It's a POM Wonderful life when you look at things though your own garnet-colored packaging.

There's one guaranteed plus about General Motors' decision this May to forego Super Bowl advertising next February: It's going to generate lot of commentary -- probably even more over the long haul than its decision to forego advertising on Facebook, which was announced last Tuesday.

The bribery investigations at Wal-Mart headquarters may be widening, as the "New York Times" reports, but the results at Walmarts' stores certainly cheered up executives in the C suites and boardroom yesterday. Profits rose 10.1%, beating analyst's estimates. They credited its low-price promotions with luring "thrifty shoppers back into its U.S. stores," as Shan Li puts in the "Los Angeles Times."

A Rand Corp. study of 28,433 regular and 1,833 children's menu items in 245 national chain restaurants finds that a whopping 96% of them fail to meet recommendations for the combination of calories, sodium, fat and saturated fat set by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture.

It's usually good news when you pick up steam faster than you expect but not always. Former Apple retail wunderkind and current JC Penney CEO Ron Johnson announced yesterday that the retailer's plan to transform itself was "way ahead of schedule." But it seems to have hit an oncoming locomotive called consumer resistance that is asserting its right of way on the same track.

There seems to be a general consensus that Americans eat too much and don't get enough exercise. Most people agree that obesity among children and adults has reached crises proportions. That's where the agreement ends. What to do about the situation -- if anything -- has become as controversial as those other three topics that mother told you not to discuss -- sex, politics and religion, of course -- if you just want to get along with your neighbors."The Weight of the Nation," an HBO documentary that launched last night with Parts 1 and 2 and will continue tonight with …

Personal Branding has been around since at least forever -- how else to entice that mate back to the cave? -- but Tom Peters famously put a concept on it for the business world in a "Fast Company" piece he wrote in 1997 titled "The Brand Called You." Well, the brand called Scott Thompson has left the battered brand called Yahoo in a slightly more tattered state than he found it after departing yesterday following a firestorm over a resume claim that his bachelor's degree from Stonehill College in Easton, Mass., was in computer science as well as accounting.

While I can't say I wished I was in the room as Jamie Dimon and his advisors crafted their explanation yesterday of what has gone so very wrong at JPMorgan Chase recently, I'd love to listen to the tape of their strategizing about how to tell the world that some character straight out of a 19th Century seafaring novel named "the London Whale" wasn't the minnow "in a teapot" as he'd previously dismissively indicated during an earnings call on April 13.

Vidal Sassoon -- the man and the brand -- is one of those names that immediately evokes images from the lost decades. The first that comes to my mind is Mia Farrow and the haircut he gave her for "Rosemary's Baby." The second is of a simple but stylish shampoo bottle (originally brown, no less). The third is of his raffish pitches in television commercials: "If you don't look good, we don't look good." He was an embodiment of hip Carnaby Street in the era of hippie sensibility, and beyond.

In this "what-have-you-done-for-me-lately" world of ours, the headlines tell us that Wall Street is "disappointed" with Wendy's first-quarter results, the company is scaling back on its expectations for this "transition year," its "W" cheeseburger promotion offered too steep a discount -- cannibalizing sales of pricier menu items -- and its marketing was self-admittedly weaker that its competitors.