does that ring a bell of early 90s advertisement to you?most people probably remember this twix slogan, but don’t feel bad if you didn’t catch it because sue shut that shit down right away.that’s right, i give my mother full credit for this one.
in retrospect, she may have had a point – it really wasn’t emphasizing the importance of sharing and likely contributed to the rise of childhood obesity – but it was the 90s and rude was cool.while other people were eating each other’s shorts and having or not having cows, we were living in miss manners’ boot camp.heithcliff had been banned, saying “shut up†was an offense punishable by soap-mouth, and this twix business was not going to fly.
my mother set about solving this problem as anyone would.the relentless, sternly-worded letter writing campaign began immediately.diligent in her efforts, it didn’t take long to slay the beast.the commercial disappeared from the air waves and order was restored.as i remember, enough twix bars showed up at our door to fill a vault and swim in it scrooge mcduck-style.my mom will tell you that it was just a few coupons for free twix.regardless, we weren’t allowed to have them, and some of us still aren’t entirely over it.
the moral of this story, and a good lesson for all of you who weren’t raised by crazies, is that the solution to ever minor injustice is to write a letter.i can already tell you that from mid-march on, my father will make repeated phone calls to the cbs office in new york to yell about which ncaa games are being broadcast in chicago (he will call angrily, multiple times in a row, he will make you call too, so that they see that other viewers are also outraged – and when he gets really infuriated, he will declare his ultimate insult: “you don’t even deserve to be showing the tournamentâ€, pretty good right), and the whole time you will hear sue in the background saying that the only way to accomplish anything is to write a letter.
rewind a week, when brian-the-brain alerted us all to a free sub situation going down at quiznos.as you may or may not know, i am a slut for sandwiches – my year was officially made…or was it?
i completed the registration and even spread the goodness on to my siblings so they wouldn’t miss out, but when i went to print my coupon, something went wrong.horribly, horribly wrong.my knowledge of technology is pathetic at best – it’s all magic to me, and if turning something off and then on again doesn’t work, then i’m screwed.struck by the terror of losing my sandwich, i was calmed by my mother’s voice in my head.sandwich, you will be mine.
i immediately composed an email to the folks at quizno’s explaining how i played by the rules and got burned.i assured them that in no way was i trying to get a second free sandwich, i just hadn’t been able to access my first and there must be something they could do.i spent the next day of school happily drawing graphic doodles of me making love to sandwiches, fantasizing about swaddling my sandwich babies in wax paper and nurturing them until i was hungry or hungover, when i would proceed to eat my young.
but as the time passed, and the number of free sandwiches climbed closer to one million, my confidence dwindled.in a desperate attempt, i created a fake email account and even lied about part where it asks for your favorite sub to throw them off my scent (however, i did spend about 5 minutes struggling with this decision out of fear that i then would be forced to get anything other than the one veggie sub i adore).unfortunately, this brilliant plan fell apart.
a few days ago, they reached the alleged million, and i was genuinely saddened.now, i’m not going to say that i had nothing else on my mind, but i was definitely being haunted by the sub that got away.the more i thought about it, my disappointment turned to indignation – how dare they not even respond to me.and so, fueled by my righteous anger, i sat down and wrote my second letter.
it was only after sending this that i realized i had officially become my mother’s soldier in the letter-writing crusade for equality and politeness.fortunately, if things get out of my league, i am living with an expert — the sensei of spite herself.the only difference is that i plan to have my twix and eat ‘em too.
Okay. I get it. You think you’re cool like me because you know obscure 1980’s music. But here’s the best part. You think it’s funny to “Rick Roll” me by making me think that I’m going to watch something interesting, but when I click the link, “What the fuck is Rick Astley doing singing ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ when I’m supposed to be watching a Family Guy clip?” are the only words that can come into my brain. Oh, I get it, you played a fucking joke on me. Kinda like when we were in 2nd grade and you would point over my shoulder and say, “What’s that over there?” Then I would look and everyone would laugh and sing in malicious unison, “Made you look, made you look, now you’re in my baby book!” Fine. I can take a joke…
…every once in a while…
…but this has gotten out of hand. As if there wasn’t enough useless shit posted on youtube (I’m talking about drunken frat boys shooting bottle rockets out of their assholes and 16 year old girls crying in their video blogs about how much their lives suck), now I have to deal with this. Again, it would be fine if it happened once in a while, but when I want to visit a link and I immediately hear the opening drum riff and see a red-haired guy in a gray suit, it’s the most ANNOYING FUCKING THING IN THE WORLD. One person started this fucking thing. I love a good prank, but whoever you are, inventor of the “Rick Roll,” you have opened up the Pandora’s Box of fucking with people on the internet. I can’t trust any of the videos on youtube that I actually want to watch because one million people followed in your shoes because they think they’re funny, too. Youtube was intended for people to post videos that other people would actually give a shit about. But immature, fledgling technologists worldwide have bastardized it and made it a forum of pure fuck.
I can’t watch anything anymore. When I look for something obscure and see a link for it, only to have a little chat bubble pop up exclaiming “YOU’VE BEEN RICK ROLLED,” I lose my fucking mind. Goddamn it, you’re not even looking over my shoulder in anticipation waiting for me to click this shit. In fact, you will never know that I even clicked it. But the problem is that I know. I know that I clicked it. I also know that you are a cocksucker. I also know that you spend all your time thinking about the next “clip” that you’re going to make. Guess what. The fun is over. Nobody likes this shit anymore. It’s not funny, and Rick Astley went from being an ’80s one-hit wonder to a nobody to a youtube phenomenon to a fucking asshole. I can’t even listen to the song anymore because of you. So thank you for ruining Rick Astley. Thank you for deleting him from my library. Thank you for ruining youtube. Thank you for ruining the internet in general. Thank you for ruining my day.
Via Pop Candy, a trailer for Beer Wars. I’m excited to see this for only the reason of having a good conversation starter about beer when I’m at a bar. I love documentaries because its learning without all the pesky reading.
Has everyone seen the new Pepsi logo? I don’t like it that much and from just a little research, it seems like a lot of other people share my opinion. One part of the craziness is the way the company that redesigned the logo pitched it to Pepsi (which people argue might be bogus too). Either way, it pretty funny how the Arnell Group described the logo as some sort of legacy of humankind and science. They compare the Pepsi logo to the Mona Lisa and the Golden Ratio. What I think is weird (and didn’t realize till Joan pointed it out to me), is that the logo does not have any trademark symbol to it. And maybe I am getting old and bad at doing interweb research, but I can’t find any article or anything that discusses Pepsi’s reasoning for that. (I like to think that if I am curious about something, that someone else on the interweb has probably thought about it a while ago and already wrote something about it.) The only reasons I can think of are highly doubtful:
It’s a marketing move to encourage people to use it and spread it around.
Pepsi knows how bad the logo looks and isn’t fully committing to it.
Forgot, like I probably would.
There a huge international company, but don’t think registering a trademark is worth it.
For whatever reason, Pepsi has been rebranding their entire line of drink products. Mountain Dew is now going to be called Mtn Dew. Tropicana got a rebrand, but after much criticism from the ol’ “blogosphere,” the old package design was brought back. Crazy, huh!?! Yah, your right, not really.
