What Were They Thinking? — Toasted Bagels

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

I found this in the small appliance section at a Haggen’s supermarket in Stanwood.  It’s a combination toaster and toaster oven.  I’m not sure if that makes sense itself: I would have to see the mechanism to convince myself that have the toaster oven heat isn’t escaping out the top.

Most toasters in recent years have been made with wider slots, to accept thicker bread.  (My own at home has stabilizers in the slot to keep narrower items upright in the slot, and it has a push-up mechanism to make it easier to get small items like English muffins out.  It even has a warming rack so you can warm a pastry sitting above the slots.)

This one, as you can see, is wide enough to accept a bagel.  Wait a minute.  Look at that picture.  They’ve put whole bagels in for the picture.  Who in their right mind toasts bagels without slicing them first?!

You can see that the same pic is used on the web page for the Toastation, which comes in two and four-bagel versions.
 

Dream Journal: February 9, 2010

Every now and then I have one of those dreams which has nothing particularly weird in at all.  Those are the ones that freak me out the most, because I really wonder what’s up to lead my head down that path:

I was in a real estate office, signing papers to purchase a new house.  Only after I signed did we go to look at the house.  (Okay, so there was one weird bit.)

The house was in a residential neighborhood, at the end of a street with some trees beyond it.  The house was small, one story, with an attached garage.  Inside, one room was painted blue with white trim, and had a loose pile shag carpet of the same color blue, with white flecks in it.  (Lint would never show on this carpet.)  Another room was olive green, with the same style carpet, again matching.

The garage was small, only suitable for a small car, and it still had boxes in it from a previous tenant.  There were also a couple cool bookcases (with no books on them).  With the stuff in the garage, there might not have been room even for a car.  I remember thinking that the house didn’t have room for all my stuff and my boyfriend’s.

Beyond the trees was a small ravine with a rushing stream at the bottom.  I was worried that the stream might flood with the rains, but when we went into the house’s basement, it was well sealed (although I’m not sure how we could tell).

That’s it for the dream.  In the real world, my boyfriend and I have talked about eventually combining households, presumably selling our existing houses and buying a new one together.  But it wouldn’t be this house; way too small (and he’s got to have a garage or work space for his tools, not to mention all my comics, his tikis and masks and ethnic art, and so on).
 

Stupid, Stupid Ads! — Non-Olympic Sponsors

“Stupid, Stupid Ads!” dissects ads that try to do something underhanded or just plain stupid.

This ad is a window sticker about three feet high from a local Subway shop.

Look, it’s the official sandwich of the 2010 Winter Olympics!  Er, well, maybe not.  "Winter Sports".  "Coverage from Vancouver".  A logo with a bowl of mountains and a stretched banner (the NBC coverage logo).  No linked rings.  Sure as heck meant to evoke the 2010 Winter Olympics, but without paying the hefty license fees attached to that.  Just the fees needed to have the NBC Sports logo and presumably logo design.

Maybe this is just a case of “Olympics?  What Olympics?  There are Olympics going on?  Really?  We’re just promoting hot food for people who, you know, like to snowboard and stuff.”

I’ve heard that the Olympics licensing fees are stupid high.  This looks to be a bit of backlash about that to me.

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Updated on March 3, 2010

I turns out that there’s a term for these fake tie-ins: “Ambush Marketing”.  And for this years Winter Olympics, the top ambush marketers were Verizon, Subway, and Pepsi.

Here’s an article from The Global Language Monitor.  I found it from Schott’s Vocab blog.

Frances Reid, R.I.P.

Frances Reid, the actress who played matriarch Alice Horton on the long-running soap opera Days of Our Lives died this week at age 95.

(That’s a damn good run for anyone!)

Although I haven’t watched the show for years, I was a very faithful watcher in my late teens and 20s.  My first episode was Bo and Hope’s wedding, when Emma burst in to threaten everyone, under the control of the Dragon.  (I think that’s right.  My memory tells me around May 17, 1985, and web research says it was actually May 23 of that year, which might be the date the wedding actually finished; you know how soaps stretch things.)

After that, I was hooked and I watched Days every day for about a decade, missing less than one episode a year.  At one point, I had no TV picture reception where I lived, but I could get the sound just fine, so I would record it during the day and listen to it with dinner, like an old radio soap opera.  (It was months before I knew what the character of “Molly of the Mountains” looked like, and I had to imagine that whole “trapped in a wrecked train car” sequence.)  I was a regular poster in rec.arts.tv.soaps for a few years.  I even have the novelizations of the early years of the show, which filled in a lot of the Doug & Julie backstory.

But back to Frances Reid as Alice Horton.  What brought me back to the show day after day, more than the outlandish plots (like a drugged Marlena acting as the Salem Slasher and killed Alice by choking her with doughnuts, but it was really a plot by Toni DiMera in an exact duplicate of Salem created on a tropical island?  Really?  WTF?  Can’t we get back to simpler times, like Marlena possessed by the Devil?) was the sense of “family” the show promoted with the Horton clan, and Alice as the matriarch.  I fondly remember the annual Christmas tree decorating, pulling out the ornaments with the Horton kids/grandkids/great grandkids/etc. names on them.

In some ways, Alice Horton served as a bit of a substitute grandmother for me at the time, since she looked a bit like my own grandmother.  (Is that weird?)  (My grandmother is still alive, age 88 or so.)  Even though I haven’t even seen her face in over a decade, the Alice Horton and Frances Reid are still there in my heart.
 

Interbay Scooters is Gone

I got my wonderful Kymco scooter from Interbay Scooters in April 2008.

Last weekend, I drove by their location on 15th, only to find the storefront was empty.  Wha-wha-what? They seemed to be doing well the last time I was in there!

Apparently Phil and Liane have retired and Seattle Cycle Center bought out their inventory (and retained their mechanic), opening Seattle Scooter Center.

I haven’t visited the new location yet, but I will soon.  (Maybe tomorrow.)  Best of luck to them, and to Phil and Liane!

(And I’m already lusting after the new Quannon 150 entry-level sport bike.)
 

What Were They Thinking? — They’ve Suffered Enough, Just Give It to Them

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This video on CNN.com covers some controversy over merchandise using the New Orleans Saints fan phrase “Who Dat?”

The story itself is utter junk, playing things as the Big Bad NFL picking on small businesses, since the end of the video reveals that the NFL complaint is narrowly targeted to items which use the Saints’ name/logo/colors, and thus imply an approved connection to the team.

The real junk, though, is the commentator, who repeatedly implies that because New Orleans had to deal with Hurricane Katrina — and perhaps just as bizarrely, because the Saints have had many losing seasons in the past — the NFL should just let this slide.

What’s up wit’ dat?

Sorry, but that’s not how trademarks work.  You either defend them or you abandon them.  Maybe you license them for a smaller fee than usual, but you don’t say “Awww, how cute!  The team has finally had a good season, so give up the trademark so that carpetbaggers trying to make a quick buck can really profit!”

(How long does New Orleans get a free pass due to Katrina, anyway?  Do New Yorker’s get to hawk trashy logo merchandise for the Giants and the Jets in perpetuity due to September 11?  What about the Dodgers after the Northridge quake, or has their freebie expired?)
 

What’s Up with Charge Cards at Lowe’s?

Every time I use my Lowe’s card, I swipe it through their little card scanner, and then I have to hand it to the clerk, who hand-enters the last four digits of the card into the system.

No other store I frequent seems to do this.  Some request my ID when I use a credit or debit card, but tha’s not what’s going on here.  Damned if I can figure out what is going on, though.

Sometimes they ask for my zip code, although that’s seemingly not related to the card usage but rather to track buying patterns and the like.  I’ll sometimes make up a zip code on the spot (like “49322”, which I see is in Mississippi), just to fuck with their data rather than feed them valid info.  (With something like 30,000 people in my zip code, that’s about the least interesting piece of “personal information” that they could ask for, so I give them fake ones just because I can, not to hide from them.)

I asked the clerk the last time I was there and he made some noise about the process being to verify that it was the right card.  Which would lead to the conclusion that the Lowe’s card scanning system so easy to spoof or so insecure that the store doesn’t trust it.

Another possibility is that the store serves a generally lower income (and more heavily black, although I don’t think racism is really a factor here) set of neighborhoods.  Some of the gas pumps in the area require entering the card holder’s zip code, presumably as a form of protection against stolen cards (if you don’t know the billing zip, it’s probably not your card), while the same company in more affluent or less urban areas (ones with perceived less incidence of crime) don’t require that.  So maybe this is a version of the same thing: they are checking that the card is actually intact, and maybe the clerk is even reading the name on the card while entering the digits, to do some base verification of card holder gender (when you can tell that from the name, of course).  Because any other fragment of needed info should be pulled off via the scanner.