As they used to do on "Dragnet."

Dum de dum dum.

Stuffed into my paper New York Times this morning was a catalogue from Saks 5th Avenue department store that was beautiful and impactful. Except for the gigantic headline on the cover which read: "Better than fruitcake." (Despite the fact that Saks actually had a fruitcake for sale in the catalogue, tucked away on page 63.)

Here's the deal. The fruitcake joke? Done. Done. Done. Done. Done to death.

I know there are only so many places you can go when you have a Christmas theme to deal with. "Even Scrooge would approve." Something with Mrs. Claus for a change. Snowflakes! A reindeer joke.

But this catalogue is so defiantly uncreative it would put me off shopping at Saks even if I were in the market for a $22,000 watch.

46 years ago, George Lois did something different for a Christmas cover. He put heavyweight champion Sonny Liston as Santa on Esquire's cover. Esquire gained what today we would call huge WOM (word of mouth) and sold a shit-load of magazines. It was daring, controversial, unique, notorious, memorable and enduring.

Looking at the Saks catalogue makes me think that our entire world has been "beiged" to death.

The Nobel Prize is so last year.

Sorry, but I'm still outraged over the Nobel Prizes awarded over the past couple of months. Not Obama's peace prize, not the particular exigencies of any particular award, what upsets me is how the awards themselves were decided. Panel of experts? Professionals? Social scientists? Bosh!

Charles K. Kao isgroundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication.

14772 people like this.
Melinda Jones became a fan.

Jonas Salk is eradicating polio,
2334945745 people like this.

Don't ask.

Dumb ad of the day.

There are two full-page ads from the health-profiteer Merck in today's New York Times that have a subhead that is stunning in its banality.

"At Merck," (oh, I thought we were at Cincinnati airport) "we believe the most important condition is the human one."

Wow.

I've written Merck's CEO with this sublime revise: "At Merck, we believe breathing is as important as the breaths we take."

The wisdom of crowds.

Recently I came across an experiment conducted by University of Illinois psychology professor Daniel J. Simons. Here are the rudiments of the experiment. There are two teams, a white one and a black one. The teams pass basketballs only to team-members and you, the viewer, are asked to count how many passes the white team completes.

Despite watching the video acutely for its full 25-second length, most people--a large majority of people fail to see what's really occurred during that time period.

This experiment is an example of "sustained inattentional blindness." That means, in English, that when we sometimes focus on the tiny, we lose sight of the larger picture.

I think this is what happens in so much advertising research. Respondents are led to look at little things and miss what might really be happening. Which is why so much is absolute crap.

My father dispenses advice.

If I had to come up with a single word or phrase to describe the tilted little house I grew up in, it would be tight-lipped. It was like a house of Shakers. Of Grant Woods gothics. It was grudging and austere. It was lugubrious and dark. It was like a detention room in a strict high school. The loudest sound the buzz of fluorescence. It’s not that there wasn’t talking, it’s that any sort of noise, and human contact was discouraged.

My father was the only one who could break this mood but only if it suited him. If he was feeling rich and expansive, the lights were on and jazz was playing on his old RCA Victrola hi-fi. Living there was I think what it might be like to be soda in a shaken-up bottle. Once in a while you could burst out, but most of the time the cap was on and you were trapped, seething. You were closed inside the walls and even when you were out in the world, your sense of freedom was inhibited because you knew that re-incarceration would quickly follow.

When I was 11, my parents decided that I should go to summer camp in New Hampshire. I should get out of our decaying Yonkers neighborhood and play ball and swim in a real lake with other kids. I had never been away from home before and knew no one else who was going off to this camp. The night before I was to head over to the Adventurer’s Restaurant, a big, sprawling neon hamburger place in the Cross County Shopping Center just about a mile or so from my parents’ house and get the chartered bus to camp, my father came into the room I shared with my older brother. He sat down on my brothers’ bed, the lower bunk.

In those days, a kids’ knowledge of girls and sex was much more limited than it is today. This is before the airwaves and the internet and even retail stores were inundated with sexuality. Language also was less liberal than today. I had never heard my parents curse, even when they fought, and though I had a working cursing lexicon, I was far from fluent.

“Listen,” he said, “you’re going away tomorrow. Don’t be wild, ok?”

Years later, I realized this was my father’s sex talk with me. He had reduced the stuff of so many sitcoms, of so many fatherly chats, in a brilliance of economy, to just four words. Don’t be wild, ok?

As a consequence of this quiet din, I learned to handle issues in my life above my shoulders. That is, when I was troubled I would shut down my mouth, make blind my eyes and deafen my ears and draw upon the experiences I never had to solve, or attempt to solve what was bothering me. Doing so I found was better than the alternative.

Somehow, when I was just 14, for instance, I had made my high school’s varsity baseball team and was named, as a freshman, starting third baseman. This was a team full of cagey Hispanic kids who were lithe and fast and it consistently finished as one of the top squads in the county. After I played one or two rotten games at the start of the season, I was sure I was going to be relegated to the bench. I don’t know what came over me, I guess a nostalgia for something I never knew, but I told my father about it. He thought for a moment and then quoted Shakespeare, "Henry IV" to be exact. “Uneasy,” he said, “lies the head that wears a crown.” “Thanks, Dad,” I said. And I left the room.

Now it was a couple years later and I was going to my first high school dance. I left the house in a hurry. I wanted no advice, Shakespearean or otherwise, no matter how much I needed and I didn’t want anyone to catch me and give me some. Of course, I left the house nervous as well. There were two girls I liked and I wasn’t sure if they liked me back. It was my first dance and every bit as daunting as your first parachute jump into enemy territory.

I don’t remember much about the dance. I suppose I had a moderately lousy time, like pretty much everyone else did. There’s a type of kid who has a good time at dances, a good time at parties and I wasn’t one of them and never would be.

When I got home that evening my father was still awake. He wasn’t waiting up for me. He just hadn’t gone to sleep as yet. Maybe the ballgame had gone into extra innings or something. I sat down on the ottoman that went with his chair. He slid his bare feet over for me.

“How was the dance,” he asked me.
“It was ok.”
“Did you get drunk?”
“No.”
“Did you get laid?”
“No.”
“Then what the fuck did you go for?”

Shakespearean.

Sometimes there's nothing to say.

Advertising news at its very second best.

If you grew up in New York, if you were a kid and a sports fan in the 50s and 60s, you grew up with Marty Glickman announcing the Knicks. The Knicks games at the time were sponsored by a chain of restaurants called Nedick's. And Glickman would say after a Knicks bucket "Good! Like Nedicks." This was a phrase you still heard when I was a kid in the 70s, especially if you hung around with some older kids. Often Glickman's phrase would be shortened to "Nedicks!" So if you were playing basketball and one of these older guys hit a basket, there was a good chance he would exclaim "Nedicks!"

Earlier today I read in Stuart Elliot's ad column in The New York Times that owing to our rotten economy, marketers are engaged in "broth wars." People are eating more soup and marketers are spending ad dollars going after a larger "share of bowl" or some such. Even Manischewitz is getting into the act. And in the process they are using once again their iconic slogan "Man-O-Manischewitz." A phrase that came in handy in the days before you were allowed to curse publicly or in front of your parents.

Then, of course, there were the radio ads that used to play on WQXR in New York that featured Allan Swift as the "beloved herring maven." Often those commercials would end with this fractured rhyme "“Make your life a little bit brighter, eat a little herring by Vita."

Man-O-Manischewitz.

This headline was not crowd-sourced.

There are things that burst on the national political scene and dominate the "national debate" that are usually so trivial and unimportant but somehow they are picked up by the networks and they overwhelm things like wars and global warming.

We've had focus over the past few elections on such major issues as American-flag lapel pins, flag burning, french fries, haircuts, pants suits and shooting wolves from small aircraft. I would argue that none of these topics deserves any attention whatsoever. But I suppose because they have a certain accessibility they become symbols for larger issues.

The advertising trade press is currently all agog about the notion of crowd-sourcing. There's now a Crispin spin off that bases its entire offering on it. There are crowd-sourcing conferences and crowd-sourcing experts.

To my mind, our industry has almost always been infected by crowd sourcing. Focus groups, who likely approved the design of the Pontiac Aztec, above, seem to me to be an example. A bunch of people who individually know nothing when they're bunched together know more than people who have years of experience. Likewise, think of all the clients who ask their wives, or the janitor or show an ad around the office. This too, is crowd sourcing.

Fiddling with asinine topics like crowd sourcing amid the tectonic changes going on in our industry is like arguing about what kind of screen doors to put on a submarine.

Outside my window this morning and Iraq.

I opened a living-room window this morning to let a little air into the apartment after an unseasonably warm and humid yesterday and I saw the fragment of a halloween costume strewn on York Avenue. It was a pair of enormous naked plastic breasts with distended nipples.

I always wonder what goes on in the heads of the Chinese who manufacture such stupidity in their factories. What they must think of us and our values. They producing fake costume breasts cheaply so we can get drunk on an artificial holiday and then throw the petro-by-product costume away in the gutter where the trash man will pick it up and send it back to China as toxic landfill.

But today I also thought about other body parts. I am reading Pulitzer-winner David Finkel's new book "The Good Soldiers" on the war that makes no news that we are fighting in Iraq. Finkel brings you there. He brings you the filth, the corruption, the false promises, the lies, the stink, the fear, and most horrifying, the death and the amputations. He puts you in the turret of the under-armored Humvees where roadside bombs sever the limbs of American teenagers. They come home as stumps and we never see them.

We are watching Dancing With Stars or Brain-Damage-Ball (football) on a fascist-run network that propagated this war in blind allegiance to an un-elected military junta we called the Bush administration.

Imagine a pile of the limbs of the 30,000 American soldiers wounded and the almost 5,000 killed. Not to mention the millions or so affected Iraqis.

We have been taught by war movies that bullets and bombs leave little red holes in bodies. We don't see or read about arms flying through the air or heads being severed by shrapnel.

We're more concerned with fake boobs.