Spring Potpourri

 Before we start the A to Z Challenge tomorrow, some random thoughts I don't feel like making into full blog entries.

Last month I talked about an online pyramid scheme where the great strategy to get free traffic was to write a blog--like I've been doing for 11 years.  Reinforcing how pointless it is to start a blog right now, I was looking at the "Blogs of Interest" linked to on Tony Laplume's blog and noticed of the 16 blogs listed, 10 of them (5/8 for those who can do fractions) were either inactive for over a year or completely out of service.  Besides proving that Laplume needs to edit the blogs he links to, it shows that blogging is not very hot anymore.  Starting a blog in 2021 thinking you're going to get a lot of traffic is about as smart of a business decision as opening a video store.

Something I mentioned on Facebook already is there's this one online casino advertising on Pluto TV (and probably other places) that keeps using the slogan "Online Casino is in Good Hands."  Every time I hear or see this it's like nails on the chalkboard.  It's like when I get some product off Amazon and the lame Chinese company, instead of hiring a native English speaker to write their manual, just wrote it in Mandarin and Google translated it so there are all these grammatical errors like, "When alarm is set, it will sounds for one full minute..."  But at least those crappy user manuals have an excuse.  What excuse does a casino site in America have for having a clearly faulty slogan? 

The most annoying thing is how sloppy it is.  Didn't anyone bother to spellcheck the slogan in a browser?  Don't they even know basic English grammar?  Not the people who wrote it?  Who produced it?  Not the company's marketing department?  No one noticed this?  It's so pathetic.  If that's how shoddy you are in your advertising, why should I waste money on your site versus the dozen others being advertised?  It bugs me as bad as "authors" who post books on Amazon with obvious typos in the title.  Geez, I spend more time editing these blog entries than apparently that casino site does with their advertising.

There are a couple of other ads I've seen that piss me off.  Like this one for Progressive where this guy is trying to get people to not be like their parents.  First the whole concept of that seems pretty idiotic.  If you don't want to be like your parents then does that mean your parents are terrible people?  Maybe the whole reason that people become like their parents as they get older is that they mature enough to realize there are a lot more important things than being cool and that their parents weren't so bad after all.  

But the part that really annoys me is a guy is reading a book and the teacher says he can't read it because it's a book about submarines and his dad reads books about submarines.  WTF?!  I can't like things because my dad likes them?  If that were true I'd never like Star Trek or most other sci-fi because my dad liked them.  The whole idea that you can't like something because your parents do is so flawed and small-minded.  If your dad is an English professor who reads Shakespeare does that mean you can't read Shakespeare?  

Sure there are some behaviors about your parents or grandparents you might not want to emulate (like casual racism or sexism) but the idea you can't like the same books as them is completely moronic.  That's really throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Another commercial that irritates me is this one Amazon one where people are wowed by the deals they find.  The parts that bug me are when they show two people walking with masks on and they can't understand each other.  One is like, "What a great price!" And the other is like, "What?"  Because everyone knows you can't understand someone right next to you when you're wearing masks.  That strip of cotton over your mouth makes you completely unintelligible to anyone near you!  Gee, Amazon, thanks for promoting unrealistic stereotypes and denigrating public safety precautions.  Idiots.  

Those two are really examples of bad jokes someone at whatever ad agency thought was funny but they really aren't.  I don't want to be a buzzkill but that shit just isn't funny.  Really that whole Progressive campaign is just dumb as shit.  I guess it makes sense if you're marketing your insurance to teenagers who are so scared about not being cool.  The Amazon one was probably written by some red state Trump-supporting asshole.  I wrote a blog entry once about how sometimes comedy ends up being a weapon against our best interests and these seem like more good examples of that.

Anyway, tomorrow the A to Z Challenge begins!  Not that Phantom Readers will care.