Guesswork

A couple of articles about music downloading caught my eye last week. The first was the news that the Songwriters Association of Canada wants somebody - the government, I guess - to tack an additional five bucks a month onto our Internet fees to help pay songwriters and artists for illegally downloaded music. I can […]

Does hair really equal sex? For me, I’m lucky enough to have a full, lustrous head of hair which if my maternal grandfather is any indication, I should expect to carry into senesence and the next life, so I haven’t paid a lot of attention to the Hair Club for Men.
However their […]

My recycling fodder from Shoppers Drug Mart features some funky technology this week - a portable stereo that plays both cassettes and CDs. Now seeing as nobody has sold cassettes for the last decade or so, I’m assuming that someone doing inventory at Shoppers’ came across a warehouse full […]

Kudos to CFTO News for this innovative print ad featuring anchors Ken Shaw and Christine Bentley in a comic tableau which appears to depict a drunk commuter hitting on a ventriloquist’s dummy. The ad can be enjoyed just about everywhere on the TTC.

A cranky blogger at the Guardian has labelled Bob Dylan ” the biggest sellout the world has ever seen” for his recent shilling of the Cadillac Escalade. The ads feature Bob driving through the desert while mumbling an awkward pitch for the eco-disaster that is the Escalade (14 mpg city!) and his own satellite […]

If you want to see how the English language is evolving, consider this recently received spam for the male enhancement product, MEGADIK:
Dolls always whizgiggled at me and even gentlemans did in the municipal john!
Well, now I sriek at them, because I took M_E GA D IK
for 6 months and now my cock is excessively greater […]

It’s rarely a good idea for corporate executives to be pitch-folks for their own companies. Wendy’s Dave Thomas had a homespun manner that let him pull it off, and Christine Magee makes it work for Sleep Country Canada because, lets face it, she’s kind of hot. However, having watched Galen Westons’ first spot […]

The iPhone is finally on the street, and even though it didn’t turn up riding on a cloud with an honour guard of trumpet-blowing cherubs, it still got more hype than any chunk of plastic and silicon, however sleek and sexy, should reasonably expect. Still, even if it’s not a category killer like the iPod […]

Is it just me or is that new iPod commercial with Paul McCartney a little scary?
What with the sixties burial suit, aging face, shuffling gait, and hunched over stance, he really reminds me of a reanimated corpse from the first Night of the Living Dead movie.
The funeral hootenany dance tune and psychedelic animation just […]

Phrasing notwithstanding, the sign above doesn’t indicate the door you should use if you want to mix and mingle with the opposite sex. In the gender-apartheid world of Saudi Arabia, “singles” means single men, and the other seating area, completed walled off from this one, is referred to as the “Family Section”.
Men […]

Ok, I promise not to turn this blog into a series of “look how funny it is that foreigners don’t speak English so good as me” pics, but I really thought this sign had comedic potential. It’s apparently an effective advertising tool too, because my colleague went and got his hair cut here just on […]

Here I am in Saudi Arabia, home of the largest oil fields in the world, watching American satellite TV (which by the way is so insular and self-absorbed that it must appear incredibly obnoxious to locals, but that’s another post) and an ad comes on for Chevron. Basically it’s some pretty pictures with a VO […]

Like many people I use Google all the time, and also like many people, no doubt their data banks in Mountain View are loaded up with dishy blackmailable material about my strange and anti-social search habits. Fortunately, Google do not use this awesome power to rule the world, because as when Frodo humped that […]

The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board here in Ontario is running a program to educate young people about, you guessed it, workplace safety. Basically teens can win prizes like cel phones and music players if they go to the website, register, and fill out a short quiz.
The cool part about the program is the […]

Here’s a spot from Canadian mobile phone company Fido that I like. It opens with a close-up of a young man, pulling out to show him making out with a young woman on a couch. The couple and the furniture morph into domesticity and a baby appears, before another rapid shift where woman and child […]

If you live in the States you’ve probably known about this for years. However, we don’t have Friendly’s restaurants up here north of the border - “cordial but distant” is more the Canadian style - so it was news to me when I learned from Buffalo TV that with each meal there you can get […]

Now, from the industry that brought you the Exxon Valdes and the war in Iraq - clean air! There’s a short ad from the American Petroleum Institute that I guess is intended to be serious, but which verges on self-parody.
The spot features an 18 wheeler rolling picturesquely down an empty highway as a […]

The American Family Association has flame-broiled Burger King for an ad (above) which they say is guilty of “senselessly using adult nudity to appeal to children!”
Now from the somewhat hysterical tone of the call to action, you’d think the ad featured Ron Jeremy waving his junk at the camera and screaming “Home […]

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Fox Network will try to keep ad-averse viewers from ignoring or DVR fast-forwarding through commercials by salting the breaks with short comic clips featuring an animated cab-driver called Oleg. The vignettes will be 8 seconds long, and feature the Borat-esque Olegs’ heavily accented wit and “wisdom” […]

Have ever wanted to say something to someone, but just been too shy? Every wished there was a portable device that would hide your face and change your voice, to make those difficult conversations easier? Well, me neither, but thanks to The Mosaic Show, at least it’s now an option. As the marketing pitch […]