Archive for September, 2007

CIALIS is indicated for the treatment of erectile dysfunction.

CIALIS IS NOT FOR EVERYONE. Tell your doctor about your medical conditions and all medications, and ask if you’re healthy enough for sexual activity. Don’t take CIALIS if you take nitrates, often prescribed for chest pain, as this may cause a sudden, unsafe drop in blood pressure. Don’t drink alcohol in excess (to a level of intoxication) with CIALIS, as this may increase your chances of getting dizzy or lowering your blood pressure. CIALIS does not protect against sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.

The most common side effects with CIALIS were headache and upset stomach. Backache and muscle ache were also reported, sometimes with delayed onset. Most men weren’t bothered by the side effects enough to stop taking CIALIS. As with any ED tablet, in the rare event of priapism (an erection lasting more than 4 hours), seek immediate medical help to avoid long-term injury. In rare instances, men taking prescription ED tablets (including CIALIS) reported a sudden decrease or loss of vision. It’s not possible to determine if these events are related directly to the ED tablets or to other factors. If you have a sudden decrease or loss of vision, stop taking any ED tablet and call your doctor right away.

Individual results may vary. In clinical trials, CIALIS was shown to improve, up to 36 hours after dosing, the ability of men with ED to have a single successful intercourse attempt. CIALIS has not been studied for multiple sexual attempts per dose.

When taking CIALIS, under no circumstances should you attempt to have sex before taking a walk through the wilderness and locating the tandem outdoor bathtubs.

Tags: Advertising, Bathtubs, Cialis, Marketing, Media, Pharmaceuticals, Popular Culture, Priapism, Satire, Search

I never got into comic books as a kid. I bought a dozen or so issues of Heavy Metal in my teens, but that’s different: it was French, it was arty, and it had bare breasts. When I was about 10 my maternal grandfather gave me a Flash Gordon (king of impossible) comic, and while it didn’t thrill me, I still had it somewhere in my desk when I was in high school — probably because of my father’s story of owning the original Superman, which his mother threw away while he was in college. Oops. Of course, if that hadn’t happened to thousands of guys his age, the remaining ones wouldn’t be so valuable. I’m actually not so sure that story’s true, anyway, as my father would have been three years old when the comic came out.

Then there are graphic novels and underground stuff. I’ve got Maus and a couple of issues of Raw, and my little brother, during his dead head days, had lots of issues of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and similarly themed hippie crap.

I’ve never seen anything like this, though. Northrup Grumman have put out a series of comic books promoting advanced weapons systems. In this one, the Murcans stop the evil terrorists by bombing the bejeesus out of their hidden camp through the use of (hurrah!) Nothrup Grumman technology.

I guess you can’t make a lot of judgments about propaganda. It’s propaganda, so of course it’s not likely to employ a lot of subtlety. But look at the frame I’ve got here. Bad Swarthy Arabian Fellow #2 says, “Those Americans have foiled our evil plan to rule the world.” Are they kidding? Using the word “foiled,” as in “Curses! Foiled again!” is bad enough, but “our evil plan”? That’s just astonishingly stupid. Even if we think these people are evil, and I know many of us do, only simpletons like Bush think that they think they’re evil.

Stephen Trimble, the original poster, writes,

I am withholding judgment, except to just wonder aloud who they think is the target audience for this (… surely not the Pentagon’s weapons buyers, right?)?

Nope. This was written for people who are stupid enough to believe that somebody like Mussolini would wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and exclaim, “Good morning, you beautiful evil-doer!

Tip o’ the hat to the fine folks at Boing Boing.

Tags: Arts, Comics, Evil, Flash-Gordon, Freak-Brothers, Maus, Propaganda, Raw, War

It’s shopping the ultra-modern way: Tags! UGC! Wish lists! Feeds! Wiki!

Hat tip to Brand Infection.

Tags: Fads, qwerty, Tagging, Tags, UGC, Video, Viral, Web, Wiki

I saw a couple of new adverts for Ask.com on the eye of hell Tuesday night. I’m pretty sure this makes five different campaigns in the past 18 months or so. We had…

• One that took place in a café full of animalistic searchers, and that one Ask user who evolves, plus one with some scientist types being described as “animals in pants” by an ape. These, I’m sure, were massive hits with the intelligent design crowd.
• The series with Apostolos Gerasoulis himself (founder of Teoma) pointing out what a “pimped out” search engine Ask is.
• Two or three spots involving people talking about “the algorithm” and yucking it up over their friends who just didn’t get it.
• Those god-awful singing and dancing “I got what I was looking for” ads, featuring searches for [Kato Kaelin] and [chicks with swords].

And now we get a couple of new ones. In these, the only sounds are a few musical notes at the end and the sound of a user clicking (must be using IE, so how smart a searcher can it be?) as s/he shows us the beauty, the splendor, the majesty, and the usability of Ask’s GUI. One of them shows how a search for San Francisco offers lots of options, such as different media — images, maps, images from news stories, or the Wikipedia entry on the city, direct information — the time and weather in SF, or the opportunity to narrow or expand the search.

In the other, we get to learn about how we can make our searches more pleasant by choosing wallpaper (they refer to it as a “skin”) from a dropdown list:

• AskX – the Web 2.0-ish interface they introduced a few months ago
• Azul – a bench, ostensibly in London in front of a blue backdrop
• Cartas – a mail slot on a red door
• Flower
• Golden – wheat
• Pink stripes
• Polka dots
• Rotunda – Sorry, I don’t know what building’s rotunda it is
• Timber Brume – A forest in a bit of fog, which is apparently what a brume is
• Western Sky – at sunset, of course, and
• Default – that boring interface we all hate so very much.

The thing is, the “skin” only appears to skin ask.com. Run a search, and it’s gone until you go back to the home page. So… big deal.

Are these ads going to help Ask? Maybe the one involving how useful the engine is might bring them up from a distant fourth to a close fourth, but the skin ad really doesn’t strike me as a reason for anyone to switch.

I guess I’d like it if Google had a bit more competition. All three of the other supposedly big four are on the eye of hell, trying to get the public to give them a try. Big old Goggly Gogol has yet to stoop to advertising on the tube, and I’m still waiting for the day when Paris Hilton looks out at me from the dreaded eye and says, “iGoogle. Do you Google? Wanna Google with me?”

Tags: Advertising, Apostolos-Gerasoulis, Ask, Eye of Hell, GUI, qwerty, Search, Search Engines, Search Marketing, Teoma