One Perspective On Advertising

At some sports events - particularly in Europe - they have ads painted on the grass in perspective so that from the camera's point of view they’ll look like a sign standing up.  However, when seen from another angle - like that of most of the fans - the sign is elongated to the point of illegibility.  Watching today's FA Cup, I noticed they took this a bit further and had a Budweiser ad that appeared like a curved beer can label.  Just think, somebody actually used a computer program to lay out what that would look like.  Pity it's all for the futile effort of trying to get British soccer fans to drink American beer.

Right after that game, I switched to the Blue Jays game.  And they have their own annoying turf ads. This season the broadcasters have taken to superimposing ads on the grass near the base coaches boxes.  You can often see an ad for Honda or Orange Julius with the proper perspective to look like it's painted on the ground.

It only just hit me that these two trends are contradictory:  one group are making ads painted on the grass to look like they're superimposed over the grass, but another group are trying to make ads superimposed over the grass look like they're actually painted on the grass.  That's how screwed-up humanity is: even our ads are trying to be something they're not.

Apology for Non-Symmetry

I'm going to have to admit it: my face isn't quite symmetrical.  Yes, the bridge of my nose is a little off-centre.  It's not something that bothers me too much: look closely and you'll see that lots of people have face bits that don't line up.

What does bother me is the question of how this happened.  If you find that, say, a carrot has a bend in it, you assume that it was growing straight, but something intervened.  It hit a rock, or some bug took a bite out of it and that curved it's growth in that direction.  So how do you explain my nose? 

It hasn't been broken or anything; have I just slept on one side more often than the other and gravity has done this?  Then how come my whole body isn't slanted?  Maybe it started much earlier:  as an embryo, one stem cell blew out at the wrong time, and I've been growing off-centre ever since.

Generation One-After-That

I've learned that there are some things in life that never change. One of them is Pepsi.  Every generation they try to position themselves as the edgy soft drink, and they always do it by aligning themselves with pop stars that are already household names.

Take this new Beyonce ad.  Yes, I know it's been on for a few weeks; but given how long they'll be playing an ad that expensive, it's still near the beginning of its lifetime.

Really, I don't think the ad works.  And not just because of the blank stare she gives that's supposed to convey surprise at seeing past versions of herself in the mirror.  It's supposed to be some great act of personal courage to embrace these spectres of her past career.  But they don't really seem that far in the past.  Yes, I know, I'm not their target market, and to the people that ad is aimed at - young people who still find Beyonce edgy - something from a couple of years ago seems ancient. 

But in today's post-Madonna pop world, a constantly morphing look is pretty much the minimum for a female pop star.  I mean, they are expected to change their look several times in a concert, never mind a career.  So embracing your look of three wardrobe changes ago doesn't mean much.  Now if Alanis Morrisette had done an ad like this circa 1995, that would have been impressive.

The Mind Boggles

Things I've learned during my addiction to the Boggle app:

• Someone decided it should not accept dirty words, but should still put them in the list of words you missed.  This ends up causing profanity than it prevents.
• I look up definitions of the obscure short words the game accepts, just so that I’ll feel less guilty using them to run up my score.  Yet I can never remember what they mean no matter how many times I look them up.
• When they were creating Boggle back in the sixties or whenever, at some point they asked, "should we let them count plurals as separate words."  I'm thinking they have regretted their decision ever since.
• Frustration sets in when you realize you'd be more successful if you just frantically entered random combinations of letters.
• When you try to start all your apps by shaking your tablet, you've been playing too much.
• Frustration gets worse when you can think up words that you know are real but the game won't accept (pho? trew? eid?)

You Looking At Me Looking At You

The other day I was stopped at a red light, when a cyclist whipped around the corner on the other side of the street.  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that he was bald (not unusual) not balding, but with no hair at all (also not unusual) and seemed to even be lacking eyebrows (more unusual.)  So I turned to look, to see if my peripheral perception had been correct.  Of course, that's the point he looked my way and saw me looking at him.

So that made me feel bad.  Whether he's fighting cancer, or has some other medical condition, he's surely used to - and sick of - people staring at him.  I swear I wasn't staring, but still, from his perspective I was yet another person making him feel like he's on display.

I'm sure I'm not alone in having experienced this before: generally I'm not going to stare at someone, that's impolite.  But if a person has some easily-seen physical anomaly, you end up unthinkingly looking their way as soon as you encounter them.  And then you force yourself not to look, and I'm sure it's equally obvious to them that you are pointedly not looking at them.  I hope that people in that position would understand that seeing people looking their way is not necessarily the result of a person consciously treating them as a spectacle, but I'm sure it's easy to lump us in with people who just don't care.

Steel Wheels

What's the deal with all the cars I keep seeing without hubcaps?  I hope people aren't removing them thinking that they're saving gas by removing weight or something.  Or maybe it's a statement in favour of a practical aesthetic over unnecessary decoration.  When you think about it, thin plastic hubcaps are as useless as vinyl roofs.  More likely, they're intimidated by the giant alloy wheels you see on cars with half-inch-think tires.

The other possibility is that people are stealing hubcaps, and we're just seeing the victims driving around with bare-steel wheels.  Though that wouldn't make much sense: they've stolen so many hubcaps, that there are lots of cars driving around without hubcaps, so people like me think its a trend, so we don't want to buy hubcaps, so the hubcap thieves are stuck with thousands of hubcaps they can't sell.

Whichever explanation is correct, it's embarrassing that my car still has its hubcaps: Either I'm out of style for keeping them on the car, or the hubcap thieves think mine aren't worth stealing.

Neighbourhood #3

This weekend I had to survive a number of lengthy power outages in Woodstock.  It was quite a strange experience: I was watching Doctor Who, and just as the Doctor was about to reboot the Tardis and fix the rift in the space-time continuum, the power went out.  It took me a second to realize that the complete darkness wasn't part of the show.  It was like a moment of extra realism that would put to shame that special smell-o-vision version of Iron Man 3 that they're doing in Japan.

I looked on the Woodstock Hydro web page for an explanation.  They didn't any information on what was currently happening, which is another example of local organizations not using the web to send useful information, as I mentioned previously.  Or they couldn't update it because their power was out.  But they did have an explanation the next day.  I present it to you now without comment: