Slashdot Mirror
Interesting Commercials
So, I'm sitting here half-watching the Super Bowl and admiring some of the new commericials. So far, I think that the E*trade Monkey with Horse ad has been really good, as has the Kasparov vs. The Machines - the accenture and cingular ads have been, IMHO, as bland as Wonder bread. That, and the Cingular icon looks like a bold color version of the X icon, or something. The E*Trade Matrix rip-off ad was good as well - but with one quarter left, I'm not as impressed as in past years. What do you folks think?Update: 01/29 06:29 PM by H :Check out AdCritic's Superbowl site.
the pets.com puppet had a killer cameo, it's good to see he is still getting work.
...coz I'm in Canada and my bloody cable company replaces all the ads with crummy random boring local ads!! grr! I'm missing half the show! At least I got to see a Powerbook G4 add that I hadn't seen yet, but still!
The Bud commercials have been pretty good, esp the one with "What are you doing?," "Just watching the market, drinkin' an import" and "Hey Jimmy, pick up the cordless." Just shows that you have a sense of humor when you can make fun of yourself. BTW--anyone else notice that it is no longer the Budwieser blimp, it's the Budwieser.com blimp. I think they missed that bandwagon by a year.
I was watching Futurama (sorry) since I had not seen it in a long time and there was no game on that channel :) when I saw a (bah!) M$ commercial.
New one, about how _reliable_ thier servers are.
It showed an empty office with servers in it and
spoke of how everyone was home enjoying milk and
cookies with no worries because Redmond was
running the show.
I wonder if this is just to tout the "new" OS,
or M$ standard campaign to make you forget about
all of those outages last week at thier server
farm...
the pets.com puppet had a killer cameo
Yeah, he looked great on Brittney Spears' arm during the halftime show.
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
CueCat's colons were lame. accenture's ">" in the middle of nowhere is LAME. Is ASCII the newest trend du jour with marketroids or what? Maybe in a few years we'll start seeing IPOs with names in pure l33t5p34|
Oh wait. mind[avg_marketroid]==mind[avg_script_kiddie]. Mystery solved.
// zyqqh
The commercials must be pretty boring if we're all here pushing reload on Slashdot. :)
This is exactly like how the News Agencies called the result of the election before it was truly over. We require, in a proper democracy, that our influential media hold its tongue and refuse to offer influential opinion before the contest is done.
I can only hope that commercials yet to declare will not be disheartened, and will show up to stake their claim despite this knee jerk reaction.
Shame on you Hemos.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I think of little else but you.
If you want to look at those comercials, you can always go to adcritic.
(I just want to be helpful, if you think I am a karma whore, mod me down).
Fh
Is anyone else but me annoyed by the elitist 'I'm too good for the Super Bowl' air around here? :|
BilldaCat
If only superbowl.adcritic.com weren't superbowled... oh wait, posting this isn't going to help, is it?
The shareholder is always right.
I think I speak for everyone here when I say the Super Bowl super sucked. Unless youre a retard, in that case, you speak for yourself.
Pick your favorite mocking quote:
"This disturbing commercial was brought to you by...Pepsi!"
"Oh look! Its Sting, and his little portable Pakistani friend!"
"Welcome to Super Bowl 35! Here's Sting Singing A Song About A Prostitute!"
"Our fans might not like that we're on stage with a band like N'Sync...But..its like, we do that all the time."
"Ok, everybody! Lets Punt!"
"Let's kick! And kick some more!! We like kicking!"
"And now, for the useless 3D instant replay."
"New York - We Suck Balls."
"Accenture -- Even We Don't Know What We Make."
"I read PROPAGANDA
Ok, Budweiser is parodying their own commercials. Pepsi is parodying Viagra commercials. This is pathetic. Sure, some of them are a little amusing, but amusing is all over the place. Some are even hilarious, but come on. How about product information? Oh, wait, people don't really care about that, do they?
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Hell, my little brother just switched over to the movie "Little Giants" on NBC. This isn't going to bode well for Survivor, either, with their pilot going on tonight. I could care less about the show (I was one of the few and the proud that didn't watch any of it last season), but if I were CBS I'd be shitting in my pants right now. Most people have probably switched channels.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
That's been my fave so far. Made me laugh and it had a good point.
:) *drool*
I liked the silicon ad...oh wait, that was Ms. Spears at half time.
Well, the most poignant one was the American Legacy Foundation's assault on the Philip Morris positive smear campaign. I think that's the one that's going to stand out in people's minds... I wish they'd show that one a little bit more throughout the year.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
...they have been SuperBowled.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Reading in the local paper, the big draw of this super bowl were, as the paper put it, Matrix like replays. After having watching 3 quarters, I must say that it is a big let down. I guess a brief look at the technology is waranted:
They have setup thirty-some cameras around the stadium that allow a continuous feed of imagery to computer located in the bowels of the programming center. This is all done via fiber, and is supposed to create that cool camera panning effect where the camera stops, swings around, and you are behind the play.
That is a simple overview, but it gets the idea across. My take is that it is a little early to be seeing this. First off, only a select few plays even need this type of replay feature, and I believe the viewer only saw it two times before the half-time show. When it was used, it was jerky, and very, VERY pixelated. I don't see why they didn't just switch camera angles. This is specially true after hearing how much they spent to do something they hardly do. Maybe in a few years, computers can do interpolation, make it smoother, all that stuff, but for right now, leave it out of the game.
As for best commercial, I would have to vote for the new "Wassup" with the Wall Street guys. Too much fun!
Bryan R.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
Lame. I'm sorry old guy in the bed with a destroyed trachea, but Phillip Morris wont change their product until idiots like you decide to stop putting a roll of burning tobacco between your lips. Quit bitching and accept responsibility for what you have done to yourself.
As for your foundation and that damn Truth campaign, take your frikking money and shove it somewhere where the sun _does_ shine. I'd rather see those billions of dollars go to finding cures for muscular distrophy or cancers that AREN'T self inflicted.
I really liked the fedex ad at the very beginning.. with the high power springs and the last line where the guy says he'll really miss the dog.
The only thing I liked about halftime was Britney in her tight pants. The rest sucked. My mother says that was because I am getting older and that the show didn't belong to my generation. Not that any superbowl halftime has been "good", just that this one was not as well done as previous superbowl halftimes.
So who is right??
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
well since I missed it, did CBS use those matrix style effects that /. reported a few days ago? If so I'm gonna be pissed :)
This whole Super Bowl was relatively uneventful. A guy got his helmet knocked off but that it's. I guess it's not what it used to be. As for the commercials, well, you're right. There weren't many. Of course I'd like to know where they got the panning cameras they used to shift views during game play? E*Trade may have ripped off the Matrix but didn't the Super Bowl camera men do that too? Only, it made sense when they did it.
... there is nothing that has not already been thought
I think the best commercial was the Snickers commercial when this guy was on the side of the street selling talking dolls, and some guy came up and asked him for the 'wazzzzzup' guy, and he smashed him! At last! Victory! That has been the most obnoxious series of commercials I have seen in years. There is nothing more annoying than hearing that phrase being repeated 50 times a day, so needless to say when the guy stomped that 'wazzzzzup' doll, I was cheering myself. In fact, I think there is a hunger inside me right now. ;)
so with a lot of the companies that had the big adds last year gone (ie. they are on f$!@dcompany.com) this year, you think this was a concern to HotJobs.com ? I mean Etrade actually has some money that comes in from its users... Hmm. lets see if we lose any from this year!
Game got boring, but the three fg's in 40 some seconds was worth the time!
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
One of the reasons for the jerkyness was that they were only using 33 video cameras, as compared to 100+ still cameras in The Matrix. The video was a bit grainy (I'm a video network engineer, so that's striking me as a bit curious.), but I agree; for a first time thing, this was good. A few years will see some remarkable improvements. I think, that www.superbowl.com is going to have EyeVision snippets online.
---------------------------------
Only in America will someone order a
Big Mac, large fries, and a Diet Coke.
Isn't ironic that same people who yelled about the dirty tactics and half-truths of tobacco advertising are the ones who sponser and run 'The Truth.' It too is half-truths and blame shifting, just now its coming from another source.
If you're too dumn to realise that sucking the smoke from fire into your body is bad, well, thats what natural selection is for.
FunOne
FunOne
WTF was up w/ the 3d shit going on there.
"You can punt the ball, and stay in wonderland."
"Or...you can run the kickoff back for a touchdown and i'll show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes"
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I was like "WTF a smaller IMac?" and then they showed some food in it.
The new IMac - it cooks, it multitasks, it still has no floppy.
Yeah, they did...
But if it's any consolation, the video quality was crap.
o/~ All God's children shall be free in Pirates of the Caribbean, when we reach that Magic Kingdom in the sky... o/~
They had a bunch of cameras at the top of the stadium and they could switch from one camera's viewpoint to the next.
The problem was it that looking down from that angle with that sort of zoom you couldn't see very much of the field. So they'd turn the view until it was directly behind the quarter back and then they'd say, "You can tell that he doesn't have anyone open from this view." But you couldn't. You could tell that he didn't have anyone open within 3 feet but you couldn't see anything that was happenning further on down the field.
It's a sad thing to know that a football player makes more than any scientist,
Why is that sad? There are plenty of scientists, but far fewer who can play professional football at the highest level. Supply and demand. Plus, you have to factor in the fact that the average career of a professional football player is 3 years... actually, the compensation differences don't seem that large.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Man, it was like the ad agencies conspired this year.
Ad: Computer Associates "Roosters on wall street"
Premise: A bunch of roosters mob a big city and then create a shockwave at sunrise
Subtext: You are such an idiot you don't even know you need us until a farm animal tells you.
Ad: Pepsi "prisoners steal our machine"
Premise: A coke and pepsi machine sit next to each other for months/years. Eventually the inmates from a nearby prison tunnel under and steal the pepsi machine.
Subtext: Convicted felons prefer Pepsi.
Ad: Budweiser "white men can't wassup"
Premise: a bunch of dorky white guys drinking heinkein look like idiots doing more or less the same thing as all the idiots in normal budweiser "wassup" commercials.
Subtext: White people are dorky and our customers look down on them. Oops, our customers are 85% white. Our customers are stupid and can't be as cool as our commercials.
Ad: Levi "corpse donor" 569 jeans
Premise: A "cowboy" kills himself on a coin-op pony and his jeans are delivered to a loser who can't afford his own.
Subtext: Idoiot cowboys buy our stuff, kill themselves stupidly, and if you're a loser you'll want their used jeans
Ad: CBS Becker "Airtime Abuse"
Premise: Two characters from a CBS show sit around commiserating about how outrageous it is that the network uses the superbowl to "flog" its poorer shows.
Subtext: Our show sucks, CBS is abusing its viewers, and isn't it funny that we come right out and say it?
Ad: Levi "corpse donor" 569 jeans
Premise: A "cowboy" kills himself on a coin-op pony and his jeans are delivered to a loser who can't afford his own.
Subtext: Idoiot cowboys buy our stuff, kill themselves stupidly, and if you're a loser you'll want their used jeans
I could go on and on. I sat there stupefied that almost every single commercial had a subtext talking about how stupid the company's target audience is. I mean, sure, you'd have to be stupid to drink Bud, but isn't it adding insult to injury to *tell* people that at the same time you sell them product?
The movie ads were ok. Too bad none of the movies themselves looked any good. But at least the ads didn't play the "morons will go see this movie" angle too strongly. Better than you can say for most of the ads.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
They may have used a compression format that was sub-par as well, because watching the slowmotion plays had about as much quality as old football films from the '70s.
Keeping
I caught the pamplona running with the bulls/squirrels ad about halfway through (gotta tape the 'bowl so you don't miss the commercials during potty-breaks) and thought it looked funny. Then I realized it was the sequel to the cattle/cat drive spot and wasn't as impressed once I realized it was EDS.
My all-time favorite still has to be the e-trade (or whatever) one last year with the guys in the garage with the monkey (we just wasted a million bucks!)
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Warning: dumb questions from a foriegner here
So what happens to all the players that only play one or two seasons of pro football, or don't get drafted , given that (unlike soccer or in my case, Aussie Rules) there doesn't appear to be "minor leagues" - if you don't make it or fall out of the system, you'll never play football again.
Is even the base pay so high that even a rookie who doesn't really make it set themselves up for life? Do they all go and buy bars and forever moan about the injury/coach/whatever that derailed their careers? Is there a charity to look after these unfortunate souls? ;)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Monkies have tails, apes do not. That was a chimpanzee. There's a difference.
That's what I thought at first but -- given that the 3D view is a reconstruction based on x camera angles, how can you tell if a given camera angle is real footage or an approximation? Here's yet another point where technology makes it easy to confuse reality with reenactment.
For those that don't know, when the name change came into affect all the AT&T Wireless & other companies that merged together phones change the logo over night. A co-worker's non-techy brother came by and told him he dropped his phone and now it's in Spanish. They spent days trying to figure out how to get it to quit saying 'Cingular' on the screen before they knew that the name had changed and this was the new one.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Accually I rember in high school the whole "Jocks" vs "Geeks" thing... ummm my memorys may be diffrent than yours however...
That whole jock pleading for his life thing really effects your prespective on life..
There is a stereotype that exists that geeks are weak antisocal introverted computer freaks and jocks are strong violent socal airheads..
Not true on both counts...
Basicly people think the stereotypical bully is a jock... really he's a loser...
Sports needs some intelect. Obveously stratagy is not the whole game but the strongest airhead jock is dead with a little planning...
In short the "I'm above that" is really just "I'm better than that bully back at my high school".. That bully never made it into the NFL etc.. The jock you beat at chess did.. Or maybe he beat you...
As for the lunitic sports fans.. don't seem much diffrent than the luntic video game fanatics.. They are just plain nuts...
I don't actually exist.
When I saw this, the first thing I thought of was, "Jobs is gonna sue."
Now, I think, "I hope he does, and I hope Foreman smacks him upside the head."
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Naw, Britney would have to be in a major scifi movie trilogy to appeal to the /. crowd. Maybe she can make a cameo in the "Lord of the Rings" films as Frodo's ladyfriend, Dildo Boobins.
Today's sig brought to you by http://www.swankypimp.com
wait'll next year!
(I've been coding for quite a few hours this weekend)
I'm still working on a clever footer.
"Hey, quite down, the commercials are on!"
"Okay, game's back, so what were you saying about that..."
Grades, Social Life, Sleep... pick two.
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
[Note: Details have been changed in order to protect the easily bored. Take nothing for granted, check all facts yourself, yada yada yada.]
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
OK, so my coworkers are addicted to nicotine and get to take 3-5 15 minute smoke breaks outside every day?
Well, I'm addicted to sex; I want to be able to cut out twice a day to screw my wife, girlfriend, hooker, etc. in the bushes next to the smoking area, Dammit!
:) This is America! I want my equal freedoms!
"Yes, the baby boomers; who have lived their entire lives based on one simple philosophy: GIVE ME THAT, IT's MINE!" -George Carlin
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
You're calling 150 million americans brain-dead morons? YOU are "more intelligent" than those 150 million?
It's a football game. It's ads that make most people laugh. And it's Brittney Spears. It's when we loosen our ties, and have some fun with friends.
Elitism makes me puke. You don't like something, say you don't like it, but don't insult everyone else who might enjoy it.
--
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Hey, I love football and all, and I wouldn't complain about getting showered with 1000 dollar bills, but I think Bill Gates took the high road this week when he donated $100 million to AIDS research.
On a related note, didn't one or more of the Slashdot guys say that they'd be donating some of the money they made on the VA Linux IPO? Did anything ever come of that? (Just curious, I really have no idea one way or the other.)
Cheers,
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
They're missing the crucial Aliens "Whazzup!" ad! What the fuck ... I mean, probably one of the funniest ads and they don't even have it up to be rated. This is like the Florida Fucking Recount all over again ...
My heart goes out to those people in India, and the Superbowl is "frivolous" compared to that tragedy any day.
Being on the otherside of the world makes it remote enough that people can shut it out of their minds. But it would have been nice if their had been a moment of silence before the game, and it would have been bigger if the network had cancelled one of its "I love Raymond/monday lineup" ads and had given it to the Red Cross.
The sad thing is that it seems to have bothered so few. What's more, our "moral" leader Dubya is falling behind other nations giving aid. If our nation gives a dime for federal aid, they should cut a check for this without "having to be asked."
So yeah, the tragedy is not that people watched a game, but that so little consideration about the tragedy in India was given on the national level, or even at the game.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
You've got to be kidding me. That Cingular ad was ludicrous, bordering on offensive. It really sickened me to see them take what was a very cool and eye-opening short and parlay it into a sales-pitch for fucking cellular phones. I hate their name, I hate their logo, and now, I hate their advertising department as well. You've got to wonder what kind of "genious" overpaid, MBA-type moronic PHBs would sign off on not only that stupid, annoying name, but then pick that stupid paint-splotch of a logo, and then, come back for thirds and sign off on such a stupid, frivolous, and sometimes insulting advertising campaign. I for one think that whoever the guilty party is should be promptly fired or demoted to the mail room.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
- SBC and BellSouth say: we aren't making enough money! How can we trick people into forking over more of it to us?
- Marketroid responds: let's merge and hire one of those big naming firms so come up with something distinctive that will stick in people's minds. Well pay them $2 million dollars in return for a 6-11 letter word. Just like Agilent! Yeah!
- Dumb, naive, MBA-educated, spoon-fed presidents of SBC & BellSouth respond: Yeah! This should help us maximize market capitalization through strategic synergizing while at the same time optimizing and streamlining our labor pool to eliminate duplicity (read: layoffs). Yeah!
- Marketroid responds: also, since the product we are trying to sell is about as common as, say, air, in the United States, we need to implement a new, metaphorical marketing campaign based on freedom of expression and personal liberty. This should help potential customers to forget that 3 out of every 5 of them already have a cellular phone. Yeah!
- MBAs: Yeah!
- Marketroid: one more thing: we're going to concoct some touching shorts using a gifted artist afflicted with multiple sclerosis. In their minds, people will equate this man's triumph of passion & communication over enormous physical difficulties with our cell-phones. Then they'll want to buy more cell-phones. Yeah!
- MBAs: Word!
... so who's up for steak?
Everything about this company screams of "profit-motive, profit-motive, profit-motive." It's like, how dumb do they think we are?--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
- Until you've found someone suffering from the disease, you haven't found the disease.
How is this relevant to the epidemiology of smoking? Namely, that while the link between lung cancer and smoking is well-established, the link between secondhand smoke and mortality is far less so.If secondhand smoke kills tens of thousands of people each year, then why is it I don't know anyone who's died from secondhand smoke? How do they come up with these numbers of tens of thousands dying each year from it? Are those actual, clinical diagnoses of "you have lung cancer triggered by high exposure to secondhand smoke", or are those inferred mortality statistics?
If those numbers are culled from aggregate diagnoses throughout the US, what's the criteria for diagnoses? If I live with a smoker and die of a virulent influenza (a respiratory ailment), does that get counted as a "secondhand smoke" death since "everybody knows that were it not for the secondhand smoke you wouldn't have fallen ill"?
What if, instead of living with a smoker, I hang out after work a couple of nights a week in a smoke-filled bar?
What if my only connection to tobacco smoke comes from walking out the side entrance at work and inhaling the fumes from the smokers there?
The link between secondhand smoke and lung damage is far from certain. Most of the numbers on secondhand smoke are inferred numbers, not direct observations; and the criteria which are used to determine secondhand smoke illness are oftentimes arbitrary and shifting.
There's a hell of a lot of politics surrounding tobacco nowadays. Best bet: doubt everything. Don't believe the hype from either side, whether that side be Philip Morris and RJR Nabisco, or whether that side be Truth.
I'd live in a world without professional athletes in a second. Which is not to say a world without sports or entertainment - that would suck. But given the choice between pro sports and goatse.cx, I'm not too sure which one I'd pick.
Too much of what's "Wrong With America" (TM) these days is that people are content to just sit back and watch other people do things that they'd like to be doing if they weren't so lazy/stupid/unmotivated. So-called Reality TV is really just the opposite. For a huge number of people, Reality TV would be a show consisting of some slob sitting on the couch watching sitcoms and sports. Really entertaining, isn't it. Instead, you get to watch other people having fun. Wow. Sign me up.
Sure, it's entertaining, but it doesn't get you anywhere. You spend your welfare check or dotcom stock options on the biggest TV you can find and plop yourself down and veg for as long as you possibly can. Maybe I just don't get it either, but there's a reason the lowest common denominator just keeps getting lower, and it's not because too many people have stopped worshiping sports 'heroes' and gone out and done something useful with themselves. Why bother being successful myself if I can just go buy a jersey that looks just like one worn by someone who already made it. Even if I've never met them. All this for only $59.95? Woah.
Comparing pro sports to art is like comparing a wastepaper basket to a landfill. Sure, watchin the game (having a bud, if you like) is something to do with spare brain cycles, but it's not entertainment. Go play a sport - that's fun, and probably good for you! Go look at some art - learn something, talk to people, run for office, hack an OS, but WHY sit on your ass paying your hard-earned cash to line the pockets of some multimillionaire who probably goes home every night and secretly laughs at you and your fellow sheep. Until he ODs on the coke your money bought him, or gets busted for raping/beating someone and becomes a great role model for your kids. After all, HE made it, and all you ever did was buy a replica of his shirt.
So sure, go ahead, watch your little heroes run around in their spandex pants, have your little riots when your team loses/wins. I'm not going to try to stop you. But I sure as hell reserve the right to laugh at you.
(Score:-1, Underranted)
Now they have to sell you a lifestyle adjunct... anybody else noticed the philosophical tripe that is advertising today?
Nope. Going now on the second year of my forgetting to pay my cable bill on time. Haven't had any kind of broadcast tv into the house since then. This xmas I got an MP3 car stereo, so now I don't even listen to the radio very often. My only outlet to popular media is through the Internet, where I can damn well decide how to block the non-stop advertisements.
What's really amazing is how little you actually miss by not watching TV all the time. Oh sure, I can't talk about a game involving 2 teams I have no emotional or geographic connection to, but somehow I still get by.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Couple of disclaimers before I get into this. First off, I didn't see the TV show in question. Secondly, I am a Gulf War veteran. Went over with the 1st TAC Fighter Wing out of Virginia with the very first deployments that occurred in August prior to actual combat.
I just love it when folks get themselves thinking they understand something about foriegn affairs and economics start talking about this war. You evidently don't quite appreciate just how important either oil or Saudi is to us.
Whether we like it or not, our entire way of life today is heavily dependant on a steady flow of oil. It affects pretty much every means of transportation, which in turn effects the cost of food and pretty much any other thing you might purchase. Ask anyone living in the north eastern part of the United States what happens to their quality of life when they can't afford heating oil. At a high enough cost, people die. When food is priced beyond the reach of the poor, people die. It sucks; our use of oil as a primary means for power is just stupid; but that's the reality in which we entered that war.
As to the political reasons, we weren't going there to protect Kuwait. We were there to protect Saudi. Aside from the bulk of the oil fields that the US buys from being there, this is the hub of the entire Islamic world. 2 of the 3 holy places in Islam sit within the borders of Saudi. They had a couple of thousand troops sitting at their northern border heavily armed. Had we let that area of the world go to a wacko like Saddam, do you honestly think we'd continue to be a player there politically? This is especially important to note as we continue our efforts to negotiate peace treaties.
Yes, we greedy American types went to fight a war about oil. Hell, I went to go fight a war about oil. And for that, the trucks that bring the food to your local grocery store can afford the gas to do so. Your momma can afford to actually by that food, and put the gas in the SUV that brought it home. Bunch of greedy capitalists.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
What annoyed me was that Gumbel guy went on about how these military guys made some sacrifice for their country.
Yes we did. Good God, don't they teach any kind of history at those grad schools? Were you so insulated as to not have seen any news, or were you too busy getting drunk?
What's REALLY sad is how folks such as yourself will go watch a movie about those events and assume it's an accurate telling of the history. I suppose reading a book or even a web page would be too much to ask.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
see some REAL MAN'S FOOTBALL
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
Most of the As got together and franchised a name, Cellular One. They also created roaming agreements between them so they could compete with the less diverse B side (which is a good thing when you want seemless roaming).
Then the various PCS and GSM outfits came along, and Bs started buying As and each other. Verizon (a mish mash of a helluva lot of telcos) eventually bought a cellular one franchise in Southeast U.S. and with it somehow the rights to the name Cellular One. This forced the other Cellular One franchiesees to rename their franchise.
So now we have two of the biggest cell companies with two stupid names, Verizon and Cingular.
But I have a feeling they may not have had much choice. These days, you look for an available domain name first, and then name your company, not the other way around! There probably isn't many domain names left that are less than 10 chars with a few vowels in them....
Found this great article through adnews.com: The best commercials that never were (National Post).
The shareholder is always right.
The only reason cigarette companies exist is because they were here a long time ago
The only reason anything exists is because either (a) it was just created or (b) it's been around. What's your point?
If your point is that tobacco would be considered a drug regulated by the FDA were it to be brought to market today, I repeat: what's your point? Aspirin (and other NSAIDs) are surprisingly potent analgesics and have low overdose levels. After I (accidentally) nearly overdosed on acetaminophen, my doc ruminated that, if aspirin and other NSAIDs were introduced to the market today, they'd be considered prescription drugs because of their potency and lethality.
So if we're going to retroactively ban cigarettes because they're harmful, going against centuries of tradition, why don't we also retroactively turn aspirin and NSAIDs into prescription drugs?
The answer is that in a country governed by the people, the people get to decide what's illegal and what's not. The people don't want cigarettes to be illegal, nor do they want aspirin to be a prescription drug.
Thus, it won't happen.
Period.
Is it right to make billions of dollars off of a product that serves no purpose other than pacifying addictions?
Why, let me get this straight. You want to ban the first cup of morning coffee, too? After all, that has "no purpose other than pacifying addictions".
But let's not go there right now, because to go there gives your argument more credibility than it possesses. There is a useful purpose served by tobacco, other than fulfilling an addiction. The purpose is, I like it.
I enjoy a stogie on occasion, once a month or two months, when something happens which is worth commemorating. It could be getting a software release out the door; it could be celebrating a birthday; it could be a stogie after a great baseball game. But for personal reasons, I smoke cigars to commemorate personal milestones.
Am I addicted? Not if I can go six weeks without a Rothschild.
Do I find tobacco useful? Certainly.
So your argument--that there exists no useful purpose for tobacco other than to feed addictions--falls flat on its face. There are a lot, repeat, a lot of people like me. We smoke tobacco because we like it, not becuase we need to. We drink single-malt Scotch because we enjoy the taste of a premium liquor, not because we're alcoholics.
You only have one life. There's no excuse for not living it well.
As the most politically-incorrect person I know...
As the guy who said "Whoa, cool!" at the Christopher Reeves ad - while other PC types were saying it exploited the disabled.
Even I found the Cingular ad disappointing. Excellent Public Service Announcement. Would have fit in great with the Accenture "Now it gets interesting" theme and gotten a "wow, cool!" from me.
His self-expression through his art, overcoming his motor dysfunction, was damn cool.
But to go the extra leap and say that he could overcome his speech impediment and "express himself" over a Cingular cellphone was an insult - not so much to the audience - but to the guy and his art.
The disability had nothing to do with it - imagine Picasso/Beethoven coming on TV and saying that a cellphone was just as useful a tool for self-expression as a paintbrush/orchestra. Puh-leeze.
(My vote for the winner: The sock puppet. "Invest Wisely" - E*Trade and discount brokers having been a big part of the message last year that "if you get an account with us, you don't need good research assistance, any average Joe can make $BIGNUM in the markets!". Oh, the irony!)
uh, yeah. "I hate sports, but gee, they have sappy personal profiles of people I don't care about. better tune in!"
I know some women who were planning on watching the Bowl, and they either a) really REALLY liked football and couldn't wait to see the game, b) were in an office pool, or c) thought the commercials might be cool. In other words, the exact same reasons men were planning on watching.
Its possible that once they are watching, women like the profiles more than men (though hero worship is pretty thick amoung football watching guys, so I wouldn't bet on it) but you have the cause and effect mixed up. Women have constituted a good chunk of superbowl viewers for years, the sponsors are just now waking up and considering that part of their audience.
Like I said, the yuppies commercial was funny, but I wonder what the reaction would've been if parallel racial stereotypes would've been played with. Say, a takeoff of those student achievement commercials with black kids inventing a new kind of pager with which to sell drugs, or an Ebonics spelling bee. Somehow I don't think they'd be seen with such good humor...
yeah, funny how poking fun at people on the top of the heap is taken better than kicking those already at the bottom. Who would have thunk it? (sarcasm off)
Didn't see the commercial, but I'm curious how much "racial" stereotyping was actually going on as opposed to class stereotyping. The latter has always been very common in "blue collar" humor, the former much rarer.
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
>Anything that anyone likes can't be any good.
:-P
Right. Prime example - AOL
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Feel free to read my other reply. More importantly, you might try reading a book or two.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.