national security advisers, Scott reports, the president took the opportunity to call for political reform in Myanmar, and specifically for the release of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and other pro-democracy political prisoners.

Obama also met with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and the two discussed the ongoing problem of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The leaders said they aren’t satisified with the pace of talks with Iran and that “other options” might have to be explored.

As The New York Times writes, Obama also said that “the reset button has worked” to improve U.S.-Russian relations It’s was announced that the 2011 APEC summit will be held in Obama’s native state; Hawaii.

We suspect we know what type of shirt the leaders will be wearing in that year’s group photo.

We turn now from old T-shirts to new T-shirts and the controversy they can cause. Remember a couple of years ago when Abercrombie & Fitch had to stop selling some of its T-shirts when a group of teenage girls said the slogans on them, like I Had a Nightmare, I Was a Brunette, and Who Needs Brains When You Have These were offensive?

Well, now comes Macy’s Department Store, which has decided to pull its latest fashion statement tees with the slogan, Brown is the New White, which apparently concerned a number of Latino shoppers.

Here to speak with me about the mistakes some companies make in their marketing efforts is Dr. Ed Rincon, president of Rincon & Associates, a multicultural marketing research company. He is also an associate professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and he joins us from KERA in Dallas.

Mr. Rincon, welcome.

Professor ED RINCON (Southern Methodist University, Dallas; President, Rincon & Associates): Good to join you today.

CORLEY: Well, first let’s talk about the Macy’s T-shirt. What do you think the company was trying to do, and why was it so maddening to some?

Mr. RINCON: Well, from the Web site description of the manufacturer and their relationship with Macy’s, they were very much trying to attract a young, chic Latina shopper to their stores by introducing some, I guess what they consider non-traditional clothing and shirts and other accessories that also had some quote, unquote, “very non-traditional” types of taglines on the shirts themselves.

CORLEY: Mm-hmm. Well, I know you don’t speak for Macy’s, and we’ve trying to get in touch with the company as well, but what do you think this slogan exactly meant, or this tagline meant – Brown is the New White?

Mr. RINCON: You know, that’s the mystery of marketing research, is that it can mean different things to different people. Now, the phrase Brown is the New White can mean, for example, that Hispanics are replacing whites as the demographic group in power, in numbers, in presence in the U.S. Another reading on what that meant is that Hispanics really, really aspire to be white.

CORLEY: So in one sense it’s kind of an affirmative, empowering statement, and in the other sense, not so much?

Mr. RINCON: Right. The second one is the one that has a potential to be offensive, because we know from the past 30 years of research that we’ve been doing with Hispanics – not just here in the U.S., but in other countries, too – that they have a very strong sense of their own cultural identity, and being white is just not one of those items that’s in their inventory of aspirations. So this could have the potential to offend Hispanics, particularly those in the U.S. who are very proud of their culture and cultural values and the implication or the insinuation that white is what they aspire to be is simply not correct.

CORLEY: Dr. Rincon, isn’t there a history of companies trying to be edgy or hip to attract customers, and how do they try to determine if what they are doing may be insensitive?

Mr. RINCON: It’s not clear that they all do their homework. I’ve done a number of studies with apparel manufacturers as well. And for the most part, the people that are doing it right actually bother bring in consumers that represent their target market – either through focus groups or some other mechanism – and they actually show them some of their apparel collection, some of their theme lines and their colors, because they’re truly interested in selling their products to that particular demographic. I would say that…

CORLEY: Can you give us an example of that, maybe?

Mr. RINCON: I can’t name a specific company, of course, but I can’t talk in general that one manufacturer, for example, is designing a particular line of clothing for Hispanics, and they very much want to know the colors that Latinos want because their – the appeal of the color spectrum is very different for Latinos than compared to non-Latinos. So if they’re only going to produce three or four shirts, for example, it’s very important for them to hit the right one, depending on what Latinos want.

The other thing that is important is lifestyle and fashion. What a teenager wants in the way of a T-shirt, for example, is going to be quite different from what an adult wants. So if you’re planning to sell to teenagers, you better make sure that you convene those types of consumers so that you — they can see the wardrobe and evaluate the pricing, evaluate the colors, the sizes, and other aspects of that wardrobe.

The bottom line is you need to get a handle on what that consumer – what appeal that apparel line is going to have with that consumer and their likelihood of buying that and…

CORLEY: Mm-hmm. Go ahead. I’m sorry.

Mr. RINCON: …one of the important things is how they plan to buy it, and this is one disconnect that I think Macy’s made with this collection here. We know from our research that a certain type of Hispanic shops at Macy’s, and it’s not likely that the shopper that they were targeting with this line of T-shirts was going to shop at Macy’s, anyway. So I’m not sure that Macy’s really understood who their target consumer was for this line of clothing.

CORLEY: Is this the case – in this specific case, and in other cases as well – of especially where you have companies trying to attract people of color, of needing more folks in the marketing industry or the advertising industry, or who work for the company who are also people of color?

Mr. RINCON: That’s true. We do know that in many department stores the salespeople don’t necessarily reflect the shoppers in that community. Banks, for example, have been criticized for that for many years. We also know that the store environments sometimes can be somewhat uncomfortable. In fact, Macy’s does have a history of, for example, in New York just a couple of years ago, the attorney general cited them for the racial profiling of Latino and African-American customers in their Macy’s New York stores.

So it’s kind of a reflection of perhaps a lack of judgment about how to deal with ethnic consumers. It’s not just understanding what they want to buy, but also when they come to shop there, it’s not clear that their personnel know how to handle the new shoppers.

CORLEY: I don’t want to just pick on Macy’s. I mean, this is the latest incident where we’ve seen a company kind of withdraw some merchandise that the public has found to be offensive…

Mr. RINCON: Yes.

CORLEY: …or had some problem with. Are there other examples that you can think of where a company has – trying to target a Latino – a Latino market has made a similar mistake?

Mr. RINCON: To be honest with you, there’s very few – many of the – in the class that I’ve been teaching on Hispanic marketing at SMU, I have kept pace with a lot of new product innovations, particularly in the clothing area. And in large part, what you’re seeing is many of these lines of clothing that are designed for Latinos, they tend to be offered through Web sites. And you don’t see as many of these manufacturers distributing their clothing lines through, say, top-box retailers.

And that may a disconnect between the retailers and their expected – the expected demand. It’s kind of like a catch-22. How do you know Hispanics are going to buy it? It says, well, the only way you’ll know is to put it in the store to see if they buy it, because if you’re not doing any research, that may be the only way to find out.

But there haven’t been too many of these bloopers – as I call them in my classes – because they’re really – the apparel industry is just, in the past few years, starting to introduce clothing apparel that has a specific cultural dimension that’s targeted to Hispanic shoppers, see.

So that industry has been slow in bringing new product innovations. But I think they’re fumbling around, thinking that, like in the case – in this case, the company that manufactures these T-shirts is based in Mexico. So, I think there was a presumption there that because they’re a Mexican-based company, they ought to know Hispanic shoppers and what they want in the U.S. But I have pointed out in the past that sometimes there’s a great disconnect between Mexican-based companies and what has U.S.-Hispanics are really looking for.

CORLEY: Dr. Ed Rincon is a marketing expert and the president of Rincon & Associates in Dallas, Texas. Thanks so much for joining us.

Mr. RINCON: Thank you.

CORLEY: We called Macy’s corporate offices again today for a response to the T-shirt controversy, and a spokesman for Macy’s South issued these comments, quote, “We are constantly looking for unique and differentiated merchandise that will resonate with our customers as hip, current and trendy. It is never our intention to offend. We have had feedback from our customers and have responded to them by removing the one style they found objectionable.” End.

(Soundbite of music)

CORLEY: And that is our program for today. I’m Cheryl Corley, and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Let’s talk more tomorrow.