Here’s to Big Thinking

In a blogosphere honeycombed with knuckleheads and mountebanks aiding and abetting a level of discourse that delights in bad spelling, bad manners and shouting in capital letters, you come to treasure the oasis of a Web site that offers a place to think, and to enjoy the company of others who do, fiercely, imaginatively, the same thing.

It’s been almost two years since the launch of BigThink, a "global forum connecting people and ideas." The Web site started in January 2008 by Victoria Brown and Peter Hopkins, two former producers of PBS' "Charlie Rose," has garnered a sturdy following with smart, polished design; a comfortable look & feel; and more than 700 video-driven commentaries from some of the more consequential writers, artists and scholars of our time. The result: a genuine refuge for anyone seeking to put distance between themselves and the CAPS LOCK cognoscente.

Two recent examples indicate where BigThink has been going from the beginning. There’s an interview with Dr. Cornel West, the dearly beloved scholar, author, intellectual and cultural flamethrower. In the November interview, West holds forth on the blues, intellectuals’ betrayal of the poor, and the leadership of President Obama in a 33-minute interview you don’t have to digest all at once; BT has broken it down into bite-size chunks, any of which is an intellectual meal of itself.

John Irving, the celebrated novelist and essayist whose fiction is among the creatively sturdiest work in contemporary American literature, is asked what advice he’d give a young untried writer today.

Irving, interviewed in November, is downbeat, which is to say more than you might expect from one of today’s more critically and commercially recognized authors. Elsewhere, though, Irving speaks of the other, various dividends of his profession, including the challenge of writing the final sentence of a book, and the joys of beginning a new one.

There’s plenty more on this groaning board: pithy Afrocentric blog posts from Kris Broughton (aka Brown Man Thinking Hard);
interviews with actress-playwright Anna Deavere Smith; Seattle-based author Sherman Alexie, Wired editor Chris Anderson, author Gay Talese and theater critic Terry Teachout, for example. All in all, a feast at another kind of welcome table. And damn welcome it is.


BigThink has been called “YouTube for intellectuals,.” But that unnecessary reach for association with a wider demographic seriously overstates BT’s true scope, numerically and content-wise. The underlying principle here is quality, then quantity, and in our 24/7-soapbox age, that can be a refreshing thing. Rest assured, on BigThink you won’t see videos of Noam Chomsky’s Chihuahua tap-dancing on the kitchen tiles.

It’s a tribute to the necessity of the BigThink business model that the site has so far managed to not just survive but apparently thrive in an increasingly stratified online editorial world. Internet time makes dog years look like an eternity. Happy (upcoming) birthday BT; here’s to many more.

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Image credits: Anna Deavere Smith, Cornel West and John Irving: BigThink.

Aol. WTF?

“Change is good,” it’s been said. That thinking's seen us through 233 years of American dynamism, from a Declaration of Independence to an election, last November, that made that Declaration truly independent of the era in which it was written.

AOL understands that basic idea. Oops, my bad. That’s Aol. to you, effective on Thursday. That’s the day when AOL aka America Online officially transforms itself for the new century. That’s the day the company’s common stock begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange. That’s six days after AOL laid off 2,500 employees, the last headcount guillotine action before today’s spin-off from Time Warner (two weeks before Christmas).

Change is, uh, good.

The company showcased the new mark in a preview on Sunday, along with six accompanying, seemingly random images. The company’s press release spelled it out: "New Aol Brand Expresses Commitment to Stimulating Content, Openness and Inclusion."

“The new AOL brand identity is a simple, confident logotype, revealed by ever-changing images. It’s one consistent logo with countless ways to reveal,” reads the statement on the corporate Web site.

“Our new identity is uniquely dynamic,” Aol. Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong said in the press statement. “We have a clear strategy that we are passionate about and we plan on standing behind the … brand as we take the company into the next decade.”

The company joined forces with Wolff Olins, a brand and innovation consultancy based in London, New York and Dubai.

Last month, Alice Cho, Print magazine’s art director, told The Wrap’s Dylan Stableford:

“To be honest, I don't get it. I'm confused by the title case and I don't feel that the mixture of upper and lower case better communicates the ‘Commitment to Stimulating Content, Openness and Inclusion.’ I wonder if the image accompanying the Aol. mark will be constantly changing, depending on the context. Or will these 6 images be applied everywhere? I'm curious to see this applied across the board and see how the changing imagery works in various applications.”

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To these consumerist eyes, though, and in some perverse counter-intuitive way, the Aol. logo is exactly what Cho suggests it might be. The Aol. logotype will be superimposed on a galaxy of images, not just these six.

And that’s probably the point: against the canvas of exotic imagery, the logotype itself becomes almost invisible, the backdrop of the everyday experience — with the ubiquity that Aol. is certainly seeking as a portal, Internet service provider and global Web services company. It’s a “Rashomon” thing: each consumer sees what they want to see; every Aol. user will have their own distinctive take on the Aol. experience.

For some, it’s a move away from a corporate mark that was fully participatory already. Larry Oliver, commenting on the identity change at The Wrap asks: “It still baffles me why AOL went to letters for their name when they had the perfect name for an Internet company. America Online. Can you think of better name than that to describe what your business is?”

A damn good question, and time will tell how the public receives this head-scratching concept. But it wouldn’t be the first time that a company has tried to get the public to accept a brand identity that, at first blush, didn’t make a lick of sense.

From amazon to Nike, from eBay to Apple, from Monster to Google, American commerce is littered with examples of companies whose maverick descriptors didn’t obey the logic of making things easy on the consumer. Everyone in the world recognizes those names, and the products and services behind them, today. Clearly, there’s something to be said for going boldly where no company’s gone before.

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Aol.’s splashy experiment makes use of one of the more subtle principles of brand identity: that, beyond identifying a specific product or service, a brand name first elicits an emotional response, a first-blush reaction that cuts through intellect and goes for the gut. It’s the look & feel of a brand that often makes the difference.

The upper-and-lower-case treatment may be their way of making the brand look more accessible, less IMPOSING and FORMIDABLE than capital letters. The msnbc Web site tried much the same thing in 2007, when it formally lowercased the letters of its brand. One observer of brand trends called it “überfriendly.” Aol. is probably reading from the same page.

Of course, warm and fuzzy brand recognition only goes so far. Despite the pretty pictures, the public has its own elephant’s memory. Millions of Americans still remember what begat that new ticker symbol on the NYSE: the company whose unsolicited mass direct-mail campaign once loosed millions of software discs on the public (and the environment); the company whose customers have experienced numerous connectivity problems; the company on the receiving end of a $1.25 million fine from New York State in 2005 for poor customer service; the company whose merger with Time Warner is generally regarded as the worst in the history of American business.

Brand identity is all about getting people to remember. It’s a bigger challenge when that brand-new brand identity has as much to do with getting people to forget.

Tiger’s rough lie II

In re the matter and predicament of one Eldrick Tont Woods: We’re right on the edge, folks, tiptoeing up to that blurry line of no return, that hazy point where it’s harder and harder to wring any more funny out of all this.

When it started, with the fetching Rachel Uchitel, we were ready to smirk with our eyebrows lifted and say something about how maybe Tiger’s best drives weren’t on the golf course.

But that was six disasters ago, and that’s not even counting the Escalade wreck that punched the first hole in the most controlled and image-conscious façade in the history of American sports merchandising.

Since then, we’ve discovered Jamie Grubbs, Kalika Moquin, Jamie Jungers, Mindy Lawton, Cori Rist and Holly Sampson — a list of names for now, some with as-yet unsubstantiated claims despite their sly walkup to the billion-dollar Tiger Woods buffet.

But these serial announcements — heeere’s the Bimbette of the Day! — have already done damage to Tiger’s persona and his biography. And all of a sudden, the matter of a single dalliance most men and women could probably understand and forgive has turned into something just this side of pathological.

They’re still extracting humor from this in ways that cross the threshold of reality; now Tiger’s entered the objectifying realm of the cartoon.

Proof? The wiseasses at break.com created “Tiger Hunting,” an on-site video game in which you “help Tiger escape his angry wife by guiding his Escalade through the obstacles.”



And then there’s the work of Apple Daily News, a Taiwanese news source whose fanciful but graphically faithful computer-generated “recreations” of what may or may not have happened the morning of Nov. 27 — and the months and years leading up to that crash in Florida — have been heavily trafficked on YouTube for the last week.



But the funny has pretty much ended with the latest alarming claims: that Tiger is reportedly a fan of sex on Ambien; that Tiger was a big fan of sex in places that risked being caught in public; that Tiger went to the hospital after the Escalade crash with trouble breathing, and was admitted as a victim of an overdose; that, according to TMZ Elin Nordegren Woods, Tiger’s wife, gave paramedics two pill bottles at the accident scene – one for Ambien, one for Vicodin; that, according to RadarOnline, Elin has moved out of their residence, and into a house nearby.



All at once, we’re beginning to get a queasy feeling, a sense of Icarus auguring in for a bad crash landing. Maybe it’s because the scope of this thing is still undetermined. The Tiger debacle still has no contours; there’s no finality to get our heads around. It's got all the earmarks of one of those toxic media artichokes, day after day each new layer revealing something more troubling, more sordid, than the day before.

And it can’t be funny when there are children involved.  You have to wonder what Sam and Charlie thought when Elin Woods, their mother and Tiger’s wife, bundled them into the necessary limousine and whisked them away from the estate in Windermere. Sam, all of 3 years old, was bound to ask: “Mommy … mommy, where’s daddy?” We don’t need an Apple Daily recreation to tell us that.

It’s starting to feel like we’ve been here before. Helpless to observe a train wreck we couldn’t predict, one we were powerless to prevent.

We’re still hoping that somehow, Tiger (relatively quiet since his sojourn in the deep rough began) will step up and put this in some kind of perspective; we hope Tiger will impart the shape of reality, or at least clarification, to a runaway public narrative, one that doesn’t abhor the vacuum of Woods' silence as much as it feeds on that silence for survival.

For Tiger, this is no opportunity for the superhuman feats he’s performed with golf clubs and towering courage. This is no CGI moment. It’s as real as real can get.

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Image credits: CGI Tiger: Apple Daily News. Cori Rist: CelebrityVibe via New York Daily News. Tiger Hunting images: Break.com.

Comcastic voyage

This network is now in the hands of CCA, the Communications Corporation of America. And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamned propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?

From “Network,” screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky

Say what you will, Conan O’Brien knows who’s buttering his multimillion-dollar “Tonight Show” bread.

It was Thursday, as you know, when the long tenuous marriage between General Electric and NBC Universal began to formally end, after GE and the Internet-cable powerhouse Comcast announced a joint venture worth a combined $37.25 billion, giving the cable company eventual control of NBC Universal.

The deal will eventually mean GE gets to revert back to its core industrial competencies and focus, and away from the more volatile dictates of television programming. NBC Universal finds a ready, able, willing partner in Comcast, which already owns several media properties, as well as the nation’s largest cable subscriber network (at least 24 million households, maybe even yours).

But in the meantime, and for the foreseeable future (until GE exercises the option to sell more of the company down the road), the NBC Universal entertainment behemoth — networks! theme parks! online! motion pictures! — is in the hands of a startling partner.

What a world. Conan O’Brien may be working for the cable guy. And Conan owned up to that on Thursday’s “Tonight Show,” with a monologue almost as good as a Comcast ad, and a tent-show-revival musical number extolling the virtue of NBCU’s probable new daddy, complete with dancing girls and Andy Richter on tambourine. CanIgeddawitness?

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We’re all witnesses to this one, the biggest media merger since the AOL-Time Warner nuptials back in 2001. You remember, when AOL bought Time Warner Inc. for a mind-numbing $147 billion in stock, the beginning of the worst deal in media history, a five-spiral crash that formally ends maybe next week, when AOL trades on the exchange as its own stock.

This new deal? It’s complicated: NBCU borrows $9.1 billion from various third-party lenders to pay out to GE, which uses that cash to buy Vivendi's 20 percent stake in NBCU for $5.8 billion. This paves the way for GE to sell control of NBCU to Comcast.

Comcast then pays GE $6.5 bil for NBCU’s media properties (including NBC). Comcast will take a controlling 51 percent stake in the joint venture, and GE will control 49 percent. GE has been wanting to get shed of NBCU for awhile; they’ll have about seven years to sell the rest, presumably to Comcast.

Comcast gets a shiny old, well-recognized media company with broad tentacles in cable (MSNBC, Telemundo, Bravo, USA Network, The Weather Channel), movies (Universal Studios) and online (msnbc.com, too, I believe). All of it, in theory, pairs up nicely with Comcast’s current media holdings, including E!, the Style Network and several sports-related properties.

“This deal is a perfect fit for Comcast,” said Brian Roberts, the company CEO, in a statement. "In particular, NBCU's fast-growing, highly profitable cable networks are a great complement to our industry-leading distribution business.”

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Others are more concerned, and for very good reason. Comcast’s move is an obvious nod to an endorsement of the idea of media synergy, the one-stop-shop philosophy that was at the heart of the ill-fated AOL-Time Warner deal. But more than being an apparent repetition of that debacle, the NBCU-Comcast tie-up is concerning for something else.

Our good friend Howard Beale hit on it in “Network” years ago in a fictional scenario that’s about to be reality. And a worrying reality at that. You see, this media conglomerate is now (or likely soon will be) in the hands of Comcast, the leading cable television provider in the United States, and a major player in the online space.

And when the leading cable provider in the United States controls a sizable chunk of online, cable and broadcast programming — when one company owns not just the pipes but the content flowing through those pipes … well, who knows what can happen?

“The people who have been in control are the ones who own the content,” James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research, told the Los Angeles Times. “Buying NBC Universal would give Comcast about one-fourth of the content that is being produced. They would then have the freedom and the power to start experimenting with how best to deliver that entertainment.”

Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Herb Kohl is watching closely. “This acquisition will create waves throughout the media and entertainment marketplace and we don't know where the ripples will end,” Kohl said in a statement. “Antitrust regulators must ensure that all content providers are treated fairly on the Comcast platform.”

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Other folks aren’t waiting for the other shoe to drop when the deal closes sometime in the third quarter of 2010. The blogosphere has already decided.

Christopher W Hull, weighing in at CNN Money: “I am having AOL/Time Warner flashbacks! … I gotta say this looks good for all the other GE verticals (even the toasters, trains and twinklelights). … Now what is going to be funny is how they treat this on '30 Rock.' ”

Katie Withane at CNN Money: “Comcast is most certainly a monopoly. They're quickly decimating, or purchasing, their competitors. Adelphia, AT&T Broadband, Intermedia ... and every small cable operator they can get their hands on ... not to mention their attempt at Disney ... They are spreading out and absorbing all they can in the hopes of controlling all of the television they can, all of the media they can. As they grow larger, they become more capable of fighting Net Neutrality. In a few years, when Comcast controls what web sites you are able to visit by throttling your bandwidth, think back on this comment.”

Slapmewhenitsover at HuffPost: “Comcast is a crappy company. .... These people have a terrible record for customer service and seem to work on a policy of insulting their customers regularly. There is a wealth of supporting evidence (just search for Comcast complaints). 
These morons once sent me a $900 cable Internet bill for an account that had been closed for 3 years.”

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This deal, if approved after a regulatory review, effectively reshapes the television and entertainment landscape. Consumer advocates have already expressed misgivings, and a strong consumerist challenge can be expected.

But Conan O’Brien isn’t waiting. He’s seen the future. He proved it on Thursday night, in that musical number, which despite its hilarity had an undeniable whiff of fatalism. Like Winston at the end of “1984,” he’s come to “love” Big Brother already.

There may be a lesson there: As NBC Universal gets ready for its Comcastic voyage, make nice with your cable operator. When he comes to do the install, set out coffee and sandwiches for your cable guy. Admire him, admire his clothes. If this thing goes through, he may control more than you think.

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Image credits: O'Brien: NBC via Hulu. NBC Universal logo: © 2009 NBC Universal. Roberts: AP Photo/Richard Drew. Howard Beale, "Network": © 1976 MGM. Conan's Comcast revival: From "The Tonight Show" video.

Proposed: The Holiday Unification Plan

The annual war with the wallet and the waistline is underway — you know, the one we battle with from Halloween to the merciful end of the year. Tired of standing in grocery line after line, week after week? Weary of the water-torture insistence of forced goodwill, week after week after week? Have you had enough?

A humble proposal: by common consent, we agree to merge all the year-end holiday observances into one. Rather than suffer the serial indignities of the costumed candied madness of Halloween, the baroque culinary engorgements of Thanksgiving, the ruthless merchandising of Christmas and the inebriate  excesses of New Year’s Eve … a holiday unification plan. One week within the same month, collectively decided.

Look at this practically. Such a plan could mean less impact on the environment; without the current prolonged holiday season, shoppers would concentrate their holiday purchasing in a tighter time frame, meaning fewer cars crowding the highways between Thanksgiving and the week after Christmas (when the gift returns inevitably begin).

For travelers: Since the current holiday season for travel runs from just before Thanksgiving until just after Christmas, airlines and common carriers like Amtrak face crushing increases in travelers for at least a month. Replacing that with a more sharply defined period on the calendar means that long period of increased demand on services is replaced with a shorter one. The same impact those carriers now experience dragged out over a month is focused on a single week — much easier for airport general managers and Amtrak schedulers to negotiate.

For retailers, the uncertainty of a protracted holiday shopping season would be replaced with a tighter time frame for seasonal purchases — more in-store and online sales in less time, and a faster and more immediate shot in the arm for those year-end balance sheets.

Rather than scattering closures over the weeks between late October and the end of December, other businesses would have one week to close at one set time in the season; the additional days of operation for those businesses, fully staffed more of the time, would mean enhanced revenues for the last months of the year.

Such a plan clears the decks for more attention to be paid to seasonal holidays the majority culture otherwise ignores, like Hanukkah, Eid-al-Adha and Muharram.

And that’s to say nothing of the wear and tear on the mind that builds up this time of year. The prolonged holiday season takes perhaps its biggest toll on the psyche, plays on our sense of well-being and satisfaction. A shorter, more concentrated holiday season would make that emotional burden more bearable (or at least more chronologically definable).

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The biggest challenge to making this happen might be the cultural resistance, but in many ways our society is moving in that direction already. We’ve long been accustomed to the combinational experience.

In various commercial aspects of the culture from candy (“Certs: It’s two, two, two mints in one!”) to household products (“detergent and fabric softener in one”), from prescription medications (combination therapy is commonly used to treat depression, diabetes, HIV and hypertension) to over-the-counter drugs (aspirin or multivitamins twinned with cholesterol-fighting phytosterols) to automobiles (witness the rise of the hybrid vehicle), this is something our culture’s been getting its head around for a long time.

A holiday unification plan is the next step to where we’re going already.

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There might be a few complications. What could we call it? Bacchanal Time? Days of Jubilee? The Great Throwdown? We’re a pluralistic society, we’ll come up with something.

Get online. Send e-mails to your friends and your representative. Let’s get behind this thing, for the greater good. One holiday period, indivisible, with liberty and justice.

In one.

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Image credits: Holiday shoppers: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster. Eid stamp: Via infoplease.com. Bayer aspirin: Via amazon.com.

Tiger's rough lie

He’s been so fiercely on message, so relentlessly self-contained for so long, we might have seen this coming.

The athletic force of nature and merchandising juggernaut known as Tiger Woods was caught in a rough lie on the golf course of public opinion. As Tiger works to put things right, he’s faced with a scandal that won’t obey his tendency for an almost maniacal self-control, one that could become the kind of sand trap even he can’t get out of.

“Sometimes, the safest place to live is the world inside your head,” Don Imus said about Tiger on Wednesday morning during his Fox News simulcast (and Don Imus would know about such things).

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By now you, like everyone else in the Western world and beyond, know the story:

On Nov. 27, the day after Thanksgiving around 2:30 a.m., Woods left his home in Windermere, Fla., driving his 2009 Cadillac Escalade, collided with a fire hydrant and a tree down the street from his palacious estate. His wife, Elin Nordegren Woods, rushed to his side and frantically broke the vehicle’s windows in a valiant effort to pull her husband from the vehicle. He went to Health Central Hospital and was later released in good condition after being treated for facial lacerations.

End of story. At least the official story from Tiger's camp.

But no, questions remained. A lot of them. Photos of the Escalade from the Florida Highway Patrol show clearly that the left and right rear windows were smashed, but not the driver’s side window. The one you’d expect to be smashed in any attempt to pull the driver from a vehicle.

Photos show that the airbags in the Escalade didn’t deploy, which strongly suggests Tiger wasn’t driving faster than 33 miles an hour. So why facial lacerations, instead of the bruising you’d expect from minor blunt-force trauma in a low-speed crash (like bumping your head against the dash or the steering wheel)?

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Chin-pulling time. Certain glitches in the Team Woods narrative have become what Arsenio Hall used to call “things that make you go ‘hmmm. …’”

Like the front-page story in The National Enquirer that appeared a day or two earlier. The story that claimed the greatest golfer in the history of the game had an affair with one Rachel Uchitel, a club promoter.

Once that story appeared, people began to put together their own scenarios of what happened on Nov. 27. Dark, sordid imaginings: Maybe Tiger and his wife had a little … marital … discussion that got unusually physical. Possibly physical enough for Elin Woods to have induced injuries. You know, the kind of marks you leave with fingernails. Facial lacerations.

TMZ reported as much on Saturday.

And maybe Elin Woods was mad enough to chase or follow Tiger out of their home wielding a golf club, smashing SUV windows all the way.

TMZ reported as much on Sunday.

And maybe, just maybe, Tiger was distracted enough by what his wife was doing that he didn’t concentrate on his driving.

That’s what the Orlando Sentinel reported on Wednesday: “[H]e didn't just hit a hydrant and tree. He crossed over a curb, onto a grass median and hit a row of hedges before driving into the hydrant and tree,” the Sentinel said.

Tiger retreated to his waterfront Xanadu, issued a statement decrying the rumors already swirling, and refused to speak with the police, denying them an interview three separate times. Then the floodgates opened.

L.A. cocktail waitress Jaimee Grubbs, who starred on VH1's “Tool Academy,” told Us Weekly that she had a 31-month affair with Tiger — and had the voicemails and text messages to prove it.

Life & Style, a Las Vegas magazine, reported today that Kalika Moquin, a marketing manager for The Bank nightclub in Las Vegas, was with Tiger at a Las Vegas hotel during the weekend of Oct. 23.

Moquin was mum. But an anonymous tipster told Life & Style that "they've hooked up a bunch of times. Tiger told Kalika that married life isn't all it's built up to be. He said he wasn't happy in his marriage or his home life and that there was just so much pressure on him."

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All-apologies time. Tiger released the following statement earlier today:

“I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart. I have not been true to my values and the behavior my family deserves. I am not without faults and I am far short of perfect. I am dealing with my behavior and personal failings behind closed doors with my family. Those feelings should be shared by us alone. …

“Whatever regrets I have about letting my family down have been shared with and felt by us alone. I have given this a lot of reflection and thought and I believe that there is a point at which I must stick to that principle, even though it's difficult.

“I will strive to be a better person and the husband and father that my family deserves. For all of those who have supported me over the years, I offer my profound apology.”

This we can believe. Tiger’s always brought out the human in us. We’ve watched him come of age, morphing from boy to man to almost-superman. Who among us wasn’t thrilled — flat-out electrified — when Tiger won the Masters at the age of 21?

Who couldn’t help shedding a tear that day, in 1997, when Tiger won the Masters with the most assured and dominant performance in the history of the tournament — then walked to the gallery … and broke down and wept in his father’s arms? Who hasn’t been deeply on Tiger’s side in every tourney since May 2006, when that father, that mentor and friend, died?

Tiger’s always brought out the human in us. It’s taken something like this to bring out the human in him.

We had to see that again. We had to know that again: that behind the megadeals with Nike and Gillette and Gatorade and Electronic Arts, there’s a heart behind the cash register. That Croesus could be Icarus, too.

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We can expect Tiger to walk the various stations of the cross of media rehabilitation. First, a late-night visitation with David Letterman. Wait. You know, come to think of it … maybe not Letterman.

The black eye of the Tiger won’t last. But what happens now will come from inside this man we’ve known and not known for a dozen transformative years.

Accenture, a global management and outsourcing company (and another of Tiger’s endorsement clients), may have obliquely given Tiger the good advice he needs from this point on.

At the Accenture Web site recently was a splash image on its home page: a picture of Tiger in his trademark red shirt and black slacks, standing, one hand on one hip, looking at a ball in just about the worst position possible.

The caption tells us what we already know:

“It’s what you do next that counts.”

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Image credits: Tiger: Public domain. Escalade: Florida Highway Patrol. Life & Style cover: Via Huffington Post. Accenture splash image: Accenture Web site.