Another Open Letter

So I love the AFLAC duck commercials; they are the best. I hate advertisers, but this series is so cute, it's the best. Well, some poultry rights people have some protest against it, like it negatively portrays a duck or abuses it or whatever. It was at http://www.upc-online.org/alerts/020304aflac_duck.html

Supposedly ducks are being degraded. So I wrote the head honcho the following:


I understand your concern and humane foresight for the portrayal of a duck being abused, but the notion of protesting AFLAC into changing the nature of their duck's portrayal is illogical at best. Why is this a quest of yours, when, as an animal rights conscious citizen, I see so many other injustices in today's society, particularly with poultry, that you waste time with a campaign that I find amusing, creative, and clearly without abuse to a live duck? I despise advertising and their nefarious practices but found the AFLAC duck to be a breath of fresh air and incredibly cartoonish in nature - and most importantly, harmless.
As a supporter of animal rights, there are limits to where protests and contention must extend. When those limits are breached, such activists and supporters of animal rights merely appear overzealous and idiotic with oversensitive protests that carry little effect or gravity in the scope of greater efforts. I sincerely applaud AFLAC for their commercials, as they are some of the few that amuse me, and clearly no live animal is being harmed. Firing shots at this campaign is an embarrassing gesture of oversensitivity and I, as others that have heard of this, strongly recommend you rescind the complaints and seek the myriad other injustices and abuses that exist in the food industry, etc, rather than a mere portrayal. Any such campaign against a comedic character merely strips away credit and respect from your cause, I hope you see that. I am not against your goals, merely pointing out a mistake in logic.

You are welcome to publish my thoughts, despite their dissention. As stated, I support your general cause strongly, but find this protest a bit of a joke and thought better of you to redirect efforts elsewhere. Is there a protest against Daffy Duck being shot up by Elmer Fudd a future campaign? Common Sense.
Sincerely,
Mike Caldwell

E-Virgin.com

With this zany internet, an infinite number of channels are at our disposal for human abuse and exploitation. We invent the camera? Cameras can produce porn. We invent the television? TV can show porn. We invent the telegraph, and people start having telegraph sex. Then phone sex. People would play chess by mail. I wonder if there was ever postal sex? Talk about needing to last a while. But love letters and the like have sufficed in their day. And the girl could spray a wisp of perfume onto the paper, and the guy could fart onto his. So cute and appealing to the many senses. Just remember, there's a real, legitimate postal rule in the Domestic Mail Manual (DMM as it were) that specifically states that if mailing live scorpions, you must write "LIVE SCORPIONS" on the box. Remember that.

As so many means for communicating love and romance have developed, the logical successor to the old "dating service" concept would be the likes of match.com or eHarmony.com. Thankfully match.com's marketing blitz has faded, but eHarmony, and this Neil Clark Warren bozo, holy hell is it getting tiring. Based on the "success stories" I've seen, the slogan should be "where nerdy guys can find girls with fat asses". And the whole concept is bogus anyway - as people are matched on 30 different dimensions. Yeah, but remember that it such a system is still based on that person's self evaluation; about as subjective as possible. This near flawless matching system and evaluation is only as reliable as the lunatics which submit them. Nobody's going to be honest with themselves and fill this evaluation out with the famous 30 dimensions:

"Well, let's see, I'm an asshole - check, I want a big fat person,
check. I like fighting, crime, laziness and anger, check. Hey now
I'll turn this gem into the soulmate-o-matic and grab my princess!"

That Neil guy on all the eHarmony commercials, grumble. Hey, I'm all excited if his site brings people together and they find happiness with this method. But ol' Neil started characterizing the wondrous, amorphous concept of love as a chemical formula; mix some compatibility with chemistry and blammo. It isn't quite so simple, and with the understandable tendency for all participants of such dating sites to subtly misrepresent themselves in favor of a better portrayal, rather than a sanguine, accurate depiction, drives dating "systems" into the flaws of misrepresentation that led these isolated souls to the web in the first place. Such supposedly innovative sites like eHarmony will forever waste obdurate, yet innovative, scientific "logic" on the hasty frameworks of inaccurate, poorly sketched personality profiles, drafted by all who sought to camouflage their flaws within a supposedly multidimensional autobiographical profile.

With my countless essays on romantic injustice and relationship imbalances, it may appear that I suffer from some related pang of unrequited love. In a sense, that impetous might be true, but in truth, it's a combination of common sense and the suffering of those around me which angers me and drives me to comment on our innate zest to find a perfect partner with which to fill egos, build security, and erect an indirect sense of fulfillment. The desperation and hurried approach to finding one's soulmate is exactly what creates embitterment, dating services, and most of all, the constantly rising propensity toward divorce. Finding that one perfect partner is not to be hastily derived, calculated, or arranged. It might happen or might not. Some people are perfectly happy eliminating that goal from their existence, and quite happily pursue a path of independence and self-sufficiency. More power to them.

The point is simple; love is an aspect of fate and otherwordly destiny that transcends any type of human wisdom or scientific processing. Success stories may exist, but meeting a true love will happen as a serendipitous aspect to life's journey, not from a fiendish set of calculated maneuvers through a scientific dating service or similar system. The eHarmony slogan touts the ability to assess compatibility, and that word is so tasteless and harsh - people are not pieces of computer equipment. True emotion, fulfillment, and altruistic peace has so little to do with the objective, emotionless harshness of a statistically crude personality rating system - I'm surprised so many people accept faith in this ironic application of science to such an amorphously soft, mysterious, spiritual concept as true love. While many will find true love and happiness by meeting their beloved in a crude setting like a dating service, I can't see how the concept could ever be true to the heart and soul, as the spirit defies numbers and statistics, and always will surpass these finite inventions of the finite, narrow human mind.

TV and other thoughts

Why do old people keep talking about how things were so much simpler "way back when..."? How simple can the old farts have it now? They get up at 4am, wait for the paper, wait more the paper, get the paper, read the paper, read the paper again, walk to the barber shop/hair salon, then go to bed at 4pm. Pretty tricky stuff, Emil.

I'm very happy the term "surf" has been dropped from associated verbage involving visiting various web sites. Disgusting term, conjured in a moronic context.

The web is 15 years old. It's gone through a "too much porn" phase, then the "dot com" era, then the "everything is a virus" era. But the whole thing wasn't a brilliant invention, it was a concept that needed high speed networking. And the internet didn't change the world, it just fattened us.

What's with these radio commercials that pretend to be a local show, but the commercial portrays "radio people" talking passionately about some garbage lineup on ABC/NBC? Networks have finally pulled back and realized they have no creativity or originality, so they gave us all those painful reality shows. I only watch sports nowadays.

Ah sports. Every swing, punt, injury, etc is sponsored. It's the Allstate Fatal Stock Car Crash of the Week! Thanks. Sign me up.

Speaking of sports, the Super Bowl is done. This whole "holiday" is insane. The pre-game show was 5 hours long. Please. Get a life.

When is Wilfred Brimley just going to die? The guy is just a bitter, fat, useless spokesman for diabetes and old people crap, and he always yells at the viewer through the television. DIE.

Let's just get it over with and take over all the oil wells in Iraq. Maybe we can get rich or something. Otherwise, bail out of there. And don't bother threateninc Iran, that bunch belongs on the moon.

Quizno's uses this stupid talking baby all the time for its ad campaign. It's not cute, and not funny. Enough. I hate babies in advertising.

I LOVE the Vonage commercials where all this crazy stuff is going on in the background as the true spokesperson gives his pitch. Brilliant. Speaking of brilliant, the Guiness guys crack me up.

When did McDonald's commercials shift to only using Ebonics for its primary language? It's 100% Afro-centric and that's fine. Are they saying that the others have figured out how unhealthy the food might be? Fair enough. Just slam out those McRibs to those uninitiated hambones...

Geico just shot themselves in the foot by employing this new, hideously annoying gecko character, straight out of England. While lecturing some tiresome script to a "real" gecko, the genius advertisers decided to employ painfully British vernacular like "bloke" and "chips" and otherwise turn the spokes-gecko into an annoying, indiscernable waste of time. Click. If they haven't figured out that these commercials are impossible to understand, they deserve the profit loss. AFLAC....

Moving along, check out the Food Network. The show "30 minute meals" stars Rachael Ray, an annoying, bubbly cutie that we'd either lust for, or stab. Drink a shot of Tequila every time she uses the word "flavor". You'll be wasted by the ten minute mark. Fun drinking game. And while I'm at it, the Food network runs so many commercials, it smells of old Match Game episodes. It's like 50/50 show/commercial ratio. I am not going to watch your pathetic clientele to see if Emeril made more veal. Get off your high horse, Food Network, show some programming every once in a while.

I will never eat at Burger King as long as that Burger King guy is on commercials. They are already on a big downslide...I'm afraid to eat there now, after the slime I ingested last time. Just go out of business so your existing structures can convert into a Popeye's as usual. It's your own fault you have no clue about marketing. G'nite, has-beens.

I hate how Nike exploited Jordan's legacy, but the most recent ad campaign, in which kids mimic his past achievements, is gorgeous and emotional. It makes one realize how incredible his career had been, so hats off.

Nobody is watching the Olympics. Nobody.

Fuck Sports Illustrated for their opportunistic commercials jumping on the latest team to win something, and peddle their half-assed "collectors edition" book commemorating the team's achievements. Congratulations [CHICAGO WHITE SOX] for winning the [WORLD SERIES]. Can you be more superficial and greedy? Fuck yourselves.

I actually like American Idol. Simon Cowell isn't evil, just honest. It's nice to see people with heads far too big be deflated back to earth. An interesting show and for all his arrogant affect, Cowell deserves accolades.

Bobby Knight's reality show will be aired on ESPN shortly. He coached teams very well. But addressing him now... Hey - you're a basketball coach. You push your kids to prospective greatness (except your pathetic seasons at Texas Tech lately). I saw you in an interview with the show "Cold Pizza" promoting your show on the same network and you were a contentious prick to the woman interviewing you. She deserved no such treatment, and you eventually walked away from the camera like a moron. Hey, dickhead. You can be thick-headed, driven, and harsh in the venue of coaching malleable recruits, but outside of those bounds, you might consider civility as an option, because not everyone is a player under your regimented program. Treat your kids like crap all you want, but when you treat people (even media people) with snotty, demeaning responses and unwarranted attitude, you lose every remaining drop of respect left in my, and others, tank. It helps me conclude that you are a misanthropic, self-centered asshole that I'd just as soon see retire and disappear to a miserable, lonely death, because you have no redeeming qualities as a person. Go fuck yourself, Knight; go abuse your players and enjoy the sadism, because you are not a good person. Can't wait until you're dead.