-I noticed that the ad for “Alteril” sleep aid ran immediately after the one for “5 Hour Energy”. There may be a message here.
-Dear poet.com: We do not owe you our hard-earned “American dollars”, you sanctimonious subsidy whores. Drop your sense of entitlement and make your product competitive if you want us to buy it. Why should American taxpayers pay off a bunch of lazy rent-seekers, driving up grain prices and making life harder for poor people everywhere, when we can buy our BTUs in petroleum form more cheaply. What do you have against people in Dubai, anyway? Unlike you they don’t get the US Congress to pick our pockets. And their hard-working ethos fits American values a lot better than does your sleazy whining PR attempt to guilt us into buying your overpriced fuel.
-Dear Land Rover: Your car looks like the fucking box it came in. Do you think we’re going to buy it just because you run ads with rock music every ten minutes on CNBC?
-The women in the Yoshi Blade ad are really annoying, especially the big blond chick with the onion. Maybe I shouldn’t say “annoying”, I should say “empowered”.
-Where are Carlton Sheets and Don Lapre when you need them? Today’s get-rich-quick infomercials just aren’t what they used to be, though Jeff Paul comes close.
-Dear Comcast: If you invested 10% as much in improving your service as you do in slick commercials to lure new customers you might not need the slick commercials. Everyone knows your service is awful. By running these endless TV ads you are really rubbing it in to your current customers. Great, you can simplify my bill as compared to AT&T. Do you think I care about that, given my certain knowledge that switching to your service would guarantee me repeated frustrating phone conversations with incompetent tech people to fix problems your own system caused? Idiots.
Woke up on the wrong side of the bed, did we?
Don Lapre would also employ hot models in his scamfomercials too. IIRC Cindy Margolis got her start on one of the Lapre infomercials.
I’ve mostly been watching Netflix (when I watch anything) and on the rare occasions where I *do* watch ordinary TV, I find it a bizarre experience.
Sounds like your TV is malfunctioning. You can fix it with one of these.
:)
I only have basic cable (and in TWCable empire that means 11 channels in English), since I need it to be connected to the Web. That’s a blessing: I have no frame of reference to any of pp. above, except LandRover(and that’s only because I vaguely remember it being pointed out to me in the street).
Hi John and C-Boyz!
I was watching Angelina Jolie own her role in Mangold’s Girl Interrupted, and I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between her character’s manipulative methods and those redolent of broadcast media. For every psychopathological push of a button by Lisa Rowe, be it kitty-puppet play to cow an acolyte-internee, or an offer of drugs to invade another of the insane’s private preserve, or a face-slap used to establish her scoldish dominance over another childish adorer, an analog of it is used daily by mainstream media to sell us their advertisers’ products.
Academe, too, as a veiled media source with generous public subsidies, uses Lisa’s tactics daily to sell its advertisers’ products. Whether it is transnatiionalism, “Gender-equality,” or one-world government that academe is selling to its inductees, it utilizes the exact same “button-pushing” techniques as the advanced psychopath that Ms. Jolie portrays.
Here’s a little challenge for youz boyz (turn it into a drinking game if you like!): rent Mangold’s award-winning film, and keep a score of every one of Lisa’s little manipulations (the behavioral traits that earn her her diagnosis, if you like), and then channel-flip – or read the nyt – for three hours, and note each one of the media’s “pushes” of Americans’ buttons.
If you take a shot of vodka for every one of Lisa’s traits exhibited by a CNN, or a Keith Olbermann, or even a Whoopie Goldberg on “the View,” you’ll be pissed after just one half-hour!
An aside: Consider all the button-pushing coming out of DC right now (take Obama’s disgust for Arizona’s immigration-enforcement laws for one), and you’ll see that this game can be played just as well by tallying the NAACP’s, the EPA’s, the NIH’s and the WhiteHouse.gov’s serial button-pushing, too: Psycopaths, selling into their caused angsts. Same goes, again, for academe. Plot the U-o-C’s Political Science department’s Master’s Theses o’er the ‘oughts with an eye for Lisa-like button-pushing, and you’ll find it, galore!
Cheers,
Steve
This makes me glad I stopped watching TV in 1981.
I have never missed it.
Retardo, it is a shame to see you trivialize one of the greatest artifacts of the Industrial Revolution. Those whose understanding is weak but basic may say “God made all men, but Samuel Colt made them equal.”
Those with deep appreciation for the handiwork of God know that the Colt 1911 A1 is now being purchased privately by members of the US Army, especially Special Forces, to replace the inferior official issue 9 mm Beretta. It is now optional for the Marines.
John Browning lives !
Dear Kia Motors, not only am I not going to buy your car, I’m not going to buy a hamster. WTF is wrong with driving a toaster? Your stupid wheeled box is just as ugly and my toaster has a longer life expectancy. What kind of marketing genius tries to sell cars to 12yr old girls and inner city welfare recipients, anyway?