Archive for the 'Eye of Hell' Category

Dear CÎROC Vodka people,

I’d be happy to try your vodka, but your adverts on the eye of hell keep insisting that it’s for celebrations. That would be fine, but you’ve got that Diddy Daddy Puffy Puff Puff Daddy P-Diddy Padiddle Puffy Huffy Wuffy HR Pufnstuff fellow sitting there scowling through the whole spot. He’s in a room full of people having a fine time, he’s surrounded by beautiful young ladies who seem to be enjoying his company, but he just sits there, ordering drink after drink, holding it up and putting on that sour face.

If he isn’t enjoying yourself, then what makes you think that I’ll enjoy sitting in my underwear, drinking it in the company of my cats and watching cable?

Why is Mr. Diddy so angry? Does your vodka taste bad? Is he upset because of the music playing at the party? It looks like it’s his party. He could get up and change the music. He could even send somebody out to get some Stoly.

Maybe he’s trying to pick a fight with me. Well, I’m sorry Mr. Puffy Wuffy. That’s just not my style. I think maybe you should send your guests home and look into getting some professional help.

Dear Qantas,

I know you’re proud. You’re proud for good reason. You represent a unique part of the world, you’ve got that funky acronym for a name, and even Raymond knows about your pristine safety record.

Charlie: Ray, all airlines have crashed at one time or another, that doesn’t mean that they are not safe.

Raymond: QANTAS. QANTAS never crashed.

Charlie: QANTAS?

Raymond: Never crashed.

Charlie: Oh that’s gonna do me a lot of good because QANTAS doesn’t fly to Los Angeles out of Cincinnati, you have to get to Melbourne! Melbourne, Australia in order to get the plane that flies to Los Angeles!

But I’ve seen your current advert on the eye of hell, and I just wanted to let you know that if you’re going to use an elevator version of “I Come From a Land Down Under” by the thankfully not immortal Men at Work as your jingle, some people are going to be compelled to try to mess up that record of yours.

So, Bill O’Reilly has concluded that, because Arianna Huffington doesn’t premoderate comments on her site, she’s the same as the Nazis and the KKK.

One of Bill’s viewers wrote in, suggesting that the analogy doesn’t really hold up, but O’Reilly explained to him why he feels the way he does.

A lot of people are pretty upset about this. Some are pointing out that Billo’s comment area isn’t always free of ugliness. Others are quoting O’Reilly himself, pointing out that he’s said some rather unpleasant things about people.

Honestly, I don’t see the point in arguing about this. If I asserted to you that your house was made of mutton, how far would you go to prove me wrong? Would you slice off a slab of a wall and point out to me that it’s plaster and not meat? Would you offer me a bite? Would you try to appeal to logic, pointing out that if the house were made of mutton, it would smell awful, be covered by insects, and fall apart?

Of course not. You’d quickly conclude that I was batshit crazy, and that would be the end of the discussion.

With apologies to François Truffaut.

I’d like to point out a couple of things I’ve noticed recently about the Sci Fi Channel, that great bastion of geekery on the eye of hell.

Ghost Hunters

I can’t say I’ve seen this program, or its spin-off, Ghost Hunters International, but I’ve certainly seen my share of promos for both shows. The shows document the adventures and investigations of The Atlantic Paranormal Society, or TAPS. Here’s how the TAPS people describe themselves and their mission:

Taps promises to bring professionalism, personality, and confidentiality to each case we investigate. We understand that it is tough to call someone like us, and we respect your right to privacy.

We bring recording devices to your home to capture evidence of paranormal activity, but they are only used with the homeowner’s permission. We will not share or publish any of the media or any details of the case outside of the close-knit TAPS group. More sensitive cases will be dealt with by the founders and be held under the most strict confidence.

We are not amateurs. We have had extensive experience. Part of what we have learned is the psychology of making someone feel comfortable during these times of fear and uncertainty. We will bring a levelheaded and comfortable atmosphere into your home, in essence, taking care of the most important thing, your discomfort. We will then help you to understand some of the nature of the problem supplying you with the information to understand why this is happening and how little danger is actually involved. We will listen to your experiences and concerns. Then we will set up equipment and begin trying to recreate and debunk personal experiences in an attempt to find good evidence either for or against paranormal activity. We will then share our findings with you and come to a conclusion.

Pretty serious stuff, it would seem. But if that’s the case, why is it that every clip I’ve seen in promos for the show consist of people completely freaking out every time the floor creaks or a door closes? If they’re serious about this, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me that they would wet their pants at the slightest hint of finding what they’re supposedly looking for. How many CPAs do you know who cry for mommy every time they see a W-2?

The Friday Prime Time Schedule

This is the channel’s current schedule for Friday evenings from 7:00 to 11:00 eastern time:

And what do they call this four-hour block of programming? “The All New Sci Fi Friday,” of all things. If you’re a regular reader here, you probably know that I take issue with the marketing term “all new”. I’ve pointed it out quite a few times. Quite a few. Come on, Sci Fi. How can it be all new if 75% of it simply isn’t? Honestly, what the fuck?

Jonah Goldberg, author of that book that was the subject of a recent googlebomb, was the interviewee tonight on The A Daily Show. Before the interview was shown, our intrepid host, Jon Stewart (Mellencamp) warned the audience that the interview we were about to see had taken some 18 minutes, but since they had to cut it down to six minutes to fit into the show, it was going to be somewhat choppy.

He wasn’t kidding. It jumped all over the place. But what we managed to see in the mess included Stewart asking a few simple questions that simply tore Goldberg down. Way down. Why is organic produce fascist, he asked. Goldberg replied that the Fascists stressed the importance of the organic — the pure. Stewart then asked if men with mustaches were Fascists, since Hitler had one.

I’m hoping they stick the uncut interview up on the website tomorrow. I simply have to see it all the way through.

Update

If you read the comments about the interview, you’ll see that I’m far from alone in wanting to see the whole thing. Sadly, that’s not what we got, but the interview is still certainly worth watching:

Dear freecreditreport.com,

First of all, I have to respect your chutzpah. The free credit report mentioned in your domain name isn’t actually your product, but a little bonus that comes with membership in Triple Advantage, but you bravely branded the whole deal as if the little freebie was the real product, singing the praises of the free credit report and then quickly mumbling that the “offer applies with enrollment to Triple Advantage” right at the end. You could have set up a site at tripleadvantage.com, branded the product as Triple Advantage and mentioned the free credit report that comes with a trial membership, but that wouldn’t have been as much fun.

And it’s not as if you’re ashamed of Triple Advantage. If I want to, I can go to your parent company’s site and use its internal search to get to its official page, or I can read about it on the FAQ page at freecreditreport.com. And while I’m at the FAQ, I can even read about how any US resident has the right to a free credit report each year, without joining Triple Advantage. Clearly, you’re not hiding a thing.

Apart from that, I was hoping we could discuss the ads you’re currently running on the eye of hell — the ones featuring that ironically cheerful troubadour with bad credit, singing to us about his financial difficulties.

Well, I married my dream girl
I married my dream girl
But she didn’t tell me her credit was bad
So now instead of living in a pleasant suburb
We’re living in the basement at her mom and dad’s

Great stuff. I find myself singing that one in the shower all the time.

I’ve got a problem with the other one, though. I believe it’s called “Pirate“. In it, our friend is dressed as a pirate, working in a seafood restaurant, because some hacker stole his identity (and now he’s in there every evening serving chowder and iced tea).

What confuses me is this couplet:

Should have gone with freecreditreport.com
I could have seen this coming at me like an atom bomb

Does that make sense? I mean, is an atom bomb really an exemplar of something one can easily see coming? I don’t think anyone’s ever seen an atom bomb coming at them, actually. For one thing, atom bombs have only come at people a couple of times in history, and both times they fell out of the sky. If anyone had noticed them coming at all, it wouldn’t have been for more than a second before they were incinerated, and since those people were among the first to have an atom bomb coming at them, I don’t suppose that second would have involved them thinking, “Say, that’s an atom bomb coming at me.”

I get that you needed a rhyme for “com,” but why couldn’t you go with something like

• I could have gotten a big loan just like my buddy Tom
• Then I’d complete my collection of the films of Herbert Lom
• I wouldn’t have to borrow money from my dear old mom

Just trying to be helpful.

Remember this?

At about 2:05 into the video, Cronkite says,

From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 PM Central Standard Time — 2:00 Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago.

“President Kennedy died”

I bring this up because I got up this morning, fed the cats, made myself some coffee, booted up the old ‘puter and switched on the eye of hell to see if there was anything in the news. That’s when I heard Heidi Collins, her hair done all wrong today (hey CNN hair people — it doesn’t help to make her head look like a rectangular prism) announce that “Henry Hyde has passed.”

“Henry Hyde has passed”

The moment I heard that, I remembered Cronkite from 44 years ago. Actually, as I remembered it, Cronkite had simply said, “President Kennedy is dead.” (N.B.: I was four months old when Kennedy was assassinated. Obviously, I didn’t remember it from seeing it live. In fact, my mother tells me that when the news of Kennedy’s death was announced, I was in front of our apartment building in Brooklyn, playing on a patch of grass.) But my point remains the same: he gave it to us straight.

Whether that particular phrase was in Collins’ script or she said it of her own accord, it just makes me wonder why journalists on the eye of hell have decided it’s better to feed us euphemisms. Is it their place to soften the blow when they bring us bad news? Not only does “passed” sound softer than “died,” to my ultra-sensitive atheist ears, it’s tied in with passed on to something else — that is, it’s tantamount to Collins announcing, “Henry Hyde is in Heaven, sitting at the right hand of our lord and savior, Jesus Christ.”

Hyperbole? Well, duh. I’d like to think that an anchor on any channel other than CBN would be fired if they took things that far. But the point stands. It’s the news. Give me facts, and don’t dilute them with the kind of language you use around children to keep from upsetting them.

I wrote last year about the way Nissan was going a tad far in product placements on Heroes.

On Heroes, Hiro and his friend are renting a car and Hiro is absolutely insistent that it must be a Nissan Versa. Ostensibly, this is because that’s the car they rent in the comic book that’s predicting his future, but does it actually name the car in the comic, or is Hiro just an expert at picking out the model of any car he sees? Keep in mind that Hiro is from Japan, where if the Versa is even sold, it probably goes by a different model name. And of course, there’s an ad about the car on the show’s home page, and a commercial or two for the car during the broadcast.

They’re at it again, but this time it may be going even further. In the season’s premiere episode, Claire’s father gives her a Nissan Rogue (the fabulous new crossover the commercials for which whore out the Clash). That episode was presented with “limited commercial interruption” by Nissan, which included three Rogue commercials in a row. One of the features they push about the Rogue is its “intelligent key that never has to leave your pocket.”

In episode two, Claire’s car gets stolen. She goes to the copy shop where her father is working and admits what’s happened, taking the blame by indicating that she forgot to lock it. She forgot to lock it? But it has an intelligent key that never has to leave your pocket. I know it does, because the nice people at Nissan told me so. Three times.

I’m predicting that in next week’s episode, we’re going to find out that the car was taken by someone with special abilities. Maybe Sylar’s already found Claire and he took the car for a joyride before slicing her head open. I don’t know. But it can’t simply be that some normal human just opened the door and drove off. They couldn’t. The Rogue has an intelligent key that never has to leave your pocket.

Have you seen this yet? Skip to about 2:30 (around 3:55 on the countdown timer) for the relevant part.

Maher makes some great points, one of which I pointed out early this year when Mitt Romney responded to someone saying he’d never vote for a Mormon.

One of the great things about this great land is we have people of different faiths and different persuasions, and I’m convinced that the nation does need to have people of different faiths, but we need to have a person of faith lead the country.

Translation: you may not like my religion, but at least I’m not an atheist.

A few of Maher’s points don’t quite work for me, however. I don’t know where he got his data, but I don’t think nonbelievers (atheists and agnostics combined) make up 20% of the voting public in the US — or to be more precise, I don’t think enough nonbelievers would admit they are to bring our numbers up to 20%.

But the main problem is that, if as he points out 70% of Americans believe it’s important to have a president with strong religious beliefs, then you simply can’t compare nonbelievers (or “rationalists,” as he prefers to call us) to other minority groups. If a politician makes a point of telling the African American community that s/he’s on their side, that does not automatically equate to not being on the side of white people. You can support women without losing the male vote. There are enough straights who support gay rights that you can come out in favor of at least some semblance of equal rights for the GLBT community without losing the support of everyone else.

But about as close as you can come to supporting nonbelievers is one of those namby pamby statements about how the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion includes the freedom not to have one. You can’t say that there’s nothing wrong with the idea of an atheist president, although we’ve undoubtedly had some. If a candidate dared say they weren’t religious they’d be dead. It was only this year that a single member of the House, Pete Stark of California came out as a nontheist, and that’s after being in office for some 34 years.

Sorry Bill, but supporting us means losing support from the majority. That’s just the way it is.

Remember a few days ago, when I wrote about AT&T’s “decidely stupid” new advertising campaign, but noted that it probably wouldn’t last long, since they would soon be premiering a series of new ads directed by Wes Anderson? Well, I was sort of wrong. The decidedly stupid ads are the new ones by Wes Anderson. I should have guessed by the Brechtian staging that they were his, but since they’re so decidedly stupid, I guess I never imagined he could suck so much.

You can see all five of them (hopefully that’s all there is at Goldenfiddle.

I’m so disappointed in Anderson. I loved the Amex spot he did. I just hope The Darjeeling Limited is better than this nonsense.