Let's Ask Google About Google+

Long-time fan of the Goog, my search engine of choice since the late 90s. They build some cool things and some fun toys.

Take Blogger for instance. Works great, lasts a long time. Here for me after a long absence, somewhat refined since the last time I used it, but still pretty intuitive and easy to handle. I also love iGoogle, the homepage that contains my reader, weather, email and other gadgetry. They're killing that fine service in November. 

Google+? It's not going to happen. It serves a small, devoted few, and apparently well, if you listen to them. For everyone else, it is a cumbersome and confusing failure.

Am I blogging again? Guess so.

Creepy Lurker Dads Watch Their Families Drive Away

Thanks to Paula for the link to this Flickr set.

More or Less

You would expect nothing less from Trump, because who is more of an asshole than him?

This high class gent just paid close to $1,000 for that bed and who knows how much for the professional escort. But that smug look tells me money doesn't matter to him. He's all about rubbing it in your face the next day on the golf course.

The Ad I Couldn't Ignore

I've been taking a break from this blog for a while. Anyone can find ads and praise them or hate them. And there were so many of us out here doing it that it became an echo chamber where nothing was new and eventually, after all of us had mocked or loved, along comes Ad Week at the tail end of the cycle to show everyone an ad that everyone already saw and blogged about. (Must be layers of corporate approval going on over there.) But Sunday's paper presented me this riveting image that must be shared.

There are too many things to hate about this ad, but I'll start with the little girl. She's a brat. How do I know? She wears sunglasses. Her dad is too cool. Jeans and a blue blazer. Nothing says serious but cool like that tired combo. He's a shitty parent too. How do I know? His daughter wears sunglasses. The doorman wears a pork pie hat. And he gets down on one knee to high five the brat in the sunglasses. "That's how the black men do it here in the city, my little Princess," said Daddy. The pork pie hat is part of the hotel chain's logo. So hip. The giant "TLC" stands for "Tender Loving Comfort." Gross. And the hotel staff all "went through body language training to understand your needs before you even have to tell us!" Grosser. Here, let Chrissy tell you all about it, she's the "Chief Comfort Officer." Hippest. Grossest.

Clint, The Morning After

Yo Ho Yo Ho

A pirate's life ain't what it used to be.

Optimism Defined

Missing since 1965, someone is still holding out hope that she'll be found.

Parents: Bust Your Wayward Daughters

VW is hyping its "low-speed corner illuminating headlights" on the 2013 CC with this full-page ad appearing in many publications.

This is a feature no one has cared about since it was first tried in the 1930s, so it was a tough sell for the people making this ad. "Big deal!" the copywriter said, "They only work at low speed. I can only see that being beneficial when your daughter, whose grades are slipping, is hiding in the bushes with that loser skater kid who needs his ass kicked."

And so they made an ad based on that.

If you've seen a new CC on the street, you know it's not a bad looking vehicle with way more going for it than this. Copy reads: "It's a simple solution that may lead to some complicated conversations."

Weak. 

Zombie Suburbia

We've all seen the haunting pictorials of abandoned urban centers, Detroit being the most popular for photographers to document, but the abandonment has reached many suburbs as the housing crisis continues to claim families.

On the two-mile trip to our local 7-Eleven in a middle class suburb, there are quite a few sad stories; homes that have been left to rot as the Florida jungle, ever creeping, tries to swallow them up.

So here's a little Fourth of July trip through our Central Florida neighborhood.

The Circle Slash Means Stop, Doesn't It?

So does adding the word "Stop" to a circle slash make this ad say "Don't Stop"? And why are the last three letters in "capitalist" underlined? Is this a take-off on anti-capital punishment groups? WHY? Just to be punny? (At least they know how to use the circle slash symbol) And why is the drop shadow so huge on that button? And why can't an organization that can afford to run a quarter page ad in the national version of The New York Times afford to hire a team to create a decent ad?

The Sleep Twilight

I've long been a believer in finding (or rather receiving) ideas in that half-conscious state between sleep and wakefulness. In fact, I let one go this morning. It was genius, I'm sure, but I didn't write it down and it vanished.

Found this quote at AnimalNewYork marking the passing of Ray Bradbury:

“Any owner of cats will know of what I speak. Cats come at dawn to sit on your bed. They may not nip your nose or inhale your breath or make a sound. They simply sit there and stare at you until you open one eyelid and spy them there about to drop dead for need of feeding. So it is with ideas. They come silently in the hour of trying to wake up and remember my name. The notions and fancies sit on the edge of my wits, whisper in my ears and then, if I don’t rouse, give more than cats give: a good knock in the head, which gets me out and down to my typewriter before the ideas flee or die or both. In any event, I make the ideas come to me. I do not go to them. I provoke their patience by pretending disregard. This infuriates the latent creature until it is almost raving to be born and once born, nourished.”

Maybe that's what lacking in today's workplace. Not enough napping.

My Guess Would be Swedish Death Metal

Kill Your Agency Blog, Please

If you're not going to update it, get rid of it. Do you know how stupid it makes you look when you have only three posts up for 2012? While you're at it, remove the Twitter feeds from your team's accounts. When your media planner only tweets links to media planning articles she read somewhere else and your creative director only links to campaigns he wishes he'd had a part in, you're not doing yourselves any favors. We get it. You do social media. Or pretend to anyway.

Dinner with Barack

Not dinner with the President. Not dinner with Obama. Nope. Just Barack. Your buddy, up against a brick wall like so many promising young bands and hopeful comedians. Barack. You and Barack. Dinner. That will be special.

I have no doubt that the skillful and shrewd tacticians of the Obama campaign are totally in touch with their audience (See that Google + icon?) and they will most likely outwit the Romney camp this November, but I wish they could reign in the coolness just a touch. We're talking about the leader of the most powerful country on earth - not Justin Bieber.

What will you and Barack talk about at dinner? My guess is he will feign interest in whatever you want to talk about and probably laugh at your lame jokes. He will also be familiar with your favorite music. He's cool like that. 

The Dream of Solar Power - 1958

From Plan59. The caption on this illustration read: "The furnace is 93,000,000 miles away."

So, yeah. Keep dreaming.

Was McDonald's Involved?

This video is blowing up on YouTube right now, in which an actress does a great job lampooning the way in which black women have been portrayed by fast food chains, particularly McDonald's. While I want to believe this is just one woman creating a nice resume piece that will likely land her more roles, something makes me cautious that it was that innocent. That something is the Big Mac featured in the final third of the four minute and twenty second video. It's perfect. It looks styled. And we've all seen the "what they advertise, what you get" photographs. I did one years ago for Wendy's Baconator. Besides the perfection of her meal, she makes an excellent pitch for a Big Mac and vanilla shake. Watching her eat it, you want your own.

And 4:20 seems a little too perfect as well, now that I think about it.

  

The Gambler

The New Awful: Internet Explorer

Every once in a while, an ad as bad as this will bring me out of my blogging coma to post it so you all can cringe with me. Here, Internet Explorer attempts to be funny, ironic and self-deprecating - and fails.How can you miss with the always hilarious go-to: guy getting tackled from offscreen! How about cats! Everyone loves cats! CUPCAKES? HELP! WE SUCK AND WE KNOW IT! 



The creators of this are so sure that it sucks, they have disabled comments on the video over at YouTube.

Making matters worse, a companion website, TheBrowswerYouLovedToHate.com attempts to upsell the clued-in hipness with more than enough tongue-in-cheek desperation.

Why won't this work? Regardless of how much better IE9 is than previous iterations, people make up their minds on these things and they stay there. When you have a reputation for sucking, people don't forget that.

Books Where You Actually Turned the Pages Made from Real Paper

I was looking around for something to read, bored out of my mind by some Sinclair Lewis novel I downloaded for free from the Gutenberg Project, when I noticed that someone in the house had removed an old Time-Life book from the bookshelf in the dining room so they might employ it as a mousepad for some murderous game played on a laptop while sitting on the couch eating Goldfish and watching Family Guy. That's the level of respect we have for books these days, They're mousepads. These old Time-Life books, a series called "The Old West", belonged to my wife's father, and they've done nothing but collect dust since the turn of the century and well before that, I'm sure. And it was not with purposeful disrespect that the person in question decided it made a good mousepad, but a careful study of its smooth, leather-ish exterior determined it had the right reflective properties and gripping strength to be used for something. What are those stupid decorations in the dining room all about? The things with the paper inside them that look like perfect laptop mousepads?

And now I'm reading them. I feel like I'm getting the quality middle-school education I carelessly neglected all those years ago, too concerned was I with skipping class and trying to make girls pay attention to me. And the books are full of pictures, too, which is perfect for a wandering mind like mine. Here's the commercial that advertised this expensive set of volumes when it was newish.

Thank you, spoiled 21st Century child who thought this made the perfect mousepad for your gaming pleasure. Alas, I was just like you when I was your age, and never would've thought these books were good for anything, unless someone had told me they had pictures of naked Native Americans in them.

Happy Presidents Day

Go sell some crap, ad hos and marketing pimps. 

OK, THAT Explains It

A friend was sporting one of those "Peace, Love, 4 Rivers" bumper stickers I posted about earlier. It's actually a magnet. That makes much more sense. And they give one away with every order. Pretty damned smart.