Can't Get Enough Of That Overthinking Commercials

Today at the grocery store, I happened to see a box of Sugar Crisp cereal, with its cartoon bear mascot, Sugar Bear. That bear has been around forever; I remember him trying to sell my generation cereal, now he's back for our kids.

I found him a little confusing as a child. I remember he started off as a normal anthropomorphic bear. Then they introduced the idea that eating Sugar Crisp made him into some sort of super bear. Okay, fine, we have the transforming hero trope. Even we youngsters had been introduced to that through Popeye. In Popeye's case, it was based on eating nutritious food, while Sugar Bear just had some sort of epic sugar high.

But at some point they seemed to forgo the transformation concept, and just had Sugar Bear be super powerful all the time. That seemed like a cheat. Even back then, I could see that the trade-off of this trope is that the hero has powers to defeat his foes, but also had normal human (or ursine) weakness. You can't just discard that and have him be some sort of all-powerful ultrabear who, for some reason, only battles enemies that threaten our cereal supply.

I wasn't sure if I remembered all this correctly - it's not like I actually ate Sugar Crisp. I prefered Cheerios, which only had that bee in the ads. He didn't introduce challenges to story-construction theories; his only problem was being short a couple of limbs. But it hit me: this over-formalized analysis of pop culture that used to just exist in my head, but now I often see it in another place too: Wikipedia. So I looked it up there, and sure enough, it very earnestly explained that in the mid-to-late 1980's, the super bear concept was dropped for a bear that simply had a "vitamin-packed punch."

Also, it turns out that it's only here in Canada that it's still called Sugar Crisp. It's become "Golden Crisp" in the U.S. to avoid association with sugar. But apparantly we don't worry about that. I'm not sure what that says about our respective countries.

Baby You Can Be My Car

I recently saw someone online mention the 80's Saturday morning cartoon Turbo Teen. It was about a kid who could turn into a sports car. I only vaguely remember the show; I can really only recall the weird way his hands warped into tires in the transformation scenes. That and the admirable job the animators did of designing a car that looked a lot like a Firebird but without getting sued.

Anyway, the reminiscer in question brought up a point I hadn't considered: what good is transforming into a car? It doesn't really give you any powers beyond that of a person who merely owns a car. I guess that's true. And it certainly takes me back to my high school days to think that owning a car is the equivalent of a super power.

Then later, I was watching a cheesy technology program from one of the kinda-science cable channels, and they were exploring the implications of a future where you can upload your consciousness to a computer. You could of course, create any sort of robotic body you wanted to occupy. But rather than assume you'd choose a Scarlett Johansson super-cyborg, they mentioned the possibility that you could use any kind of machine - such as a car, like KITT from Knight Rider. The talking head experts didn't think there was much merit in that idea, but the narrator (Lawrence Fishburne, appropriately) thought that would be pretty cool.

So that got me thinking, if I could be a car, what kind would I want to be? Supposedly when Paul Newman did a voice for the original Cars movie, his one demand was that he got to choose what kind of car he played. So I guess he'd already thought about it. But for me, I'm not really sure.

Many people would choose a supercar, but their many limitations would be a problem, like not going over speed bumps. Really, they aren’t that super. I figure that if Superman can do all the things that normal people can do in addition to flying etc, then supercars should be able to do all the things normal cars can do. But no, they’re like, “Wanna see me fly? Okay, carry me over to the window.”

I think you'd want to be a car that has the widest range of abilities, rather than incredible abilities in just one area.

So here are some ideas:

• Subaru WRX STI - a souped-up compact that's the prototypical multiple-ability car. And it's always seemed like the automotive equivalent of the 98 pound weakling who took the Charles Atlas course and is now back for revenge. But at the same time, its many wings and vents look like someone trying too hard to be cool. I suspect it would be like someone walking around in a cloud of Axe body spray.
• BMW 7 Series - great all-around cars, but being a BMW would be like being trapped in Tommy Hilfiger clothes that you can never take off.
• Mercedes Benz S-Class - as above, but with Ralph Lauren.
• Any truck - again, useful, but people would make assumptions about you. And let's face it, I'd go off road about as much as your average truck driver.
• Camaro- the closest thing today to the Firebird that was the basis for KITT. But I'd want to be a vehicle that gets good mileage, otherwise it would be like being hungry all the time.
• Tesla - certainly capable cars, and they’re likely to be the first cars with enough computing power for you to download your consciousness. The problem is the recharging. If you’re driving a car, you don’t mind plugging it in for hours when you aren’t using it. But that’s really inconvenient for the car - it’s stuck in the garage, and you know you’re going to get a party invite just after you plug in.
• Mazda MX-5 Miata - It’s famously the answer for everything, but I don’t think it works here. It would be fun to be a sporty, good-looking little car, but you’d have to keep explaining to everyone else that it’s okay that you only have a little four cylinder, no I don’t mind not being able to go as fast as you, yes I’m confident in my masculinity. You’d probably just end up as a loner, hanging out with Honda CRX’s and Lotus Elises because they’re the only ones that get you.
• Volvo - as the best at surviving crashes, they'd be the Wolverines of the automotive world. That would be worth being the dorky one.

Some Women Just Want To Watch The Fuel Burn

This Esso commercial has been running a lot, where the guy wonders what the cleaning ingredients are, and the scientists pop out of nowhere to tell him. Apparently it's a Mobil ad in the U.S. (all part of the ExxonMobil empire.)

I'm worried about the detergent #2 scientist.  She seems to have an enthusiasm for her work that no one -  not even her oddball colleagues - can match.  It seems that she's destined to be disappointed that others don't share her love of internal combustion cleanliness.  I see her shaking her fist in the air late one night at the Esso lab, saying "I'll show them the importance of removing deposits from fuel injectors!"

And I'm dreading what she'll do next.  We know that she's a master of disguise, since she was she was also detergent #1 developer.  And that leads to the next problem: she's obviously a chemistry genius, since she developed two fuel additives in the time everyone else needed to develop just one.  What I'm getting at is, she just has to steal the flying chair from the Marker Molecules guy and she'll have everything she needs to be a supervillan.

I'm not sure what sort of name she'd choose.  The Solvent? Dr. Fluid? Ms. Clean?  I think she'll have to depend on some sort of lab accident to create a persona for her.

Lock Around The Clock

They're refurbishing some of the apartments in my building right now, and today someone arrived to deliver supplies to one of those rooms.  Unfortunately, the delivery guy got the number wrong, and tried putting them in my apartment instead.  Of course, he figured out something was wrong when he tried to open my door and found that it was locked.  But it was an unsettling surprise to me to suddenly hear someone try opening the door without knocking first.

It's a good thing I remembered to lock the door, or it would have been more embarrassing.  Usually I do lock it, but sometimes glance at the door and notice that it's unlocked.  That makes me wonder, just how often does it really make a difference to lock it?  No, I'm not bragging about living in a nice neighbourhood where you don't have to lock the door.  I'm just marvelling at how society works.

Say I go away for a week: how likely is it that someone will actually try my door to see if it is locked?  Based on how many people have actually tried it while I'm here, I'd say it's likely that I could leave the door unlocked for that whole vacation, and no one would come in.  Again, it's not because everyone in the world is honest; it's because we expect doors to be locked.  So we don't actually have to lock our doors, but that's only because we always lock our doors.

Subterranean Home: Sick, Alien

You know what would be a good idea: double basements.  That is, you have a basement that's twice as deep, so you have two floors underground.  I know it sounds crazy, but think of the benefits: you have more room in your house without compromising the space in your yard.  You have free insulation.  The ground moderates the temperature of the interior.  But best of all, it is the embodiment of the suburban dream: you live near your neighbours, yet you can also get far, far away from them.

I know, you don't like the idea of living below ground without windows.  Well, you don't really need windows: it's not like the view really changes in suburbia. Besides, in our modern world, you probably aren't looking up from your screens very often anyway, so who needs to look outside. And here in Canada, you'll only be missing out on the twelve days a year that the temperature is right for opening the windows.

And in addition to you not needing to look outside, people outside don't need to look at your house.  Most suburban houses are either small-and-simple, or big-and-ugly. Putting most of the girth underground saves you from having to come up with one decoration after another.  You have enough exposed house to express your sense of style, but you don't feel the need to add gratuitous arches and columns.

So I went googling the idea, but I found that my radical idea was a little too advanced for our timid development industry, saying that it's "too expensive," "probably illegal," and "you'll die from radon." But there was some precedent of it in Britain. It makes sense there, since space is at a premium, and rules often restrict your ability to add on to existing buildings. So if you want to have a big house, but you also want to live in London, building down might be your only choice.

I think that would be ideal: you're living in the city, but you can still have a quiet getaway deep in the earth. So that's what I'll do if I ever make billions.  That, or I'll build a mansion in the suburbs that will be disguised as a normal house.  There'll be a huge basement that takes up the entire property, but only a normal-sized house sticking up above ground, with no indication of anything unusual. The garage will have an elevator down to my car collection. And I'll make a deal with the developer to build my house before anyone else in the subdivision moves in, so no one will know there's anything unusual about it.

Rub-A-Dub-Dub

What's the deal with the new-bathtub-over-the-old-one concept? I mean, I understand the concept, and it's actually pretty clever. It's just that they seem to be selling it pretty hard. You see the ads on TV, in newspapers, even kiosks at the mall. I'm just suspicious of something they have to work so hard to sell. And also the fact that they have to keep explaining it. I mean, I rent, so I'm not in the market for such things, yet I've picked it up the concept just by osmosis.

And is it just me, or is the concept a little lazy? Don't take the old thing out, just cover it up. If that's such a good idea, why hasn't it been extended to other things? You could easily cover sinks the same way. And if there were anything in the bathroom that you'd just throw up your hands and say 'cover it over, I don't want to deal with it,' it would be the toilet. Surely they could have a new toilet they could just drop over the existing one. Heck, apply this to entire houses: Don't rebuild, just put a newer house inside the old one.

Of course, that new house would have to be smaller, or at least have smaller rooms. But that brings up the question of the bath fitter endgame. After a few generations of covering up our inconvenient tubs, each time making them a little smaller. we'll be stuck with these big, chunky bathtubs, which are too narrow for us to fit in. So we'll all have to lose weight. But why struggle to build a new body when you can just put a new one over your old one.