|
|
Thursday, May 06, 2004
Hello! I have finally found the time and courage to bring you the final chapter of
TALES FROM AN AIRPLANE SOMEWHERE OVER THoh, you get the idea.
Part III - Now You Can Find Me! (Cowering Under My Seat!)
The combination of meat-laden egg concoctions and Biblical scripture had left me in a weakened state, both physically and mentally. What I needed was a few minutes of relaxation with my book. It was then that I realized that I'd made a rookie mistake: I'd put my book away in my bag before the meal was served. I was trapped in my seat and unable to retrieve it until the stewardess came around to collect the trays and free my from my in-air prison.
This meant that my entertainment consisted of whatever was in the seat pocket in front of me. Luckily, I saw the corner of the Sky Mall catalog sticking out behind the Alaska Airlines magazine. I love Sky Mall. I really treasure the idea of people shopping while flying in an airplane. I love the fact that the airlines think that people want to do that, and I love that people prove them right. Fifteen minutes with Sky Mall would surely cure what ailed me. I placed my hand on the top of the catalog, pulled it out of the pocket, and held the cover in front of my face.
The English language is ill-equipped to describe the feeling of revulsion that washed over me. The only way for you to truly understand is to see it for yourself. It is with great trepidation that I present you with this picture:
The horror! The horror!
"Yah!" I yelped, jumping backward in my seat. It was a completely autonomic reflex - my brain was instinctively trying to put as much distance as possible between itself and the twisted, ghastly visage that it was suddenty forced to contend with. I quickly turned the catalog over. The woman on my left stirred in her slumber. The man on my right looked up from his book and, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, returned to the world of Tom Clancy. These people had no idea what I'd just done for them.
I sat there for a solid minute, trying to catch my breath. As I began to recover my wits, a strange thing happened. My brain started playing tricks on me. I wondered if I'd actually seen what I thought I'd seen. Surely it couldn't have been that bad. Suddenly, I wanted to see the picture again, if only to confirm my fragmented memories.
The woman on the back cover of the catalog looked purposefully back at me. Her stated goal was to introduce me to the Dynamic Immersion method of learning a foreign language, but I knew that she was actually trying to taunt me into turning the catalog over again. "Go on, coward," she seemed to say. "You know you want to. Turn it over and take a look. If you survive, maybe we can talk about an award-winning CD-ROM curriculum for learning Danish."
I couldn't take that kind of challenge lying down. I turned up the corner of the magazine and slowly flipped it over.
It was all there, just as I remembered. The unkempt brown hair. The maniacal, crazed look. The lips peeled back in a grim rictus of pain. The tie tossed over the shoulder, with just a hint of chest hair peeking out of the unbuttoned shirt collar. The hands a slightly different color than the face. The canted camera angle simulating the point of view of a bloodthirsty bird of prey, possibly a falcon, who appears to be swooping in for an attack. A shudder rippled through my body. I was rooting for the falcon.
A closer look at the cover reveals its true audacity: this picture is not intended to frighten. It is intended to sell. Someone, somewhere looked at this picture and thought, "This horrible, horrible person would the PERFECT spokesperson for my product."
And this is a product that is in desperate need of a spokesperson. As near as I can tell, the product is called: The "Now You can Find It!"® Someone was so impressed with this name that they actually trademarked it. Naturally it is brought to us by The Sharper Image, America's boutique of shit you don't need.
The full product name is actually the "Now You Can Find It!"® Ultra 8 Wireless RF Electronic Locator. It costs $69.95. It comes with a remote control and 8 keychain-like devices. You attach a small item to the keychain, such as your keys. If that item ever gets lost, you press the corresponding button on the remote control. This causes the keychain to light up and beep so that you can find it.
The product is, of course, terribly stupid. If I am misplacing my keys so often that I am motivated to spend $70 to solve the problem, what is the likelihood that I am going to be able to hang on to the remote control? The catalog also suggests that it might be useful for other items, such as glasses. So now I'm supposed to put this stupid keychain on my glasses every time I take them off? Or am I supposed to walk around with the keychain permanently attached? Where do you even attach it? To the nosepiece? The "Now You Can Find It!"® Ultra 8 Wireless RF Electronic Locator clearly has some fundamental design flaws, and I wish I had the time and fortitude to investigate them all. I'm going to ignore them, however, so that we can return to the picture. I don't want the subtleties of this advertisement to go unexplored.
The person we see is clearly supposed to be a harried businessman. His crazy, on-the-go lifestyle makes it impossible for him to hang on to his eight sets of keys, forcing him to muss up his perfectly manicured appearance every morning just to get into his eight cars. This Willy Loman-esque character is meant to be an object lesson for the viewer. The message is that if we buy the "Now You Can Find It!"® Ultra 8 Wireless RF Electronic Locator, we will be able to keep tabs on our eight sets of keys and avoid looking so horrible.
Here's the problem: this bedraggled sad sack already has the product. He's holding it in his hand! He's not supposed to be bedraggled anymore! The "Now You Can Find It!"® Ultra 8 Wireless RF Electronic Locator was supposed to solve his problem, but he looks just as terrible as he ever did!
I guess it's possible that this is actually an improvement for this guy, looks-wise; if so, then he's a horrible choice to sell anything. Maybe we are supposed to believe that his disheveled appearance is due to some unrelated activity. Perhaps the "Now You Can Find It!"® Ultra 8 Wireless RF Electronic Locator successfully located his keys in the belly of a crocodile, which he then had to wrestle in order to get them back.
I think the more likely explanation is that the ad agency simply didn't think about what they were doing. It seems obvious to me that this picture is meant to be a shorthand version of the classic "before-and-after" sales pitch: here's what Joe Businessperson looked like before he had this amazing wonder product, and here's what he looks like afterward. Their mistake, of course, is that they showed us the "before" picture instead of the "after". It's another example of the typical lazy thinking we've come to expect from the advertising industry.
And what about the Sky Mall people? Why on earth would they choose this picture for their cover? This is obviously what people need to see when they are trapped in a steel tube suspended 30,000 feet in the air: a crazed maniac brandishing a mysterious electronic device. If this guy were actually on the plane, the air marshals would have him wrestled to the ground within 5 seconds. I'm sure that having 150 copies of his picture on board is of great comfort to everyone. Now that I think about it, the weird angle of the photo may not be an attacking falcon at all. It might be intended to represent the plane auguring in for a crash landing. If ever there were a picture that could knock a plane from the sky, this is it.
As far as I'm concerned, the cover of this catalog represents a catastrophic failure on the part of the entire Sky Mall supply chain - from product vendor to ad agent to catalog production staff. I would like to think that this fiasco resulted in wholesale firings and the swift adoption of institutional reforms designed to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. But I know better than to hope for that.
My guess is that the Sky Mall juggernaut lumbers on undeterred, waiting to frighten other unsuspecting travelers. All I can tell you is to be very, very careful when removing Sky Mall from the seat pocket in front of you. The life you save may be your own.
TALES FROM AN AIRPLANE SOMEWHERE OVER THoh, you get the idea.
Part III - Now You Can Find Me! (Cowering Under My Seat!)
The combination of meat-laden egg concoctions and Biblical scripture had left me in a weakened state, both physically and mentally. What I needed was a few minutes of relaxation with my book. It was then that I realized that I'd made a rookie mistake: I'd put my book away in my bag before the meal was served. I was trapped in my seat and unable to retrieve it until the stewardess came around to collect the trays and free my from my in-air prison.
This meant that my entertainment consisted of whatever was in the seat pocket in front of me. Luckily, I saw the corner of the Sky Mall catalog sticking out behind the Alaska Airlines magazine. I love Sky Mall. I really treasure the idea of people shopping while flying in an airplane. I love the fact that the airlines think that people want to do that, and I love that people prove them right. Fifteen minutes with Sky Mall would surely cure what ailed me. I placed my hand on the top of the catalog, pulled it out of the pocket, and held the cover in front of my face.
The English language is ill-equipped to describe the feeling of revulsion that washed over me. The only way for you to truly understand is to see it for yourself. It is with great trepidation that I present you with this picture:
"Yah!" I yelped, jumping backward in my seat. It was a completely autonomic reflex - my brain was instinctively trying to put as much distance as possible between itself and the twisted, ghastly visage that it was suddenty forced to contend with. I quickly turned the catalog over. The woman on my left stirred in her slumber. The man on my right looked up from his book and, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, returned to the world of Tom Clancy. These people had no idea what I'd just done for them.
I sat there for a solid minute, trying to catch my breath. As I began to recover my wits, a strange thing happened. My brain started playing tricks on me. I wondered if I'd actually seen what I thought I'd seen. Surely it couldn't have been that bad. Suddenly, I wanted to see the picture again, if only to confirm my fragmented memories.
The woman on the back cover of the catalog looked purposefully back at me. Her stated goal was to introduce me to the Dynamic Immersion method of learning a foreign language, but I knew that she was actually trying to taunt me into turning the catalog over again. "Go on, coward," she seemed to say. "You know you want to. Turn it over and take a look. If you survive, maybe we can talk about an award-winning CD-ROM curriculum for learning Danish."
I couldn't take that kind of challenge lying down. I turned up the corner of the magazine and slowly flipped it over.
It was all there, just as I remembered. The unkempt brown hair. The maniacal, crazed look. The lips peeled back in a grim rictus of pain. The tie tossed over the shoulder, with just a hint of chest hair peeking out of the unbuttoned shirt collar. The hands a slightly different color than the face. The canted camera angle simulating the point of view of a bloodthirsty bird of prey, possibly a falcon, who appears to be swooping in for an attack. A shudder rippled through my body. I was rooting for the falcon.
A closer look at the cover reveals its true audacity: this picture is not intended to frighten. It is intended to sell. Someone, somewhere looked at this picture and thought, "This horrible, horrible person would the PERFECT spokesperson for my product."
And this is a product that is in desperate need of a spokesperson. As near as I can tell, the product is called: The "Now You can Find It!"® Someone was so impressed with this name that they actually trademarked it. Naturally it is brought to us by The Sharper Image, America's boutique of shit you don't need.
The full product name is actually the "Now You Can Find It!"® Ultra 8 Wireless RF Electronic Locator. It costs $69.95. It comes with a remote control and 8 keychain-like devices. You attach a small item to the keychain, such as your keys. If that item ever gets lost, you press the corresponding button on the remote control. This causes the keychain to light up and beep so that you can find it.
The product is, of course, terribly stupid. If I am misplacing my keys so often that I am motivated to spend $70 to solve the problem, what is the likelihood that I am going to be able to hang on to the remote control? The catalog also suggests that it might be useful for other items, such as glasses. So now I'm supposed to put this stupid keychain on my glasses every time I take them off? Or am I supposed to walk around with the keychain permanently attached? Where do you even attach it? To the nosepiece? The "Now You Can Find It!"® Ultra 8 Wireless RF Electronic Locator clearly has some fundamental design flaws, and I wish I had the time and fortitude to investigate them all. I'm going to ignore them, however, so that we can return to the picture. I don't want the subtleties of this advertisement to go unexplored.
The person we see is clearly supposed to be a harried businessman. His crazy, on-the-go lifestyle makes it impossible for him to hang on to his eight sets of keys, forcing him to muss up his perfectly manicured appearance every morning just to get into his eight cars. This Willy Loman-esque character is meant to be an object lesson for the viewer. The message is that if we buy the "Now You Can Find It!"® Ultra 8 Wireless RF Electronic Locator, we will be able to keep tabs on our eight sets of keys and avoid looking so horrible.
Here's the problem: this bedraggled sad sack already has the product. He's holding it in his hand! He's not supposed to be bedraggled anymore! The "Now You Can Find It!"® Ultra 8 Wireless RF Electronic Locator was supposed to solve his problem, but he looks just as terrible as he ever did!
I guess it's possible that this is actually an improvement for this guy, looks-wise; if so, then he's a horrible choice to sell anything. Maybe we are supposed to believe that his disheveled appearance is due to some unrelated activity. Perhaps the "Now You Can Find It!"® Ultra 8 Wireless RF Electronic Locator successfully located his keys in the belly of a crocodile, which he then had to wrestle in order to get them back.
I think the more likely explanation is that the ad agency simply didn't think about what they were doing. It seems obvious to me that this picture is meant to be a shorthand version of the classic "before-and-after" sales pitch: here's what Joe Businessperson looked like before he had this amazing wonder product, and here's what he looks like afterward. Their mistake, of course, is that they showed us the "before" picture instead of the "after". It's another example of the typical lazy thinking we've come to expect from the advertising industry.
And what about the Sky Mall people? Why on earth would they choose this picture for their cover? This is obviously what people need to see when they are trapped in a steel tube suspended 30,000 feet in the air: a crazed maniac brandishing a mysterious electronic device. If this guy were actually on the plane, the air marshals would have him wrestled to the ground within 5 seconds. I'm sure that having 150 copies of his picture on board is of great comfort to everyone. Now that I think about it, the weird angle of the photo may not be an attacking falcon at all. It might be intended to represent the plane auguring in for a crash landing. If ever there were a picture that could knock a plane from the sky, this is it.
As far as I'm concerned, the cover of this catalog represents a catastrophic failure on the part of the entire Sky Mall supply chain - from product vendor to ad agent to catalog production staff. I would like to think that this fiasco resulted in wholesale firings and the swift adoption of institutional reforms designed to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. But I know better than to hope for that.
My guess is that the Sky Mall juggernaut lumbers on undeterred, waiting to frighten other unsuspecting travelers. All I can tell you is to be very, very careful when removing Sky Mall from the seat pocket in front of you. The life you save may be your own.
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Since you've already spilled your coffee in your lap over the baseball thing, I might as well hit you with another one: it's possible that Mel Gibson might be running Disney. The source on this is nothing less than journalistic standards-bearer the New York Post gossip column. (Scroll about halfway down.)
Wow.
Wow.
Apparently yesterday's post was prescient. The Wall Street Journal (via ESPN.com) is reporting that Major League Baseball has signed a deal to place "Spider-Man 2" logos on first, second, and third base, plus the pitching rubber, in major league ballparks this summer. That is so wrong I don't even know where to begin.
Presumably they will also be retooling all of the exhibits in Cooperstown as well. Imagine the exposure "Van Helsing" would get by putting their logo on Babe Ruth's jersey.
Presumably they will also be retooling all of the exhibits in Cooperstown as well. Imagine the exposure "Van Helsing" would get by putting their logo on Babe Ruth's jersey.
Monday, May 03, 2004
I don't want to sound like I'm down on capitalism. You will be hard-pressed to find anyone who is more of a fan of Adam Smith than I. At some point, however, I have to wonder if maybe we're taking things a little too far. When that happens, it's always the grammar that suffers.
Take Champ Car auto racing, for example. Formerly known as CART, Champ Car was slow to adopt the sponsorship frenzy you see in NASCAR, in which every available surface is sold for advertising. This may explain why NASCAR is the most financially successful form of auto racing in the world, while Champ Car is hovering on the brink of bankruptcy.
Champ Car has finally taken the hint and is jumping on the sponsorship bandwagon with a vengeance, much to the dismay of English speakers everywhere. This year's series is officially known as "Bridgestone Presents The Champ Car World Series Powered by Ford". Excuse me? Is there a noun in there somewhere?
This would be enough of a problem if they didn't insist on using its full name in official communications. The following sentence actually appeared in a Champ Car press release:
I think that I am going to open up my own name for sponsorship opportunities. With the wedding coming up, I could really attract some lucrative deals.
"Do you, Nextel Presents Scott Dierdorf Powered by Volkswagen, take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife?"
"I do, and so does the whole Tide Doritos Glidden Scott Dierdorf team!" <chugs bottle of Power Ade>
• • •
I got a great piece of mail in response to last week's Baltimore Sun column. The article got picked up by a newspaper in Florida, and one of their writers sent me email to tell me about it:
That is quite possibly the most hilarious introduction to an email I've ever received. I laughed out loud for several minutes. I am not ashamed to admit that I love fan mail.
BTW, here is the article on the SFSS web site, in case you would like to read it again with a different HTML wrapper:
Table for one, please, and darn proud of it
Take Champ Car auto racing, for example. Formerly known as CART, Champ Car was slow to adopt the sponsorship frenzy you see in NASCAR, in which every available surface is sold for advertising. This may explain why NASCAR is the most financially successful form of auto racing in the world, while Champ Car is hovering on the brink of bankruptcy.
Champ Car has finally taken the hint and is jumping on the sponsorship bandwagon with a vengeance, much to the dismay of English speakers everywhere. This year's series is officially known as "Bridgestone Presents The Champ Car World Series Powered by Ford". Excuse me? Is there a noun in there somewhere?
This would be enough of a problem if they didn't insist on using its full name in official communications. The following sentence actually appeared in a Champ Car press release:
Coming off a successful opening race to the 2004 Bridgestone Presents The Champ Car World Series Powered by Ford campaign and preparing for a May 21-23 event in Monterrey, Mexico that is on pace to break its record for ticket sales, the Champ Car World Series is starting to attract the attention of major national companies that wish to join in the racing action.That is one of the most impressive clauses I've ever seen. This is in the first sentence in their press release, mind you. I wonder if anyone bothered reading all the way to the end. It's almost not worth the effort - they might be out of business by the time you finish parsing that first sentence.
I think that I am going to open up my own name for sponsorship opportunities. With the wedding coming up, I could really attract some lucrative deals.
"Do you, Nextel Presents Scott Dierdorf Powered by Volkswagen, take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife?"
"I do, and so does the whole Tide Doritos Glidden Scott Dierdorf team!" <chugs bottle of Power Ade>
I got a great piece of mail in response to last week's Baltimore Sun column. The article got picked up by a newspaper in Florida, and one of their writers sent me email to tell me about it:
Dear Loser:
Excellent column. My paper picked it up and ran it today.
Quietly sobbing,
P-
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
That is quite possibly the most hilarious introduction to an email I've ever received. I laughed out loud for several minutes. I am not ashamed to admit that I love fan mail.
BTW, here is the article on the SFSS web site, in case you would like to read it again with a different HTML wrapper:
Table for one, please, and darn proud of it