Hey Dono, said no one ever, isn’t it about time for one of your Existential Scrapbook thing deals where you offer brief but wry observations on various pictures and doodles instead of writing an actual essay?
You know, I was just thinking the same thing, and what prompted it was the picture below. Apparently Nike is the uniform provider for major league baseball, and this year’s unis have prompted some complaints from players. Some say the pants fit tighter than they used to. Others have noticed the pants are virtually see-through, and some teams haven’t been provided all the pants they need—although that reminds me of the old joke: “The food is terrible there—and such small portions!” Another complaint is that the lettering on the back is too small—and in the case of Chicago Cub Ian Happ, poorly applied.
I can promise you that back in our Sportsman Shop days, Tom Eastman and I were better at applying names to uniform jerseys than whoever did that one.
I play a lot of Scrabble and Boggle on my phone, and like everyone else I hate the ads. Not only because there are too many of them but because the advertisers don’t put any effort into making them good or interesting. (I wouldn’t play Royal Match if they paid me, mainly because I don’t care about the stupid king who finds himself in so many precarious situations. One day he’s about to drown, another day he’s falling into a vat of acid, another day he’s going to be eaten by a giant snake—and I don’t care. Get back to the palace and do something good for the peasants.) Anyway, recently I’ve been getting ads about an app that’s supposed to measure your heart rate, blood pressure, pulse, blood oxygen level, and so on. The ads begin with a doctor throwing a sphygmomanometer off a table because this app is soooo much better. But then this screen pops up:
Test you herat rate? Fifty percent of that sentence is illiterate and you want me to think your app can accurately measure my blood pressure?
Here’s an online ad for a game with a really specific goal:
If you get past that level, you then have to serve all actors, directors, stage managers, and lighting technicians.
I have mentioned in previous newsletters that I’m fairly adept at spotting client-provided copy in television ads. The most egregious example is for Perdue Chicken, in which two of the Perdue executives note that one of their competitors gives their chickens antibiotics even when the chickens aren’t sick. I’m not going to weigh in on the antibiotic issue itself, but I will note that from a marketing standpoint, this message is a good way to reach consumers who might be a little fearful about such things. But then they have to get cute:
Yeah, the folks at Perdue thought it would be hilarious to show a woman with an overheated car tossing a handful of antibiotics into the engine. This idea is pointless, it’s not funny, it detracts from the message, and in my professional opinion no self-respecting copywriter would have come up with it and no creative director would have approved it. This is client-provided copy all the way.
Two sentences that will seem unrelated at first: (1) Kobe Bryant’s tragic death occurred on January 26, 2020. (2) The next night at bedtime Cybil asked me to get her some baking soda water to ward off any heartburn. I scooped up a tablespoon full of baking soda, mixed it into a glass of water, and did not realize I had sloshed some out of the glass until the next morning, when I found this on the counter:
I asked Cybil what it looked like and she said “Kobe Bryant dunking a basketball in heaven,” which is pretty much verbatim what I thought too.
As recently as a few years ago, there was still some question about whether or not the Republican Party was going to get back on its stodgy old capitalist track or follow a criminal egomaniac all the way into the white nationalist septic tank. Well, we know how that turned out, but here’s a little pictogram thing deal I did back then in response to the ridiculous “I got mine” argument of people for whom saving five bucks in taxes was the most important thing in the world:
Here’s a fun thing you can do to fool your friends into thinking you have psychic powers. Go to an apartment complex chosen by your friend/victim and walk around on the sidewalk pretending you’re reading psychic energy wavelengths or some such rot. Then point to an apartment and say “The people who live here have a cat.” Then go inside, find that apartment, and confirm it with the owners. Golly, your friend will say—how did you know that?
Well, the trick will be to spot some vertical blinds that have some of the slats broken off.
It works every time!
Speaking of cats, is there any concept that’s been overdone more in recent years than the whole Schrodinger’s Cat thing? It’s time to retire this trope, right after I post my two takes on it: