Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   two strange ads
Wednesday, December 10 2008
In the mail today I received one of the most unusual advertisements I've allowed myself to notice. It came in a plain white envelope with no return address. My name and address had been written on it by hand in blue ballpoint pen. Inside was what appeared to be a page from a newspaper (it was newsprint and the correct size). It was a full page ad for Kingston-area auto dealer claiming that 23 million dollars was being pumped into some sort of auto liquidation extravaganza. Someone, presumably the addressor of the letter, had affixed a yellow Post-It note to this page and written "Check this out!" The Post-It had been signed simply "J." A quick inspection of the sheet of "newspaper" revealed it to be an obvious a fake. At the top it said simply "December 2008" and made no reference to a publisher. But on the back was a dense table in the style of a list of stock market quotes, though these were all supposedly "Mutual Funds." The idea here seemed to be to emphasize the grim nature of current market conditions, and somehow tie this to a supposed sale at a local auto dealer, giving the reader the idea that the deals one could expect would be in proportion to the dire nature of the economy.

Later, Gretchen and I were watching Jeopardy when we saw another unusual ad, this one designed to catch people like us who don't watch ads because of our ability to Tivo right through them. I don't remember what the ad was for (it must not have worked too well), but it was produced to look like the white-on-blue text screens of the Jeopardy programming itself, but carrying the message of the ad. Seeing these screens caused Gretchen to stop her 30-second-jumping and watch the ad, whose entire format was an imitation of the style and pacing of Jeopardy.
Similarly, I've seen a commercial that plays during the Office that opens with a scene in a cluttered office not unlike that of the Office. It's close enough to the programming that you're trying to see that it makes you stop and look, but only once. After that, your Tivo trigger finger knows to blast past it just like everything else through which you don't want to have to suffer.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?081210

feedback
previous | next