Speak Coffee to Me‘s most recent “ad of the week” is this glittering little diamond, a brief film (directed by Azazel Jacobs) “about looking at art.” A nice little fable for those who just don’t get the point of so-called non-representational art, it’s from the Web site of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Bars on Every Corner
I worked for AT&T, late 1970s through sometime in the early 1990s (depending on where you want to place the marker). And I was a loyal customer, too. When less costly competing services came along, from MCI and Sprint, I never gave them a glance. I never considered buying a phone or answering machine that lacked the stylized bell logo (or later, the stripy globe). Even my first real home PC was an AT&T model.
In more recent years, the loyalty has faded. It’s pretty much just the brand name now which gets acquired by new corporate scalphunters. (For people I worked with back then who remain with the company, such as it is, working life must feel a little surreal.) My cell phone now comes from Finland. It operates on a cellular network belonging to one of those “inferior” competitors. I’ve moved on.
All of which is by way of saying (you were wondering, admit it): I don’t have any particular vested interest in recent AT&T cellular service ads on TV… except as a TV viewer.
And as a TV viewer, I’ve started to become obsessed with those ads. Those frigging ads…
It’s Gnawing at Me
[Click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — row of little vertical bars.]
[audio:threestooges.mp3|titles=Three Blind Mice|artists=(some orchestra)]
Help me out with something here: What, exactly — even approximately — is the deal with mice? meaning, specifically, mice as humans? (I do recognize there are many deals with mice.) And of course when you extend the question to the rest of order Rodentia, well, the mystery deepens: rats, beavers, chipmunks, groundhogs… There’s no end (so it seems) to the number and variety of normally furry, four-legged, big-incisored, nose-twitching creatures wearing little suits and dresses and hats.
Sometimes, indeed, people even become rodents — and rodents, people — as here:
The Teachable Moment
I don’t usually just post a link to someplace else, without using it as a springboard for my own ramblings. (Indeed, one of those ramblings is forthcoming.)
But this slice of life would be ruined by elaboration: “Choose your own adventure at Lee NAILS” (Deb on the Rocks, via Maggie). Highly recommended reading for parents of teenagers. Or parents of teenagers to be. Or former teenagers. Or future teenagers.
The setup:
My son and I were driving home from the dog park last night, talking about the politics of the park (they can be thick, with both dogs and owners throwing down on any given day) and Swine Flu and his course selections for next year and very other important stuff like dinner.
The sign at the side of the road (in the photo at the right) caught my eye. I’ve never been to Lee’s, but I know it’s a stripmall nail salon. Free wine/beer/soft drinks! I guess the recession must be killing pedicure places. If money’s tight, it’s pretty easy to say “Ya know, nail polish is three bucks at CVS, I bet I can slap some lotion and paint on my own damn toes at home.” It’s really not that tricky.
Then I heard my son Salo ask me, “Mom, did you hear me, I asked you which one would you choose?”
And things go on from there…
No Wonder Johnny Grew Up So… Troubled
You may have imagined that until the Internet, parents didn’t need to worry that technology might endanger their children. If so, you were wrong.
Photo below the fold. Found it at the wonderful Found in Mom’s Basement site: “Vintage advertising — found in my mother’s basement, flea markets and various corners of the Internet — dusted off and displayed for your viewing pleasure.” Click the image to see the whole ad; then spend a little time visiting there, and prepare to be entertained (or creeped out) yourself.
When Appliances Weep
In his standup-comedy days, forty-plus years ago, Woody Allen did a routine called “Mechanical Objects.”
It was a narrative about the highly mixed blessings of living at the tail end of the Machine Age, at the start of The Age of Electronicus. I found the following transcript of the routine on the Web; I can’t swear to its accuracy, but it conforms to what I remember:
I have never in my life had good relationships with mechanical objects of any sort. Anything that I can’t reason with or kiss or fondle, I get into trouble with.
I have a clock that runs counter-clockwise for some reason. My toaster pops up my toast and shakes it, burns it. I hate my shower. I’m taking a shower, and somebody in America uses his water. That’s it for me, y’know, I leap from the tub, scalded.
I have a tape recorder, I paid a hundred and fifty dollars for, and as I talk into it, it goes, “I know, I know.”
About three years ago I couldn’t stand it anymore. I was home one night. I called a meeting with my possessions. I got everything I owned into the living room. My toaster, my clock, my blender. They’d never been in the living room before. And I spoke to them.
I opened with a joke.
And then I said, “I know what’s going on, and cut it out!…”
And I spoke to each appliance. I was really articulate. Then I put them back, and I felt good.
Two nights later, I’m watching my portable television set, and [the picture on] the set begins to jump up and down, and I go up to it. And I always talk before I hit, and I said, “I thought we had discussed this — what’s the problem?” And the set kept going up and down, so I hit it, and it felt good hitting it, and I beat the hell out of it. I was really great, I tore off the antenna, and I felt very virile.
And two days later I go to my dentist in New York. (I had gone to my dentist, but I had a deep cavity, and he’d sent me to a chiropodist.) I’m going into a building in mid-town New York, and they have those elevators, and I hear a voice say, “Kindly call out your floors, please,” and I say, “Sixteen,” and the doors close and the elevator starts going up to sixteen.
And on the way up the elevator says to me, “Are you the guy that hit the television set?” I felt like an ass, y’know, and it took me up and down fast between floors, and it threw me off in the basement. It yelled out something that was anti-Semitic.
I thought of this story the other night while helping The Missus with a bit of the evening’s dinner preparations.
The Difference between Men & Women, Chap. XXIV
Momentary Semantic Vertigo
Please forgive an extended excerpt from a favorite scene in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Humpty Dumpty is here the initial speaker, and he is discussing birthdays vs. un-birthdays:
“…There”s glory for you!”
“I don”t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!'”
“But ‘glory’ doesn”t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that”s all.”
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they’re the proudest — adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs — however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
“Would you tell me please,” said Alice, “what that means?”
“Now you talk like a reasonable child,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. “I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.”
“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”
“Oh!” said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark.
In the supermarket last night, I considered the flashlights displayed for sale. I’d been meaning to get a couple of little flashlights to distribute here and there in the house, for when we have power outages. (Not that we have a lot of them, but you never know.) I selected a couple of nice ones, each running on three triple-A batteries, and what I liked most about them was that their light came from this little cluster of bright LEDs instead of a conventional bulb. Five bucks each.
Took them home, and finally managed to cut through the insanely hard plastic bubble (invented, rumor has it, by the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Division of Impermeable Wall Materials and then released to the private sector for its own use).
Inserted the batteries, tested them. Great. All was in working order.
Dropped one flashlight here, another in another room, then returned to extract the cardboard packaging inserts from the plastic bubbles in order to toss the inserts into the recycling stack. Before discarding them, though, I thought Okay, you already know what you just bought but what the heck, flipped one over, started to read the fine print on the back.
Here’s what I saw first:
Sounds great, right? Then I read further:
Democracy 101: Great Apolitical PSA
The Hurricane Phone
Back in the day — you know, the day — you could say (as I used to) “I work for the phone company” and no one would doubt which phone company paid your salary. That’s why Lily Tomlin’s old “Ernestine the telephone operator” could say, without ambiguity, “We’re the phone company. We don’t have to care.”
Aside: Okay, listen, this isn’t the point of this post but now that I’ve got Ernestine on the brain I just had to look her up on YouTube. She’s there, all right. Here’s a sample:
Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging…
Anyway, aside from the fact that there are now as many phone companies in the USA as there are neighborhoods, the technology itself has of course made huge leaps. Cell phones, obviously. Cordless phones. Caller ID. Phones that take pictures. In fact, phones do so much anymore that it’s easy to forget some of the things they no longer do.
For instance: when your power goes out, so do your phones.
