If you're a corporate brand desperate to make your logo all-pervasive for all humanity walking the earth, but you find that skywriting is such a hassle, the solution for you has finally arrived: Flogos. It's a machine that makes "floating ads" out of soap bubbles in any shape you wish. The two-square-foot ads float hundreds of feet up in the air for up to an hour, and reportedly "fly for miles." It's about time somebody has efficiently colonized the very air surrounding us for the purpose of advertising! Can we get one in the shape of a cloud? [Live Science via Metafilter]. Click through for a bonus pic of a flying Flogos Christian cross.

We got an email from Jeff Stier, associate director of the American Council on Science and Health and author of yesterday's editorial in the NY Post about the cockroach peril New York will face as a result of Whole Foods' paper bag use. We referred to ACSH in our post yesterday as "the conservative 'science' group ACSH, which is funded by Dow Chemical, Chevron, and a slew of other corporations." Stier says "Gawker owe's ACSH a correction" for that post, although you will notice that our description is accurate, and is not even contradicted by Stier's own description of the group. He also objects to the fact that "reporters often ask about funding only when some if it may come from industry," something I would characterize as "good reporting." His full letter is reprinted after the jump.

American Airlines has been having some PR problems lately, like being picketed by its own pilots and canceling 3,300 flights last week. So the company did what any $2 billion corporation would do: they started a laughable blog! It's hosted on Blogger, and it has 3 posts so far. And if their social media eloquence doesn't save the company, nothing can:

Being a limp-wristed, knee-jerk environmentalist liberal, you probably thought that Whole Foods' plan to phase out plastic bags in its stores was a good thing. Sure it is—if you love cockroaches. That's the sober warning in an editorial in the New York Post today, penned by Jeff Stier of the conservative "science" group ACSH, which is funded by Dow Chemical, Chevron, and a slew of other corporations. See, cockroaches "prefer paper (bags) to plastic," which logically means that Whole Foods is virtually holding your door open and setting up a nice buffet for the bugs! And it gets worse: they're also trying to give you asthma.

What exactly is Starbucks doing? They came out with their revolutionary, game-changing, not quite as burnt new house coffee last week, which pairs well with chocolate marble loaf. But along with the new $11,000 machines to make said coffee, the Death Star-like chain has introduced new coffee cups, and they're... brown? Was the design consultant who knows how to appeal to yuppies sick the day that decision was made? And now the company has bigger problems: McDonald's is determined to kick Starbucks' ass right where it lives. In Seattle!

Wal-Mart worked with the same small video production company for 30 years to tape internal company events. But Wal-Mart unceremoniously dumped them as a contractor two years ago,so Flagler Productions decided on a new business plan: selling its old videos of Wal-Mart [WSJ]. And the most incriminating ones sell best! Flagler now gets $250 per hour to let people look through their archive, and since all their customers are Wal-Mart haters, the company is pissed. But they can't do anything about it! They were mean and now they suffer. Which is how life should be, for Wal-Mart. Below, one of the finest examples of repurposing footage from the archives: a 1995 meeting featuring a bunch of company managers on stage in drag. I always knew those Middle America types were kinky like that.

A former Starbucks employee named Mary-Elise Smilek says she was fired after four years with the company, just because she couldn't attend last month's mandatory 3-hour retraining session/ PR stunt. She had a midterm to study for. Harsh! Now she's the subject of much debate among the bored employees and company drones at the Starbucks Gossip blog. Some say she's a hoax; some say she's a victim; and the most hardcore corporate robots say: she got what she deserved for not completely dedicating her life to the Starbucks cause!

As part of its brave new plan to stop hemorrhaging money, Starbucks went out and bought a company called Clover that makes coffee machines. These Clovers cost $11,000 each, and brew one cup of coffee at a time. We're not math whizzes or anything, but at that rate, those better be some good fucking cups of coffee. So the New York Times sent a coffee connoisseur to taste seven kinds of beans from the new machine, and he came to the stunning conclusion: not even a magical $11,000 gadget can make burned coffee beans taste good.

We find it endlessly amusing that mild-mannered Jim Romenesko, who runs the most feared blog in journalism (except this one), puts an equal amount of passion into "Starbucks Gossip," his other blog that is, for some reason, the preeminent inside news site for the coffee chain. And he's not too happy about the company's corporatized attempt to move in on his territory with its new, half-bright "MyStarbucksIdea.com" site. Romenesko is throwing down in public!

Did you know that cubicles have been around 40 years? In celebration of that fact, why not set your cubicle on fire and burn down your entire office? Just a thought. Appropriately enough, Scott Adams, the guy who draws your once-favorite-now-annoying office cartoon "Dilbert" has helped to design the CUBICLE OF THE FUTURE. One that can actually be purchased! Is he qualified for this at all? I don't see how he could be. Why not just send all cubicles to Iraq and everybody work from home from now on? Oh, that wouldn't be in the Dilbert spirit! So here's a look at some of the real features of "Dilbert's Ultimate Cubicle." There's no way these things are gonna sell.

The Starbucks high command had its annual shareholder meeting today in Seattle. The company's stock price has fallen by almost half in the past year. So what big changes are in store? Upgraded coffee makers, shorter espresso machines "that will allow baristas to interact more easily with customers," and other minor crap that probably won't change the fact that SBUX is the embodiment of corporate stealth penetration into the liberal American psyche. The company's big hope for redemption, though, is its newest customer-relations website, MyStarbucksIdea.com, where they solicit ideas for improvement from YOU, the consumer [WSJ]. If you have any great thoughts you should let them know immediately, because even the more popular suggestions on the site so far aren't exactly staggering works of turnaround genius:

A distressing new survey reveals that last month's Day Without A Starbucks—when the friendly coffee conglomerate closed for three hours in a gaudy PR stunt that placed the Olsen Twins in mortal peril—was a failure. While three quarters of all consumers knew that the closing happened, not even half knew why the closing took place [Ad Age]. Do you?

First, Wal-Mart tried to endear themselves to the online world with a thoroughly corporate website full of "Facts." Then, they tried a fake, secretly corporate-sponsored blog. Now, it looks like they've learned their lesson about openness and disclosure; they've started an (apparently) uncensored corporate blog that proves once and for all that free speech is nothing to be scared of, because even high-level Wal-Mart employees are just as gee-whiz predictable and goofy as you would have imagined. Evidence of the fundamental nerdiness of the corporate steamroller—and a fun quiz!—after the jump.

Now that the media at large has had time to reflect upon the important national matter that was Starbucks' closing for three hours for "training," it's time to take a look at the lessons learned. The real purpose of the event: A PR stunt. The media: Played like a violin. Complicit: Us. Did CEO Howard Schultz succeed in finding the company's "soul?" Of course not! It was never there to begin with. And the real benefit for the employees: The chance to get drunk and dress up in costumes. As this final, poignant insider email to us attests:

Another (self identified) REAL Starbucks employee has come forward to give us a peek behind the coffee company's chipper training day iron curtain of enthusiasm. This tipster confirms that Tuesday's mandatory job training was, in fact, for nerds, but then rises to a stirring defense of the company. The argument: "Sure, I got a nasty case of herpes on my hand because management is too cheap to buy more than one pair of rubber dishwashing gloves for a staff of fifteen. But hey, I'm insured to the hilt, so the Valtrex to quell said herpes is deeply discounted." Solid! The full, amusing email after the jump.

Yesterday almost every Starbucks in America closed for three hours in a widely publicized effort to retrain all the employees not to burn the damn coffee. No word yet on the status of the Olsen twins after the shutdown. The general consensus, which we agree with, is that this was as much a PR stunt as a retraining effort. And over at Starbucks Gossip, the definitive blog about the company (inexplicably run by King Of Journalism Jim Romenesko), the employee drones are doing their part by being INSANELY ENTHUSIASTIC about being dragged into work for three extra hours.

"The number of employers sponsoring the [smoking cessation] programs 'is going up even while firms are cutting back on medical benefits' in general to limit costs, said Dr. Steven A. Schroeder, director of the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center at the University of California, San Francisco, which promotes stop-smoking programs nationally." Ha ha! So your insurance won't cover that operation because you had your chance to be saved, smoky! [NYT]