Remember when the guy came back to the present time after stepping on the butterfly in Bradbury’s classic A Sound of Thunder and all the signage looked like this?
*that’s “want to trade,” not “women travelling together”
The most puzzling thing about this ad is how someone who posesses enough unstupid to be able to successfully post an ad on kijiji doesn’t know how to spell “guitar”, in spite of owning one. Do I know where you can buy a guiter tuner? Aside from a MUSEC STORE, no, I’m effin’ stumped. Though it’s nice to see you’re keeping your options open with respect to digital vs. analog – I gather you’re willing to consider a $10 analogue stroboscopic tuner, or perhaps a tuning fork?
NB: the show is real, the ad is not.
May I, just this once, out loud, say, to product marketing managers everywhere, particularly those responsible for marketing the Swiffer, in words that paraphrase David Milch, by way of Brad Dourif as Doc Cochran:
What earthly use is my protracted suffering to you?
Why did you feel the need to concoct the ponderous Five Signs of Clean, and then put them on display in such an insidious fashion that I might not discover them until they were on a shelf in my home? In my home, where my wife sleeps, and my cats play with their toys?
Perhaps I’m being too harsh. There may be vast, untapped capital sitting amongst the lint in the pockets of people who are too stunned to know when something is clean. Or maybe it is a sincere, altruistic attempt to educate people who live in filth, so that they are not shocked into cardiac arrest when they find themselves in an environment that is not caked in grime. Well, in that case, I’ll happily climb aboard that parade float and spread the good word. For those who are not lucky enough to have Swiffer wet refills under the sink at home, or have not yet realised that they can click the above image for a closer look, the Five Signs of Clean are, in order: See, Smell, Touch, Shine, and, wait for it, Trap & Toss.
And there we have not only a valuable lesson in household hygiene but also the most baffling use of bullets in advertising since Crest promised that their Pro-Health Toothpase protects against whitening.
If you didn’t have a stylist you should probably still tell people you did.
I just saw your work in the new indigo community ad, and two things occurred to me almost immediately: 1) oh yeah he’s the roots guy; and b) wow if you wear too much roots stuff all at once you risk looking like a real knob.
By comparison, Dan Aykroyd comes across as avuncular as ever, and while Ben Mulroney’s picture is not all that funny on its own (he’s shown holding his father’s autobiography), it becomes truly amusing when you get to the indigo site and find out that Bret “the Hitman” Hart is reading Bill Clinton’s.
Default screen saver: RSS Visualizer.
And do I care what is feeding it? Not really. It’s a screen saver. It runs when I’m not around. So I leave it on the default, which is Apple Hot News. And once in a while, out of the corner of my eye, I see something interesting, and then it all seems kind of worthwhile. I think at one point I had O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter feed running but it was a little too interesting. And I spent too much time staring at my screen saver. Until I realized hey, I’m staring at a screen saver, at which point I nudged my mouse and just went to the O’Reilly site instead.
So, to recap: RSS Visualizer with Apple Hot News, just interesting enough.
Until now, as it seems to have turned my MacBook into an all-day commercial for the iPhone.
I’m sure the iPhone is a fine thing if you like that sort of thing. And I’m an early adopter, a gear pig if you will, so I understand why it is generating a lot of excitement. But I don’t need one. I have a phone. And to be quite honest, I spend enough time on the internet and listening to tunes and sitting in front of Apple products already. I’m not looking for ways to fill those few remaining internet-free moments noodling around with wireless data devices. Hell, I don’t even have an iPod. And someday I plan to read a book.
Anyway, you can’t get them in Canada yet, and when you do the data charges will break you, mostly because Ted Rogers is a tit.
So Apple, unless you’re ready to start putting Hot News back into the Hot News RSS feed, maybe you could re-name it Hot iPhone Marketing, and I’ll be over at the O’Reilly MacDevCenter if you need me. Because Guy who stood in line for 8 days to buy iPhone says It’s the coolest thing ever is neither hot nor news.
Google’s oft-quoted credo “don’t be evil” started looking rather quaint last week with the appearance of a gentle suggestion on the Google blog that we try to refrain from using “Google” as a verb, particularly to signify an action taken on a competitor’s search engine. Apparently it makes the trademark lawyers uncomfortable. And you can almost hear the unwritten line that follows, “and you wouldn’t like our lawyers when they’re uncomfortable.”
As defenses go, this one is a few paces shy of “vigourous.” So I wouldn’t start calling Google an “evil empire” quite yet, in spite of their recent Katamari-like consumption of the staggeringly popular video site YouTube. But this is certainly the dangerous end of the “vigourous defense” wedge, the same sledgehammer with which Intel crushed the fly-like non-profit San Francisco fitness-for-ex-cons (I’m not making this up) outfit Yoga Inside, and the same legal logic that led some poor schmuck of a copywriter to pen the line “stop sweeping and start swiffering,” when it’s obvious to anyone who claims a passing familiarity with the English language that what one does with a device called a swiffer is “swiff.”
