What Were They Thinking? — I’m Feeling Safer Already

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

I picked this up at the Chicago Eagle, I think.  Or it might have been a bar in Seattle, since I saw them here, too.

Sidestepping the idea of a bank providing bar napkins — which is actually kind of cool, having some business other than cigarettes and alcohol trying to reach bar patrons — what were they thinking?

Place your credit or check card here.  That’s what it’s like to be protected with Total Security Protection.™

Putting my credit card on a bar napkin is the equivalent of Bank of America’s protection plan?  Putting it on a picture of a snake is the equivalent of Bank of America’s protection plan?  Should I just walk away and leave it there, too?  Will I feel even more protected then?

Remind me not to trust my savings account to Bank of America.  They might put it in a drawing of a safe.

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Updated on July 7, 2004

Updated on July 28, 2010

Updated on September 2, 2010
 

What Were They Thinking? — When “Clean” Isn’t Enough

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

The first of these is a toilet seat wrapper from a Howard Johnson’s in San Francisco.  (We usually think of these as saying “Sanitized for Your Protection” instead).  The second was a bag wrapped around a bathroom glass at the Dufferin Hotel in Vancouver, BC.

In both cases, why “sparkling” clean?  Without that word, do they think I would doubt that these things were really most sincerely clean?

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Updated on August 29, 2003

Updated on September 14, 2003

Updated on July 7, 2004
 

What Were They Thinking? — Am I Blue?

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

Picked this up at a Starbucks at Chicago’s O’Hare airport.

While I understand that blue is the color of the millennium, there’s nothing wrong with green, especially when your name and logo scream for it.

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Updated on July 7, 2004
 

Dream Journal: Celebrity Dreams

I only rarely remember my dreams, and even then it’s usually just a single snapshot.  Of the dreams I do remember, a few have involved celebrities:

• Most recently (June 15, 2003), I dreamt that country music singer Terri Clark had died and her sister came by carrying a huge banner, asking people to be in a tribute show.
• Sometime around 1993 (maybe), I dreamt I was taking a tour of San Francisco, and we were underneath the Bay Bridge.  Our tour guide was Connie Chung.
• A couple years before that, I dreamt I was in a snow drift on a ski slope at Tahoe, strangling Annette Funicello.  (The memory snapshot I have of this dream is similar to Kirk strangling the shape-changing salt monster on Star Trek.)

As you can imagine, I try not to analyze these dreams too much.

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Updated on October 21, 2003

Updated on July 26, 2010

Added links, retitled to merge into Dream Journal thread.

What Were They Thinking? — Playing Hard to Get

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

On the way to work today, a van for the Executive Extended Stay hotel passed by me, undoubtedly shuttling someone to a nearby site or attraction (per their website).

Plastered on both the side and the back of their van was the hotel logo and phone number:

(206)   23-9300

I guess the sticker for the number peeled off (in both places?).  So fix it.  Or don’t you want executives to extend their stays?

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Updated on July 7, 2004

Updated on July 26, 2010

The hotel no longer has a website; I’m not sure it exists anymore.  Numerous travel sites have entries for it, including an alleged pic of the hotel featuring towering palm trees and spiny desert plants.  In Seattle, on First Hill?  Really?

Disease of the Month Club

Now that AIDS is out of the way (cough, cough, hey buddy, wanna buy a bridge?), it’s time to select the big important disease of the next 15 years, the one to get all the research bucks and to get conservatives all up in arms about the attention being paid to it and the groups it affects most.  So which one will it be…

• Ebola?  Coming from deepest, darkest Africa, with unknown origins and even unclear methods of transmission, Ebola has all the makings of a panic inducer.  On the other hand, it is largely confined to the Third World at this point.  Can it really be a worry if it isn’t affecting middle class white males in the United States?
• West Nile Virus?  Malaria redux, and you can get it just by being outside when mosquitoes are out.  Doubly scary because it affect crows, too.  And horses.  And llamas.  And crocodiles.  And…
• SARS?  The double whammy of having a four-letter acronym (which might change once we learn more, of course; AIDS was originally GRID) and coming out of China, giving an easily identifiable group of people to point at and run from.  May also have jumped the species barrier, akin to some theories on the origin of AIDS.
• Something else?  It’s seems like a new deadly disease has shown up every couple years for the past decade, so there may be more on the way, things to topple even these three as King of the Hill.

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Updated on May 31, 2003

Updated on July 26, 2010

Something else, obviously: H1N1 Bird Flu.  Attack kids.  Comes from Mexico, or Southeast Asia, or somewhere that people have different colored skin.  Perfect.

Dinner, Anyone?

Courtesy of the March 2003 issue of National Geographic is today’s fun word:

iculanibokola

A fork used by cannibals in Fiji to feed people who were considered too holy to touch food.