Sunday, June 9, 2013

RIAARRRRRRWWWW! Tigers on the loose at the JDRF Walk for the Cure




Erica is transformed from a sweet little girl into a TIGER! Today we all enjoyed going to the JDRF Walk for the Cure on her sister Lauren's unstoppable Ladybugs team. It's a kid-friendly event with rock climbing, mini-golf, arcade games, clowns, balloons, more mascots than I've ever seen, and FREE hot dogs! The face-painting was something else at this event- I'll post a few more pictures below. All in all, a fun day with a great purpose: to bring us a step closer to a cure for Type 1 (juvenile) diabetes. Next year Grandma is getting HER face done.











Lauren ROCKS at the JDRF Walk for the Cure!



Lauren ROCKS at the JDRF Walk for the Cure! This is a family event we all look forward to every year, a walk to raise funds and awareness for the Juvenile (Type 1) Diabetes Research Foundation. Lauren was diagnosed at 15 months, and here celebrates her exuberance and vitality in an impromptu dance performance onstage!







Saturday, June 8, 2013

GO! (or: come back, Mr. Whipple - wherever you are)




(Note. I've dealt with this issue before in a previous post, but every time I see a new Charmin ad I have to update this due to their absolute genius for presenting their product in the most astonishingly offensive manner possible. And yet, the ads just go on and on. And so must I. . .)

When I first saw one of those Charmin ads - you know, the ones with the cutesie cartoon bears running behind trees to take a royal dump - I was pretty offended, but I managed to more-or-less tune it out. 

But then they escalated.





The Mama and Papa bear seemed highly concerned with Junior's wastefulness in the TP department, but the nice Charmin voiceover convinced them that with their brand, you could "use less". At the same time, Junior developed a problem: "Little bits left behind," requiring regular rectal inspection from Mama.

Little bits of what? I had to ask myself. And if it was toilet paper, why were they sticking? It didn't "bear" thinking about.

But then I noticed the annoying Baby Bear announcing at the end of the commercial, "We all go. Why not enjoy the go?"

Jesus Christ!




I wondered if I was the only person who was completely astonished by this bit of business. Characteristically, I went on an internet search and found so much shit I couldn't believe it.

Proctor and Gamble decided, in some bold and possibly idiotic move, to rip the inhibitions away from bathroom functions, to elevate urination and defecation to the lofty and even fun level they deserve. We should all be enjoying our basic bodily functions, not just getting them done so we can get on with our day. 

Interestingly enough, when I look up samples of Charmin ads on YouTube, ALL the comments are negative. NONE of them think the bears, including the shitty-assed Baby Bear, are cute. The newest ad is even more jaw-dropping: Charmin will, apparently, help you keep your underwear clean. (And this in full knowledge of the fact that these bears don't wear any clothes.)





I honestly don't know why this headspinningly offensive campaign is still on the air, but it just goes on and on, year after year, continually upping the ante, so to speak. One wonders what's next: actually watching the bears go grunt, grunt, plop? How much more explicit can these ads be?

(As an aside: why are there three colors of bear: red, blue and brown? Does the brown bear really get down to it, and will we soon be subjected to the fruits of his labours?)

Below I quote the only article I could find that deals with this embarrassing subject to any depth. But even this piece isn't complete. To kick off their cute new campaign, a few years ago Proctor and Gamble set up a sort of Defecation Expo with gigantic toilets and Disney-like washroom cubicles. Their public ambassadors, all fresh-faced and attractive, had to be people who "really, really enjoy going to the bathroom". One of their slogans was, and no, I am not making this up, "sit and squat".








The Wikipedia entry reads: 

Times Square Charmin restrooms 

In 2006, Charmin opened up public restrooms in New York City's Times Square. The location is now a new Disney Store. The convenience of having clean restrooms in Times Square during the Christmas season was a novel idea. There is currently no news of a 2013 Charmin restroom location at this time.

In case you can't quite make out the want ad above, some of the most unbelievable lines are:

"Do you enjoy going to the bathroom enough to earn $10,000.00? Charmin is conducting a national search to find five super-fun, enthusiastic people to work at the Charmin Restrooms in Times Square, NYC this holiday season. Description and Qualifications: Greet and entertain bathroom guests. Then, blog about the experience. All candidates must really, really enjoy going to the bathroom." And I can't go on, sorry.

I don't know, maybe it would be healthier for us if we DID sit around the water cooler comparing anecdotes about the quality and duration of our poo-poo experiences, ideally at lunch time. Maybe we should have little contests (judged by a rotating panel of poo monitors) to see who uses the least and most squares, and even a fragrance tester to determine whose dump smells best and worst. Might have something to do with what you ate last night. The curry, perhaps?




"Enjoy the Go"? Is Procter and Gamble's Campaign for Charmin a Bizarre Joke? (from BrandCulture Talk)


November 26, 2012 


Every once in a great while we encounter a campaign so execrable it defies belief. Charmin's "Enjoy the go" fits the bill and causes us to question whether the marketing geniuses at Procter and Gamble have lost their minds.





The campaign rhetorically asserts, "We all go. Why not enjoy the go?" Can this possibly be the Charmin brand assertion? Indeed it is. The brand embraces a path as grammatically desultory as the campaign is incomprehensible.

Here at BrandCulture Talk (with a hat tip to David Aaker) we spend a good deal of time discussing rationalemotional and self-expressive brand benefits.  Brands that lay claim only to functional benefits are subject to being quickly eclipsed by competitive offerings. Only by laying claim to emotional and self-expressive value can brands create enduring competitive advantage. Except for a product like toilet tissue.

We suffer no illusions as to the job Charmin is designed to perform. By seeking to elevate excretion and dejection to a source of pleasure, however, the campaign is at best puzzlingly risible (albeit in poor taste) and more likely, seriously unhinged. Charmin endeavors to explain, "We all go to the bathroom every day . . . especially after morning coffee. Talk about getting things going! . . . Whew, that curry was hot [steam whistle sound effect]! Bottom line, we all spend a lot of time going." We do?







How a company that is arguably the world's preeminent marketer of consumer packaged goods created, and continues to support this campaign is a mystery.  P&G has extended the campaign into social media (recent Tweet to Charmin's nearly 8,000 Twitter followers: "Anyone have a favorite game they play while 'enjoying the go?' We enjoy a certain mad avian galactic battle one"), a Facebook presence with over 325,000 "likes" (!) (recent post: "Did anyone have Charmin on their Black Friday shopping list????") and a dedicated blog that descends from the simply gross to a creepily voyeuristic "Daily peek inside the cleanest public restroom in Times Square" (although they may have rethought that one as the last "daily peek" took place in 2009). This campaign is so bad for so many reasons that the writers of Saturday Night Live would be hard-pressed to invent this madness as a parody.

And just to make this whole campaign a wee bit classier, let's add . . . Kim Kardashian a couple of "Enjoy the go" bear mascots, a Brooklyn drum corps and a ceremonial glass key to the toilet! See for yourself:








So . . . instead of furthering the devolution of the English language while mawkishly celebrating the unspeakable, wouldn't P&G be better served by dusting off an updated version of the venerable Mr. Whipple, who successfully hawked Charmin for over 20 years? Mr. Whipple cleverly extolled the functional (and actually valuable) benefit of softness through the inability for virtually anyone to resist the siren song of "squeezing the Charmin"? Like the iconic "Maytag Lonely Repairman," Mr. Whipple distinguished Charmin from competitive offerings with aplomb in more than 500 commercials, and was at one point the 3rd most recognizable American -- only behind Richard Nixon and Billy Graham. Not once did he feel compelled to mention enjoying the "go."





The late Dick Wilson, the actor who portrayed Mr. Whipple, hit upon the crux of Charmin's dilemma in a 1985 interview with the Chicago Tribune: 'What are you going to say about toilet paper? I think we handle it the best way we can." If only  P and G took his advice.









(An awful p. s., then I will truly stop. In what used to pass for morbid curiosity but is now seen as chirpy cheerleaderism, I decided to google terms which might be said to support the idea of "enjoy the go". What I came up with were terms for two psychiatric disorders: urophilia and coprophilia. This is the sort of stuff Dan Savage deals with in his ever-fascinating Savage Love column (not that I ever read it).

Sorry, folks, but this is what "enjoy the go" really means. Perhaps Proctor and Gamble had better do their homework more carefully next time.)








Friday, June 7, 2013

The STRANGEST "separated at birth" ever seen!







If you've been following my blog for a while now - and I just fervently hope SOMEONE reads this, at least once in a while - you will have noticed my recurrent series, Separated at Birth. Anthony Perkins and Gregory Peck. Harold Lloyd and Jake Gyllenhaal. That sort of thing.

Well.





I stay up way too late sometimes and just look for things to muck around with to use on my blog. I love diddling around with images that move, but I like images that don't move too. I also wanted to see if I could find a good YouTube video on the Hapsburgs, preferably a comedy: Take it on the Chin Charlie, Louie the Lip and Friends, whatever. An animated series on King Charles II of Spain, also known as El Hexado because he was so fucking ugly, would have filled the bill, but all I could find was a very strange 2-minute "reconstruction" of the face of Marie Antoinette. 






I could find almost no information about this, but it started with the standard portrait of her and slowly morphed into something a lot more realistic. Someone in the comments section said something about a death mask, so it may have been reconstructed from that, though death masks, I find, generally aren't very flattering.

But as it slowly morphed, I cried into the void, "Hey. That's not Ms. Let-Them-Eat-Cake at all. That's Kaley Cuoco!"

Yes.

The adorable female lead on the hit comedy The Big Bang Theory, which is now on so many times a day that my DVR just can't keep up. I think it looks EXACTLY like her, or at least close enough, though Kaley definitely has Marie beat in the cheekbone department.





The comments under the video mentioned Marie's "Hapsburg lip", so like all the rest of those aristocratic swine she must've been hopelessly inbred. I don't see the lip here, but the picture's not in 3D, is it? I don't know if Kaley has any Hapsburg blood in her, and to be honest I've been trying to figure out just what sort of a name that is anyway - sounds kind of Portuguese. So now I'm off on yet another search.





SPECIAL Bonus Creep-o-rama Link! One of the creepiest links I've ever found, next to Victorian Post-Mortem Photography. In fact, this one is worse.


http://www.undyingfaces.com/info/

It has got THE WORST pictures of dead guys' faces all melted down, or with their mouths tied shut. I don't know when they stopped doing this shit, but there's one of Alfred Hitchcock that's just ridiculous, it looks so much like him.
There's also one of Timothy Leary (but I forgot to save it). To be honest, I thought they froze his head. I saw a video once of a bunch of scientists carting his severed head around. It was too sickening.











Special Post-Post Bonus-Bonus: There are all sorts of these creep-o sites, apparently, for sickos who like to look at death masks. Nobody WE know. This one is a sort of Greatest Hits list. But I'm beginning to be suspicious. Some of these masks are of rather murky provenance and might have turned up in some third-rate history prof's cellar in 1980 or something. One site even said, astonishingly, that it was clear Abraham Lincoln "had not been assassinated". Gee, then I wonder what all the fuss was about?








Some weird shit goin' on. . .









Harold gets jolted!




I TOLD you not to step on that wire!

Incredible word soup






Ducks on a pond, ducks on a pond
Very pretty swimming round
The lion and the unicorn journey very far








The answers are the question, sir
The lady soothes the lion's fur
Meek as a lamb he follows her
Wherever angels are

Sing me something









I asked the ice it would not say
But only cracked or moved away
I thought I knew me yesterday
Whoever sings this song





Greetings on you kings in the sky
Who'll buy me a mynah bird
Play me a magic word
Speak of hopes with thoughts absurd



Thoughts floating by
Little ducks, pretty birds
Clouds across the sky




Moving pieces on the plains of Troy
Carving faces on the rocks of joy
Pretty lady washing the tiles
Soapy pictures like crocodiles

Chilly winds blowing
Lovely spring coming soon










I wear my body like a caravan
Gipsy rover in a magic land
Misty mountains where the eagles fly
Lonely valleys where the lost ones cry





I had a little letter full of paper
Inky scratches everywhere
Always looking, looking for a paradise island
Help me find it everywhere




Peacocks talking of the colour grey
Awaking soundly in darkest day
A howling tempest on a silent sea
Lovely Jesus nailed to a tree




Mad as the moon when Merlin falls
Silver castles and silver halls
Taking lessons from the piper's son
Learn to play while the world is young





Boys and girls come out to play
The moon doth shine as bright as day
Leave your sorrows and leave your sleep
And join your playfellows in the street




Come with a whoop or come with a call
Come with a goodwill or not at all
Up the ladder and down the wall
A ha'penny loaf will serve for all




Following my fortune now the Holy Grail is found
And the Holy Bread of Heaven it is given all around
Farewell sorrow, praise God the open door
I ain't got no home in this world any more




Poor as the birds but to give their song away
Gathering possessions round to make a bright array
Dark was the night, praise God the open door
I ain't got no home in this world anymore.





Brighter every day





OK then, this is a mixup, but not really. All day yesterday (or I think it was the day before), I was thinking of that Incredible String Band song Ducks on a Pond. Makes sense, because all I did  that day was watch ducks/ducklings on a pond.

I wanted to post my homemade duckling gifs, video, etc. and wondered if the Ducks on a Pond song would be a good accompaniment. Well. . . I hadn't heard the Increds (as we called them back in 1968) for many,  many years, but I remembered they were best listened to when you were stoned out of your mind on hashish (with a side of cheap wine). I now see why. The Ducks song just goes on forever, and though it has some arresting images in it, it's just too crazy to include here.





But I found another one, much shorter and more - what, sprightly? Less stoner-rific? Like you can actually listen to it clean and sober. No ducks in it, but it's still a nice song.

So here it is. . . with ducks.

You Get Brighter

You get brighter every day and every time I see you
Scattered brightness in your way and you taught me how to love you






And I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you
I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you

In the morning when I wake I moor my boat and greet you
Hold your brightness in my eye and I wonder what does sleep do







For you get brighter every day and every time I see you
Scattered brightness in your way and you taught me how to love you

I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you
I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you

Oh, wondrous light
Light, light, lighter
You give all your brightness away
and it only makes you brighter






For you get brighter every day and every time I see you
Scattered brightness in your way and you taught me how to love you

And I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you
I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you

Krishna colours on the wall you taught me how to love you
Krishna colours on the wall you taught me how to love you
(repeat and repeat and repeat)







You get brighter 




Every




Day.


Thursday, June 6, 2013

Itty-bitty, fuzzy-wuzzy ducklings: DUCKLINGS ON LAND!




Part 2 of our Duckling Adventure! The fluffies preen themselves on shore.



Itty-bitty, fuzzy-wuzzy DUCKLINGS!



Such goings-on at the Duck Park! The Duck Park isn't really the Duck Park at all, but is properly called Coquiitlam Town Centre Park, and we walk around it at least once a week. The jewel of the park is Lafarge Lake, a former gravel-pit,  trout-stocked and serene. One day we discovered a tiny cove full of greedy ducks who were so acclimatized to humans that they literally walked right up out of the water and stood 2 feet away from us expecting to be fed. Soon we were saying "Let's go to the duck park" to each other.  For retirees like us, it was a cheap way to get out and have fun.

Then. . . come spring, the flock thinned out. There were fewer and fewer ducks waiting for us. Bummer! Then I had a thought. What if the ducks had other things to do in the spring?