Speaking of the ineffable genius of marketing types:

By way of The Disney Blog, here’s Kroger’s press release for Old Yeller Chunk Style Dog Food.

You can go ahead and read that press release without fear of spoilers; for some reason, they don’t mention how the movie ends.

So look forward to a long life with your dog thanks to Old Yeller Chunk Style Dog Food. And when it comes time to put your faithful companion down, why not try Bambi’s Mom brand bullets? They’re in your local Kroger right next to Grave of the Fireflies brand fruit candies.

I was thinking more about those Hummer ads, and something just occurred to me:

For decades, we’ve had hundreds of ads for dozens of products where the underlying message has been the same: Buy this product and you’ll get a huge boner.

In the past few years, advertisers have been able to run commercials for products whose purpose is exactly that. And the ads always show guys fishing or gardening or sitting at the kitchen table with their wives. In other words, they finally have the chance to come right out and say “buy this to get a boner,” and they say everything except that.

Marketing types live in some bizarre alternate universe.

I must be all kinds of dense, because I’m having a hell of a time making it through The Odyssey. I was meaning to be reading it for pleasure but I can’t tell one name from the next and it just feels like homework.

So I switched to The Once and Future King. And it only took me 40 pages of deja vu before I realized I had seen all of it before, as The Sword in the Stone. According to Amazon, the book is actually a compilation of short stories by T.H. White, the first of which was made directly into the Disney Version (what with its being about an orphan who proves himself and all).

The reason I thought this story was interesting: the Sword in the Stone was always one of my least favorite Disney movies. I thought it was slight and pretty forgettable, like an unfinished chunk of a larger story. But what really stood out and bugged me were all the anachronisms — Merlin wearing a Hawaiian shirt and all that. Contemporary Disney movies like Jungle Book and Robin Hood handled it better. King Louie was genuinely cool (although the British Invasion vultures were kind of annoying). And I still say that having the depiction of the merry men in Robin Hood exploit all the country & western stuff that was popular at the time (with Smokey and the Bandit) was a genius move.

At the time, though, I assumed that The Sword in the Stone was an original invention. I’m not dense enough to think that Disney invented King Arthur, of course, but I just always assumed they’d done their own take on Le Morte D’Arthur or something — like they did with Mulan. And the anachronisms were just annoying Disney formula, like the Genie in Aladdin. (That wasn’t based on a re-telling, was it?)

What’s particularly odd is that in the book, I love it. I think it’s great hearing Merlin talk about electricity, and reading the narrator describe everything in contemporary terms and dialect while explaining that that’s exactly what he’s doing. It’s integral to the whole character of the book and the way it’s told, and it’s a genius move for an adaptation/re-telling.

So this is one of the rare cases where reading the original makes me appreciate the Disney version more. (While at the same time, being a little disappointed that it wasn’t as original as I’d always assumed). It also leaves me wondering if there are any other Disney movies that aren’t direct translations of a book; the only ones I can think of now are two of the most recent, Lilo & Stitch and Atlantis.

Car commercials are getting a lot more aggressive lately. Used to be the worst was that Mistubishi ad with the creepy woman in the beret pop-locking in somebody’s passenger seat like she was having an event. Now it’s hard to watch commercial TV for too long without feeling like you’ve been assaulted.

VW has been all up in everybody’s business, either trying to charm you into buying a Rabbit, scare you into buying a Jetta, or shame you into buying a Passat. The ads for the Rabbit, like the car, would be completely unremarkable and forgettable except for that damn song which grabs on like one of those Wrath of Khan worms. VOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLKSWAAAAAAGEN!

Then those Jetta ads, which don’t seem to be working as hard to sell you cars as they are to freak your shit out. People driving along having some dull conversation so you think it’s an ad for wine coolers or something then BAM! they get T-boned. The ads always end with two people saying “Holy Shit!” — the one in the ad, and me.

Then of course there’s the Passat ads, about “Low Ego Emissions.” I’ve gotta admit I kind of like the concept behind those. And you’ve got to like any series of ads that has a Nemesis. Not long after the Passat ads started, Hummer launched these:

This one also got a “Holy Shit!” out of me. The version posted there on YouTube is the one that’s running now, the one after somebody must have complained. The version I saw ended not with “Restore the Balance” but the real message of the campaign: “Restore Your Manhood.” The other ad in the series is a woman who gets pissed off when a rude woman cuts in front of her son on the playground, and her only recourse is to go out and buy a gas-guzzling Hummer. (She doesn’t even head back to drive the Hummer over the woman’s child, which would’ve at least made some sense).

Before I get lumped in with the “ecofeminist” who posted the YouTube video, and the other tofu defenders complaining about the ad, let me make one thing clear: it’s not the whole “you got to stop being such a damn pussy and start eating steak and drivin’ a big-ass truck and GIT-R-DONE!” that bugs me.

I mean, it’s stupid as hell, but nothing to get all upset on the internets about. Advertisers have been pulling this kind of nonsense for years, trying to grab guys by the short hairs and point and laugh at their flaccidity until they spend money on their whatever. There were a few months at EA where every morning on my way into work I had to walk under a ginormous screen showing an ad mocking guys for being impotent pussies until they bought a copy of Madden or Fight Night or whatever.

But that’s marketing; that’s what they do. There’s some parable that keeps getting trotted out about a scorpion giving a ride to a field mouse or a racoon or something. I forget the details, but it ends with the scorpion killing its passenger and when the passenger asks why he just says “I’m a scorpion” and the moral is that it’s pointless to get angry at a person for being true to his nature. Same goes for ad people: humilating you or flattering you into buying something is their purpose in life. There’s no point in getting all indignant about it.

And that’s why the Hummer ads have me baffled. Being honest is antithetical to what these people do — and if we are going to start seeing truth in advertising from anyone, it’s going to be Hummer?

But with these ads, they’re calling out their core market exactly for what they are — impotent turds with more financial worth than self-worth. They’re coming right out and saying, “You are so hopelessly insecure that even the most mundane of life’s setbacks send you reeling into an impotent rage for which the only solution is to immediately buy a ridiculously oversized, impractical, environment-destroying vehicle that should never have been released to the mass market.” In other words, the exact same message as this parody ad, but for reals.

If other advertisers decide to follow Hummer’s lead and start telling it like it is, I just have one urgent request: please, please, please, stay true to advertising convention and keep urine and menstrual fluid a bright royal blue.

Usually I like being over-worked, because it distracts me from my normal self-involved maudlin navel-gazing. But apparently my inner blogger is fighting for attention, because the weirdest bout of unexpected nostalgia popped in my head this morning.

I was in the shower, convincing myself that the code I’d written last night would work while washing my privates. (Hopefully, it’ll work while not washing my privates as well). This particular bit would work, I told myself, because all of the records in our database are keyed with a GUID. Then I became momentarily nostalgic and despondent.

A GUID, or Globally Unique IDentifier (also known as a UUID for Universally Unique), is a chunk of data that’s virtually guaranteed to be unique, any time you create it. So conceivably, a billion people on a billion different computers could create a new entry in your database a billion times, and each one would have a unique value. It works by taking a bit of info that identifies you and your computer and a semi-random number, but that’s mostly just extra padding. The key part of it is the current system clock time.

Thinking about it in that context was the first time it really struck me how fleeting time is. The milisecond you hit that button is never going to happen again. In fact, it’s never going to happen again to such a degree that the moment you did it can be used to uniquely identify you among billions of other people for all perpetuity. It’s like one of those old depressing bearded 1800s poets telling you “You can’t go home again” and then backing it up with mathematical proof.

The other day I drove by my old high school for the first time in years. It’s barely recognizable any more; there’s a huge multi-story addition with a separate entrance in front of what used to be the band room. It occurred to me that it’s been eighteen years (567,648,000,000 miliseconds, unless my math is off) since I graduated. And an enormous chunk of those trillions of miliseconds were completely wasted or worse, have been completely forgotten.

It’s probably just a combination of sleeping in my childhood bedroom and spending too much time in front of a computer, but now I’ve joined Roast Beef Kazenzakis and the developers of C# as the only people on the planet who can become depressed thinking about Java.

It’s counter-intuitive, but having a TiVo encourages a healthier relationship with the television box. You’re always hearing from TiVotees who go on about how they watch less TV than they did before they got one, but now I’ve got proof. Over the past month I’ve been subjected to more TV at my parents’ house and on airplanes and in hotel rooms than I’ve watched in the past four years.

The first thing that becomes obvious is that so much of TV is absolute crap. There’s a whole section of my TiVo subscription list that I always thought of as guilty pleasures, but now I can watch completely guilt-free. Because now I’ve seen what’s out there, and it’s worse. And what’s worse, I’ve been having to see it Clockwork Orange-style, unable to turn the channel but still instinctively reaching for the rewind, fast-forward and skip buttons like some kind of a phantom limb.

Or worse, stuck on a plane with a huge projection of Jeremy Piven all up in my face for an hour during turbulence.

Jeremy Piven’s Journey of a Lifetime
Also known as Jeremy Piven is an Enormous Douche. I’ve got no idea how something this loathsome made it to the normally-innocuous Travel Channel; I’m guessing there weren’t enough sexxxy spring break girls in it to make the cut for E! The premise is that inexplicably well-known supporting actor Piven makes a spiritual pilgrimage to India with a camera crew and a book about yoga he picked up while in LA.

One of the remarkable things about this show is that it manages to make egomaniac Anthony Bourdain seem low-key and selfless. Hell, he makes Richard Gere seem well-adjusted. We get shot after shot of Mr. Piven doing yoga here, talking to a swami there, feeling visibly moved by the plight of a child over there before being driven back to his luxury spa here. The key theme isn’t so much “India” or “East Asia” but “get this guy on-screen as much as possible.” It’s not filmed like a travel documentary but a campaign ad. Although I’m not sure what office he could be running for other than Arch-Douche of Doucheland.

And all the while he keeps bowing and saying “Namaste” in that insufferably pompous nasal whine. I like to think that the typical shooting schedule for the “documentary” consisted of 10 minutes getting footage of him shouting “look at me” during some deeply significant ceremony, followed by 20 minutes of the camera crew just beating him repeatedly.

Bones
I’m sure she’s a fine actress and all, but Emily Deschanel has that weird Cro-Magnon thing going on. I’m just sayin’. It was surprising, is all, because Zooey’s hot.

But the show is stone dumb, even for Fox. Read the character names and descriptions on that Wikipedia site, for starters: “Temperance Brennan” and “Seeley Booth” are your heroes. Take that petri dish of stupidity and add the desire to one-up CSI at every level, and you end up with forensic pathologists at the Smithsonian who have holographic technology straight out of Aeon Flux.

Plus it has a message: the one I saw was about a murdered prostitute addicted to plastic surgery and Dr. Temperance Brennan lamenting about people so convinced they’re ugly that they willingly give up their individuality. Which is a good, albeit preachy, point, although the whole time she was talking I couldn’t stop staring at her protruding brow ridge.

The Closer
This one isn’t so bad, actually; it’s your typical old-school hour-long crime show. I just wish somebody would give Emmy Award Nominee Kyra Sedgwick a dialect coach. One of the things about her character (who’s pretty much completely unlikable and annoying) is that she’s supposed to be from Atlanta. Nobody from Atlanta talks like that, not even on “Designing Women.”

Grey’s Anatomy
I only caught a few minutes of this one, and I don’t get it. I keep hearing about what a huge hit it is, and I guess I assumed it was a show about a hospital. From what I could tell it’s a show about self-obsessed average-looking women who wanted to have sex with equally average-looking guys. Maybe it’s got some subtleties I just didn’t pick up on.

Kenneth Copeland’s Believer’s Voice of Victory
I’ve seen three sermons/infomercials by this guy, and the recurring theme of each wasn’t so much faith and belief or even Christianity, but “Praise Jesus I’ve got so much money.” He talks about his boats and his planes and his big houses and his big cars and how all of us could have as much money as he does if we just have faith. And tax-exempt status, I’m assuming.

There are plenty of televangelists out there a lot more toxic — as far as I’m aware, Kenneth Copeland hasn’t blamed 9/11 on the liberals or said “nyah, nyah” to a stroke victim. I was just surprised by the rhetoric of the Copelands, having grown up watching Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker (yes, really) reveling in their wealth and excess and seeing how that whole thing played out.

The day after crunch mode ends on a project is like a bullet train hitting a concrete mammoth. “Brick wall” seemed too mundane. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, instead of finding myself sitting in a hotel room with nothing to do and too bored even to nap.

There’s still plenty to do, of course, but the key point is that I didn’t have to do anything today. I’m torn between halfway feeling guilty about goofing off today and then realizing that I don’t feel guilty about goofing off today and feeling guilty about that. Luckily things will get crazy busy again within a couple of days, and all that nonsense will stop.

I ended up going to Hollywood Boulevard to see Pirates of the Caribbean at The The El Capitan Theater. A while ago I complained about the El Capitan having too much of the Disney Regimented Whimsy vibe going on. That was a perfect example of what happens when Disney goes horribly awry; today was a great example of what happens when Disney gets it right.

The theater has piratey stuff over the sign, all through the lobby, and in the balcony. In the basement there’s a museum with props and costumes from the movie. If you pre-ordered your ticket, you got a bucket of popcorn and soda included (the tickets are ridiculously expensive, but a) that’s Disney, and 2) it was worth it). They had the organist going as usual, which is always cool; a drawing for tickets to Disneyland; and before the show started they did a flaming pirate skull/dungeon effect behind the screen, which was really well-done and great for getting geared up for the movie. It was pretty much exactly the promise of the theater — the Disney thing combined with the Great Movie House thing.

As for the movie itself: not bad. I’d been reading reviews panning it, and hearing people say they didn’t like it, but I don’t think it deserves the negativity. As far as movie-trilogy-franchise-building goes, it was suitably entertaining. And it worked all right as a movie in spite of being the Jan Brady of the trilogy — unlike The Two Towers (a better movie), Pirates had an arc to it.

What it needed was an editor. And a few more script revisions. In the first, stuff happened because it kind of made sense to happen. It was still as formulaic as a big Disney action franchise requires, but there was motivation for everything. The second just seems as if they threw everything they could think of up on the screen. I’m sure there was a thread through the whole thing that made it vaguely story-like, and I’ll bet that it was explained in one of the hundreds of lines of dialogue I couldn’t comprehend at all. Plus the thing could’ve stood to lose an hour or so.

Speaking of bad editing and meandering purposelessness, here’s a video I made from Hollywood Boulevard. I got myself a video camera for my birthday and was playing around with it and iMovie. But if you’re into that kind of thing, the internet makes it possible. Let me reiterate that this is a home movie, so don’t watch it expecting something interesting to happen.

Hard to believe I’ve been in LA for a week already. On one level it feels like it’s just been a day or two. On another level, it feels like I’ve been here for months. That would be a side effect of the wicked crazy crunch we’ve been in. Any notion that I’m no longer working in videogames is belied by the fact that I’m up until the oui hours (as in, “oui, je suis très fatigué”) and seeing nothing more than the office and my hotel room.

I was playing around with the MacBook’s webcam and even after four tries, I couldn’t stifle a yawn before the picture went off. I think that says it better than anything else.

Things will get back to normal at some point, I’m certain.

In other news, the pilot for the Amazing Screw-On Head TV series is watchable online at SciFi.com. I haven’t been able to watch it yet, both for lack of time and because of the hotel’s lousy internet connection. Someone watch it and tell me how it is.

Also, my favorite song at the moment is “We Run This” by Missy Elliott.