Posts tagged “advertising”

• The legacy New England Patriots logo of a minuteman center about to hike a football (that looks suspiciously like an eggplant) is officially known as Pat Patriot. ¹ When I was at Super Bowl XLII in Arizona as a guest of the NFL, I was gifted an awesome distressed / vintage white Reebok retro t-shirt featuring Pat Patriot. It was my favorite t-shirt. It was accidentally incinerated in an industrial furnace several years ago — it’s a long story — and I’ve never been able to find another one exactly like it. I’ve looked far and wide, Googled and eBayed repeatedly, set alerts, but no luck. I’ve seen a red version a few times on eBay, but never the same white one I had and loved. I can’t even find an image of the same shirt anywhere online!
• Questlove created a trailer for the 50 Years of SNL Music documentary and it is completely mind-blowing. You have got to see it.
• When our TV enters screensaver mode, it shows images from Google, including the artist’s credit. One cute photo prompted me to search for Aravind Krishnaswamy and we were delighted to discover he has a plethora of pleasing penguin pictures.
• The latest issue of Culture of Sport (from David Skilling) examines why paying $7M for a 30-second Super Bowl ad is, incredibly, still a good deal.
• The entire global cosmetic Botox industry is supported by an annual production of just a few milligrams of botulism toxin. Pure toxin would cost ~$100 trillion per kilogram. – via Tom Whitwell
• TV & Movies
  • We watched Mr. Popper’s Penguins recently and it was a big hit. It’s a great kid movie, especially if your kids are infatuated with penguins. (And it’s Jim Carrey acting like a [mostly] normal human being, which is my favorite version of him.)
  • We have finally started watching Skeleton Crew, the latest Star Wars series. I read somewhere last year that the concept was supposed to be The Goonies, but Star Wars, and they nailed it. So far I think it’s phenomenal and I regret not having started it sooner.
  • Fly Me to the Moon (Apple TV+) was a pretty fun family movie, but should have been at least a half hour shorter. It was campy and painfully predictable, but the kids liked it. Woody Harrelson was great.

I’m getting really tired of companies trying to sell me $85 pairs of gym shorts.

My favorite part of Monday Night Football is learning about all the new prescription cancer medications.

There’s an excellent Kia Sorento commercial right now featuring a sock monkey and a monster (and some other kid toys). They go bowling and the sock monkey gets a tattoo. The best part, though, is the song. It’s How You Like Me Now, by The Heavy. You can find it on the album The House That Dirt Built on iTunes.

Sidebar: I just noticed that the latest version of iTunes now lets you easily post a song or app to Twitter or Facebook. (Savvy guys, those Apple engineers.) But here’s something extraordinarily odd: The URL that iTunes provides for the link is absurdly long. The one for the song mentioned above is http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-house-that-dirt-built/id328490302, which is seventy characters. Twitter only allows 140 characters! Why in the world isn’t Apple running their own URL-shortening service?