Siri Ads are Majorly Annoying

I don't get the second "Siri" ad.  I don't know who the old guy is, or why the "two iphones walk into a bar"joke is funny, and I can't understand what they're saying when they talk about  restaurants serving something that starts with an L.  The intended audience isn't sophisticated early adopters - they've had iphones for years.  People understanding the references in this ad do not need to be convinced to buy iphones.  

The first "Siri" ad, with Zooey Deschanel, is better. She's cute, the music is cute, and it sort of makes you think it might be fun to have Siri around.  The problem is the idea of having tomato soup delivered.  Who does this, when you can just open a can? People too good to eat canned soup already have iphones. You've got to live in a metro area to even have the option of getting soup delivered. And why tomato soup?  Why not something more interesting, like tiramisu?  She could be sick and want chicken soup delivered (like Sheldon in "The Big Bang Theory"), but she's not sick, she just doesn't want to go out. 

These ads are for wannabes, pathetic strivers for coolness who know all the cultural referents and want desperately to be trendy.  If they live in NYC they're sharing a tiny apartment with lots of roommates, if they're living in L.A. they've got a bigger place with fewer roommates but they're still waiting tables and selling their souls and/or bodies in some kind of success fantasy.  If they could afford iphones they'd have them already, so the only purpose of these ads is to try to make them buy something they can't afford.  

Surely, you say, advertising has a long tradition of trying to make people buy things they can't afford.  True, but the subset of people who can't afford iphones is vastly greater than the subset of people who wish they lived in New York and were able to have tomato soup delivered.  I'm thinking something along the lines of those famous Miller Lite ads would be more effective. 

Saving the World

Why is everyone disappointed because President Obama hasn't been able to save the world?  Why did they expect him to?  He may have promised the moon in campaign rhetoric, but you have to do that to be elected.  Remember Walter Mondale, anyone?  I'm extremely happy that we have Obama in the White House, and not John McCain, or, God forbid, Sarah Palin. 

The White Rolls-Royce Stretch Limousine

Saturday night a white Rolls-Royce stretch limo was in the right lane when I was in the left.  It was a beautiful thing. Gleaming white, dark windows, spare tire cover on the trunk, emblem on the hood.  You have to wonder who is inside when you see a car like that.  Who could be worthy?  I wanted to think it was a celebrity who'd come from a performance at the Arena, going to the airport, but it was too early in the evening.  More probably some tacky couple was on their way to the Woodlands to dance and get drunk. 

Some years ago I saw a creamy brown Rolls on the Harveys Lake road.  The license plate had something to do with Andy Warhol, who'd already been dead a long time. I've wondered ever since who owned that car. 

Evil Serial Killers

Saturday at Barnes & Noble on the bargain table I saw a book called "Evil Serial Killers," and thought, "as opposed to all those good serial killers out there?"  The only supposedly good one is Dexter, a fictional character on HBO.  Is the author making a distinction between evil killers and mentally ill killers?  Couldn't a case be made that all serial killers are both evil and mentally ill?  Maybe evil and crazy are the same thing.  Nevertheless the word "evil" in that book title is seriously redundant. 

Plastic Containers and Paranoia

There is no uniformity among the makers of plastic containers so that the lids of one container will fit a container made by a different company.  Two plastic sandwich-size containers, to the untutored eye, look exactly the same.  Yet the lid to one is, in some subtle way, the wrong size for the other. 

Competition cannot explain this.  It is pure chance which containers I buy the next time I shop.  I'll probably end up with a third kind that doesn't match the other two.  And I'm certainly not going to bring the lids of the containers I have at home with me.  If I were that organized I wouldn't have this problem and wouldn't have time to write about it.  I'd be spending hours obsessing over plastic containers, much as I am now. 

What can explain this?  The logical answer is that the containers are not made by different companies, but by the same corporation under different names.  It's an evil corporate plot designed to make us buy more containers, and blame ourselves for not remembering which kind we already have.  It's a devious monopoly designed to take advantage of the thousands, nay millions, of tiny ways a lid may differ from its accompanying bottom.  Where are the anti-monopoly laws?  Where is the Sherman Anti-Trust Act? 

Blue Dress Dream

Last night I dreamed I was looking at the side of a blue dress with a narrow black sash, dangling from the waist, not tied.  It was not an attractive dress, rather cheap-looking jersey, in a blue similar to the "Save Now" shade at the bottom of this posting window.  It would not have looked good on me. 

Ulysses Chapter 3

I've been reading the Gifford annotations for Chapter 3  - which I did read first - and find an alarming number of theological references, Thomas Aquinas and Arius, among others.  Somehow just reading the chapter it did not seem so religiously oriented.  So many people, for so many hundreds of years, have argued over how the Christian god is divided up, which parts are more divine than others, which came first and from where.  Mobs ran amuk over these questions and people were burned at the stake. 

Yet I think if I lived back then - I imagine myself as an artisan, skilled in some sort of handworking - I would not have cared anymore than I do now.  I think it was all political, really, a question of who you felt more personally comfortable with as your bishop, for example.  Many questions in Congress are equally trivial yet arouse such emotion.  It was a struggle for power back then, as it is now, and all that fruitless speculation about the nature of the Holy Ghost was just an excuse to take sides.