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How To Rattle That Stick In The Swill Bucket

January 26, 2012 10 Comments





Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.
-John Wanamaker

I lived in Los Angeles back in the early eighties. I have a soft spot in my heart for Fred Rated. Fred Rated is semi-well known as Shadoe Stevens, a disc-jockey game show host voice-over dude. According to Wikipedia, he’s currently the announcer for Craig Ferguson’s late night show.

He’ll always be Fred Rated to me. LA TV and radio was fun just then. Cal Worthington and Elvira and Fred; The Plimsouls and Oingo Boingo and Wall of Voodoo. It was all cheesy garbage and I loved it. I loved the west-coast flavored The Gong Show just as I had adored the execrable east-coast Community Auditions because it was crap and didn’t pretend to be anything else, and you could just watch the fat majorettes drop their batons while jitterbugging to disco versions of Sousa marches and enjoy the hell out of it while nursing a hangover.

Fred Rated became a sorta star by making those commercials. If the purpose of advertising is to make the public aware of the product then Fred was a smash, if I’m anything to go by. It’s thirty years later and I remember him, and fondly. If the purpose of advertising is to get you to part with money, I make it a miserable failure, because I never set foot in a Federated store and never got the urge to, either.

Advertising has gotten very, very creepy. The Stasi crossed with a peeping tom keeps track of you, online and elsewhere, and mines it for all its worth. Funny that guys like Fred played a creep, and yet their appeal was simply to amuse while barking out the phone number.

This blog is advertising, I guess; I try to be charming, and let you know I exist. I know the charming part is thin on the ground now and then, but I try to exist as hard as I can. Maybe it’s the only half that matters, anyway.

Bleak House

January 25, 2012 3 Comments

The Lover Tells Of The Rose In His Heart

ALL things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart,
With the earth and the sky and the water, re-made, like a casket of gold
For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

–William Butler Yeats

Dios Mio, Mang

January 22, 2012 6 Comments

So you wanna be a roofer, huh?

I was once at the top of a forty-foot ladder, laden with tools, with the ladder leaned against a house where one rake board transitioned into another rake board at the spot an addition met the main house. Forty feet is plenty high to be lethal, and give you the feeling it’s lethal, too.  Without any warning, a bat — one bat — came out of the seam and hit me square in the face, thrashed around a bit, and fluttered off.

In theory, no matter what, you’re never supposed to let go of the ladder. Earthquake, fire, gunshots, surprise parties, whatever — your natural inclination to wave your hands around must be countered. It’s hard to override a bazillion years of fight or flee, but it’s easy to see who can manage it. They’re not blogging just now.

The bats are just a lark for these fellows. Watch out for the histoplasmosis, guys! It’s more painful than marriage, but less deadly in the long run.

Month: January 2012

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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