The greatest commercial ever made

     A coworker showed this video to me this morning, I thought it was hilarious. Subsequently I decided to post it on the blog and then figured "why not analyze it to see if it really is a good commercial according to the criteria in class?" so here it is:

Perception facet (is the advertisement attention getting?)
-"Look at your man, now look at me, now back at your man"--yes

Emotional/affective facet (does the advertisement stimulate wants, touches the emotions, or elicits feelings?)
-"with two tickets to that thing you love, look again, the tickets are now diamonds!"--absolutely

Cognitive facet (does the advertisement explain what it will do for the consumer?)
-"sadly, he isn't me but if he switched to old spice instead of using ladies scented body wash he could smell like me....anything is possible when your man smells like old spice and not a lady"--anything is possible when your man uses old spice, yes.

Association facet (is the “product” transformed into something special?)
-it arises out of diamonds so, yes.

Persuasion facet (is the advertisement compelling and persuasive?)
-only if you want anything to be possible.

Behavior facet (does the advertisement make the viewer want to take some action?)
-of course, buy old spice for their "man".

Creativity (not one the facets, but important)
-"I'm on a horse"

According to our criteria in class it's possible this is the greatest commercial ever created!

Short track speed skating rocks!

I love short track speed skating! I think it's the greatest racing sport ever created. I'm sitting here knowing that I need to write my paper for SFL 351 but I can't take myself away from the action! only 10 more minutes until the final race!

Now for the media connection. Isn't it funny how television can take over our lives? My paper is probably a lot more important than the olympics, at the same time the olympics only come around ever couple of years. In contrast to that isn't it awesome that we can "be there" even though we're not actually there? I guess it's simply the great conundrum of television. I suppose the key is having enough self-discipline to put the most important things first. Which in this case I'm going to say it's short-track speed skating. GO USA!!!!

p.s. I'm really antagonizing these Korean skaters right now.

Video Games: A memoir

After the lecture yesterday I was thinking about my experiences with video games. I decided to write a memoir about it. When I was five my grandparents gave me a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) with Super Mario Bros. 3! I was extremely excited,they had one at there house that we could go and play duck hunt and Super Mario Bros. on, as well as excitabike, they also had Skate-r-die but I couldn't ever figure that game out. About this same time I was learning how to utilize a computer. My dad taught me how to use a 5.25 floppy drive and some minor DOS (Disk Operating System) commands. We only had Golf and starfall. I spent hours designing the most ridiculous golf courses you've ever seen. I didn't have patience to play the game though.

My parents didn't ever want to buy us video games, they were too expensive, but we inherited some cool computer games from my super computer savvy uncle. I remember being unable to sleep at around nine years-old because I was so excited to play SimAnt, so excited that I jumped out of bed and headed to the computer where I installed the game and played until about 5am. This would be the first of my late night digital game playing. Super Nintendo (SNES) came out sometime in this same time period. I told my parents that if Santa brought me a super nintendo that I would never need another game system ever in my life. On christmas morning there was no Super Nintendo but after breakfast there as I was heading downstairs to play with some K'nex I saw a big box on the bottom step. It was a Super Nintendo! We played Donkey Kong country in all of it's 16-bit glory the entire day!
I was already in love with video and computer games when I turned thirteen but my friends and I still spent plenty of time jumping on the trampoline, playing basketball and swimming in ditches. When my family moved my new friends were hardcore gamers. I was introduced to Warcraft 2, Starcraft and Mechwarrior. These were the first violent games to grace my home. My parents weren't especially pleased but I played them all the same. One of the greatest days was when we bought a 56K modem, wowie! What a blazing speed! It took a lot of time and effort but eventually I got hooked up onto Battle.net for some serious multiplayer action. Right as we got it hooked up Jedi Knight 2 came out and STAR WARS was just starting to get big again (The Phantom Menace) .

Then we moved again, my new friends weren't into gaming. In fact they were all seniors and I was a freshman, they were much more interested in cars and women. So I had to adapt making sure to keep up some gaming on the side. One new thing I learned in this era was that you could auto-run sports games through entire seasons and bet on who would be the winner, it was a great way to gamble! Ok, I never actually did this but it sounded pretty sweet at the time.
Once all my friends graduated, the residue of the group took up some old school gaming. With our small teenage fortunes we went about buying as many NES and SNES games as we could get our hands on. Life was good and we were playing a lot of Mortal Kombat and as an added bonus I was the good at it! So good that no one wanted to play anymore. We soon started playing a lot more Playstation 2, Tekken 3 was the game of choice. I was pretty good at it until my friend, Ben, started practicing. We hung out a lot my junior year and played a lot of "vids" as we came to call them.

My senior year I became a lot more interested in my high school activities, student council, dances, choir, drama etc. I didn't have much time for video games but occasionally would play with friends when we were hanging out. The big game around this time was Grand Theft Auto (GTA) and Grand Theft Auto 2 (GTA2). This was the first time I realized that video games could have an effect on a person. Leaving a friend's house one day after playing GTA I had this insatiable desire to run over a mailbox. I didn't do it but I wanted to do it so bad and felt like it wouldn't be a bad thing to the point that I realized the game was affecting me a lot! This turned me off from GTA but not video games as a whole.

Now for the climax, I was now a freshman in college and living life to the fullest. I chose to live at home and attend the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Warcraft 3 came out at this time and I spent many late nights trying to beat the game, which I never did. My first semester I dated, met a girl and we started dating. But after the first semester I reconnected with my friend Ben and we started playing vids again. I decided that video games and hanging out with the guys was a lot better than a girlfriend. Plus, I was a premie anyway so big deal! We began to live for Thursday and Friday nights. I didn't have class on Friday so we would play until 5 or 6am. Mostly Halo, but the occasional Tekken or Parapa the Rapa (we reserved that for when we were really tired and had fully imbibed ourselves with Mountain Dew, the real gamers drink). The most ironic thing that happened during this time was that Ben my old gamer friend admitted that he didn't really care for video games but that they bred sociality so he bought them for that reason. We enlisted another guy during this time, he actually introduced us to Halo, we called him Obi. We also became really interested in Razor scooters, specifically customizing the decks (that isn't relevant but it makes me laugh).

During my mission, my friend Ben moved to Utah to ski. Obi moved back and forth between Utah and Missouri and ended up back in Montana with his family. When I returned home I tried to get back together for some vids but it wasn't the same in fact, Ben was engaged...lame. The good news was that I still had Warcraft III and my family had purchased decent internet and put a Local area network in. So my brother and I enjoyed some fearsome battles together. In fact I once told my then girlfriend, now wife that I was tired so she would go home and I could play Warcraft with my brother. She wasn't too happy when she found out the truth. Guitar Hero was now on the rise as well and I became very interested in it along with Dance Dance Revolution. I realized that these games, which promoted socializing, were a lot more fun than the solitary games. Eventually I got engaged and moved to Utah to go to school. My fiance was not the slightest bit interested in vids much to my chagrin. I poked and prodded but she wouldn't budge, she really hated video games. So it was something I sacrificed, needless to say I was really surprised when she bought me a Playstation 2! It functions as a DVD player more than anything else now, except for a guitar hero stint when I got to the end guy and then my brother and his friend came into town and stayed at our place, it hasn't work correctly since, and yes I'm still bitter about it.

When I was a freshman playing games at Ben's his brother-in-laws would come hang out with us, drink dew, and play vids all night. I dreamed of a day when I would do that with my own brother-in-laws or at least my own brothers. I'm still waiting. My brother-in-laws aren't too interested and my brothers didn't catch the video game bug that I did. They'd rather go to sleep than stay up half the night playing vids. For whatever reason, I have no idea, video games really bring people together. I say people but I mean men. Yeah, for the most part they are a real waste of time but when I think back about nostalgic periods of life I think back to that magical freshman year when we played and played and played until we crashed. Life was good, in a different way than today. So ladies, when your husband needs time to go play some ridiculously violent video game (I say violent in jest) with his buddies let him. You probably don't understand it but he doesn't understand the things that you do with your friends either so just let him. In a strange way, I think he'll be a better man for it.

*Disclaimer: I am in no way saying that your husband, boyfriend, brother or otherwise should engross himself in a digital world of asocial activity in which he throws his life away. I'm only saying that once in a while it's kinda nice.*

A 24 year old's entry into the world of Harry Potter

I don't feel like I read for fun that often but reflecting on the past year I realized that I don't do too bad. Especially if I can count audiobooks, and I do. I missed the whole Harry Potter thing as a child. I was one too many years old when the first book came out and was too concerned with other things when the craze began. So after putting it off for about a decade I decided to catch up with pop culture last fall. I successfully listened to all seven books in audio format in the course of about two months. At the time I had a job in which I could listen to music/books at the same time as working. However, after the second book I could no longer limit myself to just listening at work and I started listening whenever I had a free moment. This culminated with me finishing the seventh book at 4:30AM sometime in November. Yeah, it was sweet.
Needless to say the Harry Potter series is a set of books about a orphan boy who finds out he is the most well known wizard in the "wizarding world" it chronicles his journeys for seven years as he attends wizarding school and eventually defeats the extremely powerful dark wizard...well you know.

I don't think that Harry Potter changed my life in anyway, it was simply a lot of fun to read. It did change my feelings about the Harry Potter movement however, prior to reading the books I'd seen a few of the movies and came away feeling like wizards were pretty lame. The book changed my perspective. If I learned anything from these books it was that your imagination can do a much better job than a movie if for no other reason than that you can customize your own version of the characters. For example, in my version of Harry Potter the competitors in The Goblet of Fire don't wear lame jerseys. Everything is a lot more hardcore in my version as well. And finally the Weasley boys aren't as ugly in my version (this might sound like a strange one but Fred and George were my favorite characters and they were grossly different than the version in my head, I simply chose the most blatantly skewed characteristic).
Books are awesome, all the best ideas start out in written form and they aren't limited by technology nor do they become laughable with time. Books are timeless, otherwise we wouldn't still be reading the Odyssey and the Illiad, or the Bible for that matter. I don't feel like I've read too many books in my lifetime that have resulted in some sort of epiphany but that doesn't mean that there isn't an impact in some way or another.

Walk Two Moons

I started using heavily in the ninth grade (cliff notes that is) I have always had a difficult time getting into a book. However, I remember really enjoying the book Walk Two Moons when I was about ten years old. I remember very little about the book, in fact the only thing I remembered before looking it up for the book assignment was that someone was bitten by a cottonmouth water moccasin and they cut two slits in the persons leg and then someone else sucked the venom out. I decided to read up on the book and began to remember as I read a brief synopsis. The book is about a girl whose mother has died, and throughout the book she tells her story as well as her friends as she journeys across the country with her grandparents.
I don't know why I enjoyed this book as a kid. I remember really getting into it one night and staying up reading the book by night-light until the wee hours of the morning. I remember not being able to remember what the book was about just a few months later though. I think it's interesting that the only thing I really remembered was the grandma being bit by a cottonmouth water moccasin. I grew up in Idaho and never had heard of such a snake, but I assumed they were prevalent in the midwest. When my family moved to the midwest I went on a camping trip with the young men and we were out swimming when we saw one gliding along the lake. No one acted like it was a big deal. They obviously hadn't read Walk Two Moons.
I remember being intrigued that the grandpa sucked out the venom. When I learned later that the better treatment for such an injury was a tourniquet I wondered if the grandma would have lived if they used that method instead of trying to suck it out. Perhaps this was the first time in my life that I ever really connected with the characters of a story.
Overall, I don't think this book had a very long lasting impression on me. Except for the part about the snake. Which for whatever reason I have thought back on several times in the course of my life.

They really get to you

Ever since the advertising lecture I've been thinking a lot about the ways that the advertising media gets to you. I found this cool little gadget and embedded it in my blog. It's a pinball game but in actuality it's a advertisement for seven up, maybe their trying to reach the hardcore pinball crowd. However I'm not really sure how this kind of advertising works. Since adding this free advertisement to my blog I've had no more desire to drink seven up. I think about this all the time, coke and pepsi ads are extremely pervasive yet I am still not a coke or pepsi drinker, in fact I don't even drink soda (except for independent root beer brewers!). Perhaps it's just getting the product out there though. Maybe it's all about making your name synonymous with soda or whatever you're selling. I think apple has done a good job with this. For example, when you see a mac on television you think "oh there's a mac!" or maybe "oh, there's another mac." But you knew it was a mac! If you see a dell on tv you think "hmmm...there's a pc" it doesn't help sell Dell computers but it helps sell macs. In reality a Mac is a PC (personal computer) but for whatever reason (probably the operating system) they created a separate identity and it's done wonders for their advertising. Anyway, just a thought.

Music has saved my life...or at least my sleep habits

Last night I caught my son on film doing one of his favorite things, watching his mobile. We've tried all sorts of different types of music but none of them work like his mobile. Which is kind of a funny thing because it's simply a music-box-windup type machine i.e. the sound quality is pretty poor. He hasn't learned about sound quality yet though and doesn't seem to care. Whenever he hears his mobile start, regardless of how upset he is, he immediately calms down.



For the past few months I've been thinking about what an impact music has on us, or at least myself. I like angry music when I'm angry, sad music when I'm sad and so forth. Most of the time listening to this music only makes things worse or if I decided to listen to something happy then it would be a good thing. Music is interesting because it is a background type of medium, rarely do we let it take all of our time but rather it hangs out with us while we do other things. I think this is one of the reasons that we don't notice the effects of music very often.
I'm glad that it does have an effect though otherwise I wouldn't be sleeping as well as I am now, which isn't saying much.