The Auto Ad Death Race
Automotive advertising has taken a turn for the lethal. There is no other way for it to end up. These ads, of late, are full of video footage of successful young men driving their (sometimes) mediocre cars at ridiculous speeds through the downtown portions of major metropolitan areas. Even Volvo commercials are doing it. Safety, indeed.You will a see young executive type speeding through a tunnels onto a downtown street, jerking the wheel to pass a truck on the wrong side of the street, all to show off for his simpering girlfriend. You will see two cars racing through an urban area, any semblance of caution thrown to the winds. You will see people, in short, driving like absolute idiots.
But those people are well-dressed and driving expensive cars, and a good-looking woman (or man, if the driver is a woman) is riding with them, so they must be successful and everybody (well, almost everybody) wants to at least look successful. So everybody, including our sons and daughters, will want to drive exactly like those cool folks on the teevee. Although our teenagers may not all be able to afford the cars that they are driving in those commercials, they will want to emulate those smooth young men behind the wheel by driving like them. Read more
Popups, Pop-Unders, and Idiots
I am a both stumbler and a Stumbler. Because I have multiple sclerosis, I have become a journeyman physical stumbler. I am also a user of StumbleUpon. Not a pathological Stumbler, yet, I don’t think, but, a Stumbler nonetheless. For the uninitiated, StumbleUpon is a sort of Match.com or eHarmony service for you and Websites. You tell StumbleUpon what sort of stuff you like. They give you a toolbar with a Stumble button. Click on that button and they take you to a website that you might just be interested in. See? Match.com for surfers and Websites.
It has done a good job of expanding some of my horizons. They have taken me to a lot of Websites that I otherwise would probably never have found. I didn’t know that there were so many sites dedicated to physics, as one example. So far, I have been taken to 1,057 sites that I liked. The StumbleUpon toolbar has a “thumbs up” icon that you click on to tell them you like the page to which they have taken you. I assume that information goes into The Great Internet Database in the sky somewhere. It helps them, I am sure, to better direct other Stumblers who share one or more of my interests. Read more
