Kaiser Permanente Logo

Here in California we have a managed care organization named Kaiser Permanente, and they have a really odd-looking logo for a medical insurance/care group. It basically looks like a family of Lego people being irradiated by some radioactive something in front of them. Here’s what it looks like:

http://www.ieuw.org/images/kaiser%20permanente%20logo.jpg

Maybe what they’re trying to say is that if you get care from them, they’ll make you strong like The Incredible Hulk, and that’s why they have that radiation thing going on. But I doubt it. In any case, it seems odd to me. But I suppose it’s better than a logo of some general practice guy giving a crying kid a shot.

Super Committee!

It looks like the good old super committee can’t agree on nothin’. Republicans want to cut lots of spending, and Democrats want to raise “serious revenue”, but Republicans won’t budge on taxes. So, what to do? I have an idea: Why not let them battle it out American Gladiators style? They could put it on Pay Per View, and I’ll bet it would get lots and lots of revenue, and they could fight over what stuff gets cut, who to raise taxes on, etc. This whole showing them just talking on CSPAN for free crap ain’t workin’! Plus, it’s boring. But hey: Congress has the lowest approval rating in history, so I’ll bet everyone would love to see them beating on each other with those giant Q-Tip thingies and stuff, right? (I know I would! Especially if they have to wear those dumb American Gladiators outfits!) Hell, that’s all they’re good for anyway if they can’t do this one simple thing! So let’s demand it or threaten to vote them all out! Who’s with me?

FreeStyle Lite

Yes, they make the glucose test strips that “target the blood”. That’s what everyone says when they first try them (in the commercials). I don’t think it’s scripted, because I’m sure everyone would just naturally say: “Hey, it targets the blood”, as opposed to: “Hey, it just sucked the blood right up”. But I guess there’s some sort of bigotry against using the expression: “It sucks your blood right up!” And I thought vampires were supposed to be cool! (Or did they jump the shark and nuke the fridge at the same time already?)

But you know, the FreeStyle Lite test strips are kinda pointed like vampire fangs (Just get rid of those butterflies!). So why not make a separate set for Halloween and for teenagers where they look like teeth, and the tester looks like a vampire’s head? They’d have to have a plug for two test strips at a time, but that’s okay, right? Maybe it would work especially well for diabetic couples! (Especially for goth couples who love vampires!) After all, it sucks having to stab your finger to test your blood glucose level; why not make it into a game where you pretend it’s a vampire? Then they could use the more accurate line: “It sucks your blood!”

Here’s the website for FreeStyle Lite:

https://www.myfreestyle.com/

Amazon Kindle Fire Ad

A new TV spot for the Amazon Kindle Fire shows a woman walking down the sidewalk and up the stairs to the door of her urban townhouse to find her Amazon Kindle Fire waiting on her doorstep. Yeah, right! That thing would have been stolen in a matter of seconds had it been left outdoors like that! In this economy? Are you kidding me? I live inside an apartment building with locked gates, and sometimes my packages “walk away” from my apartment hallway, so imagine how long a package would last on a city street!

But then again I suppose the element of fantasy is always desirable in advertising to enchant the potential sucker, um, I mean, consumer. (Actually, the Kindle is great. I’m just talking about advertising in general with that “sucker” comment. Because after all, advertising is the business of tricking you into buying something you don’t need with money you can’t spare. Right? That’s why it’s an art form. Like an entertainer mixed with a scam artist. Or something like that.) But I really hope they’re not planning on leaving them outside like they do in this ad, at least not in downtown urban areas: they might just disappear, as endless traffic makes it practically impossible to notice anything suspicious. But then again, the Kindle had an old ad a couple of years ago where some beautiful model in stop motion animation plays a magician, so I guess it ties right in (making things disappear, that is!)! (BTW: That old ad for the Kindle was one of the real champs of contemporary advertising, if you ask me.)

Here’s the optimistic spot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opnJA3FoCis

And here’s the older Kindle ad that I think is one of the great ads of all time, using as it does such wonderful imagery as a way to illustrate the stories you can get lost in while reading on the Kindle (They should have advertised the library like this, too!):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsPF1_tovQw

And here are two more I was less familiar with that are by the same people, and are just as good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6wWy9DwgPQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYUVpjrzvXc&feature=related

This is some of the finest work I’ve ever seen, both conceptually and execution-wise. Three cheers for the people who made these ads! Hurrah! Hooray! Yay!

Buffalo Wild Wings Responsible for LSU Win over Alabama?

I’m not saying they are, and I’m not saying they aren’t; but just remember that the Alabama/LSU game went into overtime because Alabama missed a bunch of field goals, and then look at this damning evidence:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIVtwjdfb2M&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C8y5z_7YtA

Now, I didn’t see any sprinklers, but maybe they had a wind machine blow those field goals wide. Who can say? But after seeing these ads for Buffalo Wild Wings on TV, it looks mighty suspicious to me…

Son of Sam I Am

This killer, “Son of Sam I Am”, is the son of the Dr. Suess character Sam I Am, the hero harasser of the bestselling children’s book: Green Eggs and Ham. Sam I Am so relentlessly and ruthlessly nagged, harassed, harangued and bullied his son and everyone else around him to try green eggs and ham, that it drove his son insane; and now, whenever anyone mentions eggs, ham, or the color green, he goes into a homicidal blackout mode where he massacres people and doesn’t remember what happened later on. He simply wakes up in a pool of blood, with bodies piled up all around him. So what else could he do with them except of course to make green sausage and bacon out of them? Well, they go better with eggs than ham anyway, so I suppose it could be worse.

But think of what a bad example Sam I Am left for his son! Green eggs and ham are bound to be all chock full of salmonella and trichinosis; and that’s every bit as deadly as a knife murder! So he’s basically showing his son day-after-day how it’s okay to nag and harass people to their breaking point, so that eventually they will be willing to do anything just to get rid of you and make you leave them alone, and then to kill them with poison! And with this approach, the victims don’t even bother to ask how the eggs and ham got green to begin with! How devilishly evil!

Well, it turns out that they (the eggs and ham) weren’t actually green to begin with, but that the people were so obstinate about not encouraging Sam I Am after what a pestering jerk he always is, that they refused to try anything he offered them. But for the record, those eggs were normal yellow, and that ham was normal pink, but these subjects/victims of his unwanted attention resisted for so long, that the eggs and ham went bad, and hence became the green eggs and ham of the book we all know and love. But it seems that it happened that Dr. Suess found out about this whole situation near the end of its occurrence, and so he only ever heard about the eggs and ham being green to begin with (but they weren’t!), and he found this tale to be so charmingly didactic that he didn’t bother to find out what ever happened to the people who finally acquiesced to trying the green eggs and ham before he ran off to write the story; but just so you know: they all died!!

So not only did the Son of Sam I Am get driven insane by the endless ruthless nagging and harassment from his father, but he was also haunted by the knowledge that his father caused the deaths of countless people as well through his recklessly depraved indifference, bullying, nagging and manipulation, and he was powerless to stop him!

(Well, this is just a joke, and I love Dr. Suess, so I hope it doesn’t get me sued; but if it does, I can write a children’s book about it: Greggy Gets a Lawsuit in Litigationland, by Dr. Sued. {Actually, the Dr. Sued name always seemed like the book he’d write would be called: Medical Men in Malpracticeland, by Dr. Sued.} And that would make Dr. Suess into Dr. Sues. But that would open up a whole world of new books for young lawyers to be, like: Oh, the Settlements You’ll Get! by Dr. Sues.)

Centrum Specialist Vitamin Ad

Hey, great: Centrum has specialty vitamins! Well, it’s about time, since I’m tired of taking the regular Centrums and not being sure that they’re formulated personally enough for me. Because you know what happens when they’re not, right? I took Centrum Silver by accident, and now my hair is turning silver! Aaaa! Or maybe it’s just old age. But I reject that, and I blame Centrum Silver! (Maybe if I sue them, I could get them to buy me my mid-life-crisis-mobile! Yay!)

So now Centrum has specialty (“Specialist”) vitamins, and it’s about time! There’s an ad that shows there’s some that are specifically formulated for your heart, some that are formulated for pregnant women, etc. But what happens if the pregnant woman accidentally takes the heart kind? Will she give birth to a giant heart? And then, since it’s just a heart, without blood flowing into it, will it become a vampire heart that attacks and sucks the blood out of everyone else? It could happen! All it would have to do would be to pump, and then it could hop around like a kangaroo, attacking people! We’d all be defenseless like Sylvester the Cat was against that baby kangaroo (and that one was just a baby)! And it would be all Centrum’s fault!

Ah, I see it now: Centrum is helping vampires take over the world with their new “vitamins”, and we’ll never suspect until it’s too late! And I’ll bet they financed those Twilight movies too, just so if anyone figured it out, then they’d probably think it would be a good thing, since vampires are all the rage now! Well, I’m onto those vitamaniacs! They’ll never get away with it! I’m calling the werewolves: surely Jacob will help me foil their dastardly plot!