News You Can Bruise

• Manufacturers of polyhedral dice.
• Custom-printed toilet paper. "What do you need your tissues to be? We give you the satisfied answer now!!!"
• BOPP Tape Slitting Machine.
• Industrial food processor.
• Locate table for changing babies? You need Fully-Auto Baby Diaper machine.
• The Guangzhou Junyue Advertising Co. makes those company-name signs that get mounted on the sides of buildings.
• New York City Subway USB flash drives. (That company also has London, Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong versions.)

(This only changed recently. A few years ago, all cars featured variety in their ads. Now almost all cars are dedicated to a single type of ad, which means you encounter Dr. Zizmor less often.)

I thought about this and came up with a couple reasons. First, there are a lot more car spaces than platform spaces. Probably 500x as many car spaces. Maybe the MTA looked at their numbers and saw an individual car ad was costing more to manage than it was producing. So they started forcing advertisers to buy an entire car's worth of ads at a time.

Second: a single platform ad will have about the same effect as a whole car of car ads. People usually sit still in a subway car, but they walk along the platform when they get out. Everyone in a subway car will walk by a few platform ads on their way in and out, but within a car they will only see the ads in front of them.

And while the people are sitting down, the subway cars are moving through the stations. An ad on the subway platform will be seen by people in the facing car. So, to make sure a carload of people sees your ad, you either need to buy up the entire car's ads, or one or two of the platform ads facing that car.

I've also noticed that movies are only advertised on the platforms, and booze is only advertised in the cars. (TV shows are advertised in both places.) What's the pattern?

This podcast is less than two minutes long, a sorbet after the huge Seder podcast. Don't-miss links: a sequel to the Zenith ad we discuss. PS: I spent a medium-sized amount of time converting and pasting in the original commercial audio rather than giving you the sound of it playing on our TV, so appreciate it, dammit.

I don't publish a popular web comic (or indeed a popular anything, except for Beautiful Soup), and it just wasn't worth it. So I've reclaimed those few pixels of vertical space. But if you have some crowd-pleaser that can push your ad bids above that elusive two-cent mark, I definitely recommend Project Wonderful over AdSense.

The day before Sumana got a telemarketing call. On her cell phone that's on the Do Not Call list. It was a Choose Your Own Adventure pitch from the Internet company (a preexisting business relationship trumps cell phones and DNC list) wanting to sell us a phone line. As in a phone you can't take out of your house. I believe to sweeten the deal they offered an original iMac and some commemorative Pogs. When Sumana said she wasn't interested, the Choose Your Own Adventure (which was being read by some poor human) became incredulous that we could live full lives if there wasn't a land line in our place of residence. After assuring the CYOA that our lives were fairly full, Sumana eventually reached one of those unsatisfying endings where she lived in a state of uncertainty as to what might have been, and hung up.

In both cases this was not the first time we'd been pitched but an escalation in tactics. We got a very weird spam-card from Direct Energy a while back, which was why I remembered the name on missionary #1's badge. And the Internet company sends us a paper bill every month mostly so they can bundle in pitches for a phone line (I pay the bill online, through the very Internet I pay for).

I wonder if this increased aggressiveness is an effect of the economic crunch, or, as I believe they used to say, "recession". Did this happen last time? Since coming back from London I've also noticed a little of a more common form of creeping advertising: advertising on surfaces that previously had none.

1. "Freshness — Hostess — Kids... They Go Together!"
2. Collect U.S. Commemoratives
   • They're Fun
   • They're History
   • They're America

(The latter in use for at least thirty years.)

The envelope is actually the best part of this buffet of lunacy. (front, back) On the back there's fake handwriting that starts out saying "Dear Jesus, ...". I guess I was absent that day in fifth grade when they taught us how to write a business letter to Jesus.

Anyway, the real reason I wrote this entry is the other genre of commercial: the weird health-related ad. There's one running now that's just ridiculous. It's this guy standing in a roadside vegetable stand full of supermarket produce, talking about phytochemicals. To get all the phytochemicals he thinks we need, we'd have to eat 18 ears of corn a day, or 5 heads of lettuce. Yeah, or possibly as much as a single tomato! Jeepers. What about celery? How much celery would we have to eat?

The web is full of stories of these arbitrary cutoffs, which I can now confirm in their relevant details. You get an email saying "we've cancelled your account based on classified information" and that's it. You get a pro forma chance to defend yourself, but it's not much good because you don't know what happened. It also doesn't make much difference, because the response always comes back: "we re-ran our classified algorithm on our classified dataset and it gave the same result as before, buh-bye".

Fortunately, I have a friend in the online ad business. Ryan's Project Wonderful mostly serves ads for webcomics right now, which is fine by me, as it means fewer "KEYWORD? Buy it now at creepysite.com" ads.

"Hi. I'm a human..."
"...and I'm a Cylon."

One was for Bud Lite. I guess if you're spending a million dollars a day or whatever on advertising, hiring an airplane to fly over a beach is just a drop in the ocean. But it's not neccessary, because the Budweiser brand is one of those select few that's associated with the concept of obnoxious advertising in general. Ask someone: "Say you're at the beach and someone flies a plane in front of you. What is the plane advertising?" "Uh, Bud Lite?" You don't need to hire an advertising plane, because any advertising plane makes people think of your product.

One was for Snakes on a Plane. It had a picture of a snake, and it said "Snakes + Plane = In theaters August 18th". As much as I would like to believe that there were promotional snakes on the plane that pulled that banner, I know that that's not true. The banner merely called attention to one of the many planes above this planet that contain no snakes at all. Was this a good marketing move? I don't know, but this is a ridiculous B-movie-style movie being marketed as an A-movie.

The other airborne banner was the most ridiculous yet. It was tied to its plane by two tethers, which somehow had folded the banner up so that the advertising was not visible to anyone on the beach. It was as obnoxious as the other two ads, but there was no content. Made me think of Bud Lite for some reason.

My ideal audience for these ads are the people who come into my site on really weird search requests that I can't help them with. Often times someone will do a search for, say, a game called Rat Poker with colorful rats that you color coordinate. For the median person who comes into my site on that search request, Crummy is a smorgasbord of disappointment. My scintillating discussion of mola molas and scripting languages are ashes in their mouth. Assuming I'd ever talked about games in which you color-coordinate rats (the plague has never been so stylish!) it would have been a computer hippy Linux game reviewed in a Game Roundup, or some crusty old DOS game in the Da Warren archives.

But there's a slightly larger chance that some programmer has recently written a Flash game that's all about picking the right rat to go with your jacket, and is advertising it through AdSense. The search request person should have just clicked on the AdSense ad for Barbie Rat Shop in the first place. But if the same ad shows up on my page and they click on it, I get money.

I have tried to make these ads unobtrusive by picking the most boring color scheme on offer, in keeping with the philosophy of design simplicity that drives all of our efforts here at crummy.com. Let me know if they bother you nonetheless. They sort of bother me, mainly because I've already had to tell Google not to use my site to push ads for the PublishAmerica vanity press, but also because there's sleazy impossible-to-block-all-of-it "give us your personal information and receive a tasty herring!" stuff. What kind of way is that to make a living? Whatever happened to making money the old fashioned way, by putting ads on your website and writing about random crap?

Speaking of marketing, to raise some extra scratch I've been forced to accept advertising in the Starslip Crisis RSS feed. Some might say, "Hey, shouldn't Kris be getting the money from that?", but those people don't recall that time in college when I lent Kris an infinite amount of money.

PS: Bonus fanboy quiz: IMDB trivia for Enterprise says that T'Pol was originally named T'Pau in tribute to the T'Pau character in "Amok Time". They changed her name so they wouldn't have to pay royalties to Theodore Sturgeon (author of AT) for every episode of Enterprise. To my knowledge this is the second time this (renaming a Trek character so as not to have to pay royalties) has happened. What's the other time?

All that was seemingly a big lead-up to the fact that I've had to start putting up "misc" directories to contain pictures that don't correspond to a "big event, better take the camera" thing. Here they are for February and March. These sets include hilarious moments like At least they didn't park in the handicapped space.

Bonus for Joe: this Ad campaign for New Zealand found near the Apple store which opens up new fields in tautological advertising. "Don't even come," it says. "We won't let you in."

Bonus bonus for everone: for some reason they're ripping up all the greenery around the building where I work. I assume they know what they're doing. Anyway, I call this picture set The Scouring of the Shire, and it should satisfy those of you who were hoping Return of the King would be even longer.

1. Kick-spinning tripod of death
2. Technology enabling "Post-Feudal Ninja Industrialists" to be the first movie filmed in NINJA-VISION!
3. Neighbor to the Temple Mount

Perhaps the real message of his work, then, is a critique that makes a mockery not just of the entertainment industry, but of the very notion of meritocracy in America—his success being the most damning evidence to date that the marketplace of talent is a sham.

"You'll like our crust!"

Energy Brands, is looking for hip water drinkers

I wanted to make NBNFAO a goofy-looking pseudotainment site like Cool 2B Real, so that the younger generation would be tricked into sampling hot NewsBruiser tips, not knowing that I was secretly underwriting the whole affair in hopes of boosting their NewsBruiser consumption. That fell through because I lack the neccessary design skills, so it's the same (admittedly icky green, which might play well with males 5-8) scheme as the rest of Tigris, and the NewsBruiser Flash hangman game will have to wait. Instead, I'm going the Astroturf route, like Dr. Pepper before me, recruiting key bloggers to discretely shill for NBNFAO on their sites. Unfortunately, that's not going too well either; I've only been able to convince one blogger to agree to the formatting and tone requirements that best reflect the sheer extremeness of the NewsBruiser brand.

"It is very exciting to be associated with a fun brand like Lay's. I am sure Saif-n-Kaif Hot & Sweet Chilly, Caribbean Style with its spicy, tangy taste is a flavour that will go down well with the younger generation," said Saif.

This reminds me that in Trader Joe's, Sumana and I saw some fliers for Tom's of Maine mouthwash. Only they weren't consumer-oriented fliers, they were fliers that tried to convince stores to carry the product. They said:

• Ginger flavor appeals to cultural creatives.

I was just thinking, "Ginger-flavored mouthwash, that's an interesting--gaaah!" If there's one thing us cultural creatives hate, it's to be identified as such.

NewsBruiser!

Only you sing it like "Transformers!" in the Transformers theme song. This is actually the better of the two versions. The extended remix goes:

NewsBruiser!
More than eats the pie!

Again like the beginning of the Transformers theme song. I don't know what qualities enable NewsBruiser to exceed mere eating the pie, but it's a theme song that Joe Mahoney will like, which is the important thing.

• "frank zappa" mormon
• free bakersfield telemarketing list
• pussy whipping instructions
• Can I be thrown out of school if I am kicked out of my home?

Remember, if you've enjoyed this edition of Disturbing Search Requests, please support our sponsors by clicking on the banner ad below. Without the puny ad revenues thus received, we would have no incentive to bother trawling through a new day's search requests.

"You got your gametes in my gametes!"
"Hey! you got your gametes in my gametes!"
"Wait a minute... it's a genetically different organism!

Reclufteg Ftalabesp Trastrar Echrort

Bedradric Nfatusorm Rcytchep Achrons

Actual subject lines from actual spam, folks. Of course, it's just the usual make-money-fast crap.