Perhaps one of the greatest unsung marketing success stories of the past 25 years has been that of the Jaws of Life.

Take this story about an accident on the Confederation Bridge for example: “The bridge was closed for about two hours while rescue crews used the jaws of life to free the injured.” Or this story about an accident on the Charlottetown bypass: “Firefighters used the “jaws of life” to cut the youths out of the vehicle.” Or this story. Or this one.

Jaws of Life is a registered trademark of Hale Products Inc.. Originally developed by Hurst Performance as a race track tool, the products’s history page says “Because the tool reduced the time to extricate a victim from a car crash, literally snatching them from the ‘jaws of death’, the tool earned the name Jaws of Life.”

What’s odd about the Jaws of Life is that whenever they are used to rescue someone in an accident, this fact is mentioned in news stories. It’s almost like the company has an product placement deal with media outlets. Imagine if every product, from ladders to hoses to stretchers, was mentioned, by its trade name, in accident reports.

While I can understand the novelty of mentioning the Jaws of Life when a fire department originally purchases them, or when they were a novel product, this has been going on for a long, long time.

Perhaps my friends in the media can enlighten me?

The How Stuff Works site has a good page that explains how the Jaws of Life work, by the way.

In the next seven days, there are 8,473 television programmes available on my television set. Of those, there are 1,868 uniquely named programmes, starting alphabetically with with 100 Huntley Street and ending with Zoom.

After Paid Programming (445 airings), the most frequently broadcast programmes are Real TV (58 airings), WBZ 4 News (42 airings), Daily Planet (38), The Simpsons (37), Judge Judy (37), Martha Stewart Living (35), Blind Date (35), The Decorating Challenge (34) and M*A*S*H (34).

There are 20 programmes with “sex” in the description, 32 programmes with “love” in the description, and 64 programmes with “war” in the description.

The channel airing the most number of individual programmes this week is the children’s network Treehouse (468 programmes); our local Eastlink Cable 10 airs the fewest number of programmes (42) followed by MuchMoreMusic (146), CNN (152) and A&E (158).

The West Wing airs Wednesday at 10:00 p.m. on NBC.

I find this Common Errors in English page very, very useful. It cleared up both the jerry-built/jury-rigged confusion and the whole tenterhooks question.

I direct my little brothers^* to alot and it’s/its; they are both afflicted with blind spots regarding these two.

^* For the record, I have three brothers, Mike, Johnny and Steve. Johnny and Steve are “my little brothers” as a collective noun because they are twins, and six years younger than me. Mike is simply “my brother” because he’s not a twin, and we’re very close in age. “My brothers” is a reference to all three of my brothers. And Johnny and Steve are “my brother Steve” and “my brother Johnny” individually. Complex, no? I have no idea how my brothers refer to me.

From Alan comes this interesting story from the Whig, titled “Lights out for festival that brightened fort,” concerning Kingston, Ontario’s shutting off of their “Festival of Lights,” with the gear being sold off to Regina (Lord help them).

Who are the people who go on Anna McGoldrick’s Musical Tours of Ireland?

Here’s a handy tool to assist candidates aspiring for the leadership of a political party. Select one action verb, one connector, and one destination and, blammo!, you’ve got yourself a political campaign.

• Action Verbs — Building, Grasping, Tumbling, Energizing, Leaping, Hunkering Down, Aiming, Leaning, Tilting
• Connectors — towards, in the general direction of, into, at, on top of
• Destinations — the Future, the Past, Paradise, Hell, getting Organized, Winning, not Losing, Absolute Power, Recognition

Potential candidates are welcome to make use of this tool at no charge.

Leaping into Hell.

Steven Garrity raises an interesting point about news reports of tragedies, and how numbers of dead are reported.

Having worked in a daily newspaper, albeit at the slicing and waxing end, not in any reportorial capacity, I have some feel for how this world works.

I think it’s best to imagine the world of facts reporting as a spectrum that starts at the daily newspaper (or, today, the web or CNN) and ends with Encyclopaedia Britannica.

As you move across the spectrum, additional layers of accuracy are overlaid on the factosphere as additional reporting is available. If you imagine “truth” to be a sculpture, you can imagine the first early whiffs of news as a rough outline of a finished work — enough to give you the idea, the proportions, the scale. As time passes, and we learn more, shapes emerge, details get filled in, and “truth” emerges.

The interesting thing is that the opportunity for insight probably occurs somewhere after television and daily newspapers are finished reporting the facts, but well in advance of the history books. I’d site this sweet spot at somewhere near the appearance of commentary in weekly newsmagazines (like Weekend Magazine and The New Yorker) and weblogs.

At this point in the journalistic cycle, enough of the facts have emerged to give us a fairly accurate picture of the situation, but the images of the event are still fresh enough in our minds to be visceral. Its news on the way from the stomach into the intestines.

Reading about a disaster in a weblog or weekly two years after the fact is of little use or interest, for the context of the time and space are missing and difficult to fill in. Both are ephemeral, and that’s what makes each, for my money, the most interesting of media.

The CBC, says its employment equity policy, is “committed to equality in employment and career opportunities for people who have been underrepresented in the Canadian labour force.”

Apparently this spirit of reparative generosity extends to the multi-gendered among us, as their employment application, in the section for “Sex,” contains checkboxes for “Female” and “Male,” both of which can be checked at the same time.

The CBC should be lauded for this overwhelming spirit of inclusiveness.

What with the Aubergine Alert flickering, and the drums of war beating ever closer, you might expect that air travel through Boston would have the security sphincter ever more tightened this week than most. And you would be right.

Terminal E at Logan, the terminal through which all international arrivals and departures are handled, has been under construction for as long as anyone can remember. While the light at the end of the tunnel is nearer now than ever before — you can actually see evidence of new construction now, while previously it was shrouded behind drywall curtains — it’s still a chaotic place to travel through. Indeed having been through more airports than I can count in the last year, I’d have to say that Terminal E is about as bad as it gets.

So you start with a chaotic terminal, apply considerably increased paranoia, triple the number of security personnel while cutting in half the number of security gates and doubling the amount of going-over we’re all subjected to, add in a gaggle of excited students taking Lufthansa to Frankfurt for the February break, and the result is a melee.

As an added bonus, you have the Air Canada standard practice of telling passengers to be ready to board at, say 3:10 p.m. while not actually boarding the plane until 3:35 p.m.

There is no more a stark contrast from my experiences in Boston to the mood here in the Air Canada departure lounge in Halifax as I type this. While the Halifax Airport has also been under constant renovation for as long as anyone can remember, the worst is now over, and slow times like this (8:30 on a Saturday night), you could shoot a cannon through the place and not do any damage (although this action would no doubt be considered an egregious infraction of several federal laws). The flight to Charlottetown is the last one of the day, leaving at 9:40 p.m., and having landed here at 6:10 p.m., I get to experience this humming calm for almost four hours.

Which means that in addition to answering my backlog of email, and seeking to entertain or at least distract the readership, I also have had ample opportunity to enjoy the offerings of the oddly named “Brisket,” the new food concession in the departures areas (brisket: “a cut of meat from the breast or lower chest especially of beef”; in other words “no vegetarian options”).

If you set aside the scheduling quirk that leaves me here for a four hour wait (which is roughly enough time to be back and forth to Boston again), service from Air Canada on this trip has been less abysmal that usual. The planes still shake and rattle. There’s still no food to speak of. But the folks seem friendlier and less stressed out, and things seem to be flowing a little more smoothly. Maybe I’m just becoming used to the abyss.

Only 70 more minutes until my plane leaves…

Postscript at 8:51 p.m.: some sort of loud cult of 14 year old girls, some 40 of them, has descended on the departure lounge. Calm has deparated; tittering ensues.

Another postscript at 8:54 p.m.: as near as I can tell, this cultic gaggle is comprised of British youth en route to Deer Lake or Gander. And there is one young male in their midst. Which if I recall correctly from my own teenaged years, means this young chap is either in heaven or in hell, depending on his disposition.

Followup at 9:00 p.m.: they all appear to be going skiing or snowboarding.

Observation at 9:01 pm.: is it an consequence of our colonial past that people with a British accent, at least a British accent of a particular sort, sound far more intelligent than we could all ever hope to manage here in Canada, even if they’re only 14 and on their way to ski in Newfoundland?

Seeing as brother Johnny and I were in New England this week, we took the opportunity to drive south into Cambridge to attend the Dave Winer-sponsored “weblog event” at Harvard last night.

The gathering was primarily of people “in the blogosphere” — in other words people with weblogs, with an interest in weblogs, who circulate, to some extent in orbit around Dave and the software that his company, UserLand, creates for assisting people to create weblogs.

I took the effort to attend because I am a longtime reader of Dave’s weblog, Scripting.com, and a casual user of UserLand’s Frontier system (we used it to build an early e-commerce system for Cows). I was also curious, to be honest, to see what ‘webloggers’ look like.

Given the nature of the medium, the event itself was well-blogged: Donna Wentworth, Bob Frankston, Frank Field, Derek Slater; Dan Bricklin took lots of photos.

I quite enjoyed the evening: the people were interesting, the conversations novel. Dave Winer is a good showman, and a capable discussion wrangler: he managed to keep things rolling along for two hours, and when things got too tangential, or too repetitive, he instantly steered the boat in a new direction.

I made a comment about writing for Oliver more than for a amorphous audience of unknown netizens and in making the comment realized it was true (Oliver, hello, it’s me, your father, thinking of you here in the past). I also mentioned that, as far as I knew, I’d never actually been “linked to” in the big and important validating way that weblogs “build flow.” This was immediately rectified when Dave asked Donna, who was liveblogging the event, to link to me. Which she did (thanks!).

We took off after the session so as to be back at a reasonable hour in southern New Hampshire; many of those attending went off to eat spicy food afterwards.

Dave promises there will be other similar events as his time at Harvard continues; if you’re in the area, and are interested in weblogging, you can’t go wrong by attending.