To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
We’ve got a band geek. She’s on a band trip somewhere. She’s in her hotel room, leaning over her balcony, looking down on the strange city, thinking about the parade tomorrow and not sure she’s going to be able to eat much tonight she’s so nervous. She’s thinking about the parade, and she’s got part of her band uniform draped over her shoulder. Wistful, sexy, with a hint of John Philip Sousa.
Message: Band chicks are hot.
Continue reading “High Concept (III)”
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Dustbury links to a story about the Feds worrying about the uninformed masses who must be shepherded: Study: Nearly Half Of Consumers Fooled By “Up To” Claims In Advertisements:
The Federal Trade Commission recently commissioned a study that looked out how consumers perceive and comprehend the “up to” conditional in advertisements.
The researchers used different versions of an ad for windows — one that stated that the windows were “proven to save up to 47% on heating and cooling bills,” and one that simply stated, “proven to save 47%.”
Of those who looked at the “up to” version, 45.6% mistakenly said the ad promised to save 47%. Meanwhile, only 58.3% of consumers who saw the unconditional version said the ad promised to deliver 47% savings. According to the FTC, the small difference between the two results indicates that the use of “up to” did little-to-nothing to change consumers’ perception that the ad was promising the maximum level of performance.
Friends, Americans, and countrymen under the DREAM thing, this results from the Lake Woebegone Effect and self-esteem based educational curricula. People all believe they are better than average, better looking than average, smarter than average, and in the tops in whatever they’re measured. Whether they are or not.
So of course they believe that the absolute best possible result of a product applies to them. Some people, not just in Chicago, spend their winters thinking the Cubs might win the World Series. People like blood sausage, too.
Now that the FTC has discovered this fact, what does the FTC want to do about it? Solve the problem of optimism, no doubt.
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We took our children in for a shearing this weekend, and as always, the hair stylist asked if we wanted the hair off of the children’s ears. I’ve seen that this is starting to come back into fashion, probably because of that Justin Bieber kid or because of the Hanson brothers or the Jonas brothers or whichever or all of the kiddy sensations who and whose fans were not alive in the 1970s and whose parents are braindamaged from the same.
Me, I just say no to the Keith cut. Continue reading “Just Saying No to the Keith Cut”
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This book is a short collection of tales from Ozarks lore, broken into categories such as “Tales of the Supernatural”, “Indian Tales”, “Treasure Tales”, “Outlaw Stories”, and so on. None of them are well-researched or well-documented, but they do give one interesting stories to tell the children and ideas for little essays and historical bits if one wants to put in the time to conduct real research.
The best bit about this book, though, is this written on the title page:
As some of you assuredly know, the William Quantrill led a pro-Confederate band of guerrillas in the Civil War. The William Quantrill does not appear in this book, so it’s not a notation of a previous owner. I assume it was the name of the previous owner, perhaps a distant relation of The William Quantrill. So I can boast I own a book once owned by William Quantrill, but given that this is the 1998 reprinting of a book that first appeared in 1983, it’s not The William Quantrill. But those to whom I boast need not know.
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