Dread Pirate Alice

News Item

A newspaper in Switzerland ran a Gucci ad that cost the equivalent of $50,000 here in the US. Yah, so… an ad in the Tribune is pretty darned close to that cost, depending on the advertiser.

Well this ad, in the Switzerland paper wasn’t ordered by Gucci

Some dude, took a picture of himself and put the Gucci logo and a bottle of perfume in there and called the paper and placed the ad. He told the paper to bill Gucci directly for the ad and then he sent them the file. They ran it. He doesn’t work for Gucci, or their agency. The paper can’t find him either, even though they’ve got a naked picture of him. They know what he looks like, why can’t they find him?

See how easy it is to become a Gucci model! See how easy it is to get newspapers to run ads that aren’t real. Dude, you don’t even have to work in advertising to get a paper to run an ad and bill someone else. Perfect.

Watchin’ the Awards

I just want to point out that the very best way to watch the Oscars is to record it and then watch it later. That way, you can fast forward over all the lame crap they put in there that just wastes time and get to the meat, who won what. Yesterday we had crappy snowy, icy, weather and our Dish went out for all channels except 11, 56, 20, and 32. (the first 3 are PBS the last one is FOX). So I was worried I’d be looking up all the winners this morning to tally the Oscar Pool I was in control of. Well, I slept-ish on the couch for a while and then watched a previously recorded episode of Ace of Cakes and then viola! All channels were back. But by that point Barbara Walters’ special was over and they were in the last 10 minutes of walking the red carpet and we had decided to watch a movie. So I hit record, figuring I wont miss much anyway. And I was right. The darned show was more than an hour overtime!

I was like 2 hours behind and caught up to them, fast forwarding through everything, within 10 minutes. The Oscars put too much extra lame crap in to their show. There’s only 24 awards given out at the Oscars. Why should it take 5 hours to give away 24 awards? Get rid of the lame chatter of the presenters, get rid of the excessive “look how cool we are” montages, get rid of all the singing! Give out the original song award and then let ONLY THE WINNER SING! I don’t need to hear every single nominated song…I only need to hear the winning song.

I think from now on, I’ll record the Oscars and watch them later. Perhaps I’ll even throw a week after Oscar Party (on the following SATURDAY so people can enjoy the evening) and we’ll watch the Oscars on high speed and then do other fun stuff later. What do you think?