Whose Faulty Vision

Drove my Chevy Where?

This is one of those things music fans and ad people love to notice: when a song is used in an ad with the lyrics carefully trimmed. Viz. the Windows ad that used the Rolling Stones song “Start Me Up” and cut out before the very appropriate line “You make a grown man cry”, or the time Philips used the Beatles song “Getting Better” and left out the part about “Can’t get much worse”.

Anyway, here’s a new one: I just saw a Chevy ad that included the lines from “American Pie”, “Drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry.” But they had to repeat “Drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry” a few times, because if they had continued on through the song, they would have ended the ad on “This’ll be the day that I die.”

Quote of the Whenever

Quote of the Whenever:

“What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

-Milton Friedman

Family Feud Clip

This clip from “Family Feud” is hilarious. Man, I miss the Game Show Network.

Quote of the Whenever

Quote of the Whenever:

“It’s encouraging to know the makers of Soylent Green would be forced by today’s FDA guidelines to include the phrase “Ingredients: People” in the nutritional disclosure. However, I sense most shoppers would just see “Now with no trans fats!” splashed on the front and drop a few cans in their carts anyway.”

-Brad Simanek

I’m a “Future Leader”, Apparently

So I got this invitation in inter-office mail last week, addressed to a horrible mangling of my name, inviting me to some kind of company training exercise. The first session was tonight. It turns out that all of us who were there were young agency employees who were nominated by our bosses because they feel that we have the potential to be the future leaders of the company, eventually, down the line.

So they’re having us do a huge, multi-month, interdisciplinary training program, in which we’ll learn from the current leaders of the company and eventually put together pseudo-new business pitches to present to those same leaders. (Including the CEO of the global agency.) The winners of the pseudo-pitch will get some unspecified reward.

It’ll be a lot of work, but I expect I’ll learn a lot in the process, and it’s certainly flattering to have been chosen.

Anti-spam Trick

I just added a filter that I think will stem the flood of spam comments on my blog. (You haven’t seen any of them, because I deleted them before they were visible to readers, but I’ve been having to deal with about a dozen of them a day.) I don’t think it will stop any legitimate comments, but if you try to post a comment and it doesn’t go through, drop me an e-mail.

Remaking “The Hitcher”

When I saw a trailer for the remake of “The Hitcher”, my initial reaction was disdain: it wasn’t that good a movie the first time, why remake it? But thinking about it, the premise is sound, so perhaps the new team did something interesting with it. As I recall (and I saw the movie once in high school, so my memory may be faulty), the premise was: a dude picks up a hitchhiker. The hitchhiker turns out to be a psychopath. The dude ditches the hitchhiker, but the hitchhiker follows him around, killing people and making it look like the dude was responsible. So not only is the dude being followed around by a serial killer, but he can’t even go to the police, because they think he’s the serial killer.

If I were doing the remake, I’d focus on that wedge that the guy’s in, that paranoid sensation as both sides seem to be closing in on him. And I’d at least consider changing the ending, so that it turns out that the dude really is the serial killer: the hitchhiker is just a figment of his imagination, a character that he’s created to justify his heinous crimes. Yeah, it’s been done (by Steven King, among others), but I don’t think it’s played out just yet.