Grief bacon

Kummerspeck (German): literally, grief bacon; excess weight gained from emotional overeating.

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Céline Dion demands Ridiculous Pictures of Céline Dion shut down

The owner of a Tumblr blog titled Ridiculous Pictures of Céline Dion has received a threatening letter from the singer's lawyers demanding the blog be shut down:

"céline dion found our blog, and she didn’t like it. we just got a letter from céline’s lawyers that the blog has to be shut down. though this blog is well within the realm of ‘fair use’, i don’t have the money or time to get a lawyer to respond. the dream is over."

The blog owner goes on to clarify that it was not Dion herself who found the blog and initiated contacted, blaming her "publicity and legal team."

The blog has been scrubbed of all but one ridiculous picture of Céline Dion (left).

Fair use is an exception to copyright law.  It allows for limited use of copyrighted material without permission, for things such as  commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test. The term "fair use" originated in the United States, but similar exceptions exist in many other jurisdictions.

This certainly appears to be a case where fair use is a legitimate argument for using the photos on the blog, and it's a no less egregious example of the super-rich circumventing laws by virtue of their ability to spend a lot of money for the small size and insignificant nature of the blog.

There is, however, a bright side: a Google images search for "ridiculous photos of Celine Dion" returned 4,160,000 totally ridiculous results, while a Google web search for "ridiculous pictures of celine dion" returned nearly as many, most lamenting the demise of the site and lambasting the over the top singer.

Facebook is the lowest-scoring social media site

Facebook ranks lowest among social media websites when it comes to consumer satisfaction, according to a new report based on interviews with about 70,000 consumers.

Overall customer satisfaction with social media scores an aggregate of 70 out of 100. A score above 80 is considered excellent. Facebook was the lowest-scoring social media site, with a score of 66.


In a statement made in response to the survey, Facebook claimed to "take user feedback seriously," a claim that seems incredible in light of several customer satisfaction debacles concerning redesigns of the service and the user agreement.

Facebook is still the social network of choice for most, however the survey categorized Google "search engines and portals," where it led with a score of 83, rather than social media, and the survey was conducted before the launch of Google+.