Has anyone seen those new 7-up commercials claiming that 7-up is now all natural, showing fresh lemons and limes bouncing around in water?
Yeah. What a bunch of crap. You know what’s not in 7-up? Anything with the word “lemon” or “lime” in it. It’s carbonated water, high-fructose corn syrup, and three things that sound like I made them in Chemistry class with the word “Natural” in front of them.
I just finished watching the movie The Island, and basically, I couldn’t roll with it. I can normally suspend belief pretty well with movies, but I couldn’t buy that an organism who had been alive for less than 5 years and had the mental capacity of an 13 year old or less could pull off everything that happened in that movie.
The worst part, though, was the overt Microsoft product placement. Usually I can look past this, but I was disturbed by the fact that the game used to keep the clones complacent (since the existence of clones with emotions was illegal in this movie) had X-Box written all over it! I can imagine that pitch. “Hey Microsoft! How’d you like to donate some X-Box equipment to help prevent these clones from becoming self-aware, and ensure that our organization continues to make its illegal profit? Good deal, huh!”
So as I watched the movie, I couldn’t help but think, “This horrible future reality is brought to you by Microsoft. ‘Where do you want to go today?’ If you’re a clone and you said, ‘outside’ – we’re sorry, that’s not allowed. Why don’t you play X-Box instead?” I’m so excited to start working there so I can usher in this awful future with all due haste.
For the benefit of my audience who doesn’t reside in Nebraska, I thought this story would give you a chuckle (I couldn’t find it anywhere on Google News… but there might be a reason for that…).
In the Omaha area there’s a small chain of restaurants (3 or so) called King Kong, a restaurant that sells large burgers and gyros, among other things. Apparently, King Kong has copyrighted any and all use of “King Kong” as it relates to talking about or promoting a restaurant, so they’re suing Burger King over their new “Kong-Sized whopper.”
Maybe I should trademark using King Kong to promote my website. Then I could say you’d get some Kong-sized design skills if you hire me… but that’s pretty scary. The only thing scarier, in fact, is waking up next to the King.
I have a dog at home named Lulu. She tends to need a fair amount of attention (even in her old years), so my aunt would always humor her (as if Lulu could understand) by saying “Lulu! You are the cuuutest dog in this whole house!” It’s easy to be the best when you qualify it that much – which is fine for helping my dog’s self-esteem. Not so for advertisements though.
Today on the radio I heard a spot for that new show Commander-in-Chief, encouraging me to watch “the best new show on Tuesday nights.” At first I thought, “What? That’s surprising… oh.” After all those qualifications… are there any other new shows on Tuesday nights? I mean, hey, it was pretty easy for me to earn Best Senior Debater when I was the only high school senior in debate. (I was good though. Honest.) Clearly they couldn’t get away with calling it the best show (Veronica Mars!). They probably couldn’t get away with calling it the best new show (The Closer, definitely). And at that point… is it really saying anything?
When I was watching Meet The Press this morning, that wacky company BP had a commercial asking people if they knew how big their carbon footprint was. Nobody did. So they told the audience to find out on their website.
I usually ignore ads that force the audience to do work for any information, but for some reason I was feeling motivated today. I went through the carbon footprint calculator, and apparently, my carbon footprint is size 19. And you know what they say about people with large carbon footprints…
I actually found the exercise a bit frustrating. Most of it had to deal with the fact that I’m a grad student living in an old apartment building with old appliances, so there wasn’t much I could do to lower my score. But what was most frustrating is the fact that air travel contributes substantially to your carbon footprint (almost half of my score); yet, the site doesn’t mention anything that can be done to reduce your footprint in that area. On the upside, it was an interesting 10 minute diversion.
I think this video debuted almost a year ago now, but I only saw it recently, and I had some thoughts, so I figured, why let a thing like being a year behind the times stop me?
Anyway, the video is called Epic, and it discusses the future technology track, with a focus on Google, Microsoft, and the impact of technology on news media in this country. I think it’s a really interesting take on where this country is going in terms of its technology.
You may have heard a lot lately about this search war between Google and Yahoo, who has the biggest search index, etc., etc. This doesn’t really affect me all that much… I tend to make my decisions based on what is most convenient. However, a banner ad I encountered today might scare me away from Yahoo for a while.
Sorry for the small image size, but I think you can still make out that awful monstrosity on the left side of the image. And, let me be the first to say… BLECH! I don’t want to know how many spiders I eat while I sleep! I’d rather remain blissfully ignorant since, upon waking up, I obviously don’t realize I’ve eaten one.
What I’m dying to know is whether this type of marketing strategy is working for them. It’s not as though you can’t do a similar search on Google (in fact, a Google search revealed that it is highly unlikely to swallow spiders while you sleep), and I promise that this ad isn’t doing any favors for their arachnophobe demographic. I’m slightly disturbed that all my Yahoo search results will start featuring spiders that I eat while asleep. Playing with phobias is tricky business; if you aren’t careful, you might get the opposite effect.
When Macromedia came out with their Studio MX 2004 almost two years ago, it was heralded with the slogan, “We can’t wait to see what you’ll do with it.” It was at that point that I started to develop a distaste for Macromedia. I had been trained on Flash to the point where it was my #1 tool, so to some extent I was interested in the next release regardless of what they did. But people who participated in my Flash workshop can attest to the fact that I’m disenchanted with the improvements offered by the new version.
I saw a BMW commercial today with the best actor ever – a cute doggie! The guy shook his keys to tell the dog it was time to go for a ride, and the dog looked apprehensive (I know! Good acting!). He finally came out to the car with an orange helmet. When the guy started the car and backed up, it jumped a little bit, and the dog slid into the back windshield, hitting his head on it. Awww! Poor puppy!
If you were to look at where people in CMU’s MHCI program came from, you’d see heavy concentration of students in the northeastern and western United States. In fact, I can count the number of people from the South and Midwest on one hand (well, if I had a hand with six fingers that is, but who’s counting?).
