Is that Ron Jeremy over at mcdonalds.com?

I got a pop up ad from McDonald’s today. Their semantic auto-targeting online advertising software must be pure genius, I will admit. But there was something even creepier than that in my ad, RON JEREMY.

Yep, The porn star seems to have moved on to more mainstream media. His likeness seems to have at least been an inspiration for the, for lack of a better word – inspiring – fast food loving character, who seems to revel in his abject poverty, and shabby attire. The Dollar Menu Guy is the human embodiment of tacky.

While there is something to be said for the advertising to your target market, embracing that your target market is mostly poor is probably not as good an idea. The tape on the furniture, the clothes drying on the radiator, and the lawn chair don’t look as much like fun to me, as they do symptoms of poverty.

Choosing a character whose likeness reminds one of long nights with porn starlets and cocaine, is likely as good as it gets when you are selling crappy $1 hamburgers at 2 a.m. from the drive through. So, thank you McDonald’s for keeping The Hedgehog working, if only in spirit. Time is definitely not on Ron’s side for much longer, and he could probably use the work. Don’t count him out yet though, but there are not too many 60 year old male porn stars working I suspect.

Finally, this is not the first corporate giant to borrow the high visibility actor’s image. Rumors of Nintendo’s copyright infringement against Jeremy swept the web just a few years ago…

When did the comics get all serious?

One of my favorite webcomics is Penny Arcade, written and illustrated by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik. The content material focuses mainly on video games, the gaming industry, and the gamer sub-culture. However, over the past year or two some more serious topics have come up, as the characters have, gasp, grown up a bit…. Click the strip above for a larger, more legible version.

Some of my favorite “real” paper comics tackle serious issue too. Funky Winkerbean, a strip I have read for many years, recently “killed off” a character, and reset the entire clock on the comic. All of the characters have been fast-forwarded 15 years or so, and their lives moved further into adulthood accordingly. Throughout however, Batiuk has covered topics like teen pregnancy, adoption, and U.S. servicemen returning home from Afghanistan with devastating injuries.

Doonesbury is always high on my list, but we have always expected serious topics from Gary Trudeau. His own characters are now dealing with issues like the massive number of brain trauma injuries to soldiers serving in Iraq, the elections, and the current administration. Trudeau’s characters are iconic, maybe none more so than Uncle Duke, the character based in part on late “Gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson.

Trudeau ’s cast has aged gracefully, at the same time introducing new cast members to introduce us all to the new issues of today. He even has a blog for U. S. Soldiers serving in the middle east called The Sandbox. Here’s a great Washington Post article on Trudeau. I am still mystified as to why his web site is still on Slate. It’s so…. 1999.

Zits features Jeremy Duncan, a now 16 year old aspiring rock musician, and his parents, “who don’t understand anything“. The fanciful ways that the strip bends and distorts reality reminds me very much of Calvin and Hobbes. The character often morphs into younger, older, zanier versions of himself, much like Calvin. I cannot express, now that I have my own near-teenage son, how much I can relate to Jeremy’s gigantic feet. Have you priced sneakers lately?

A newer comic with great characters, including an always smoking version of the creator, is Stephan Pastis’ Pearls before Swine. The characters are flawed, but lovable, and if you look closely you will see a lot of subtle gems hidden amongst the simpler humor. Here is today’s strip, for Valentines Day:

I have a very soft spot in my heart for Calvin and Hobbes, likely the best strip ever, and I also love Peanuts, but I have left them off of my list for one simple reason – they are not being drawn today. While both are incredible works, but the one thing I like most about the comics is tomorrow’s strip, the promise of a continued relationship. What is goingt to happen to our friends? Will it be a light day, or a grave day? We know these characters, check up on them every day.

Like real life, the comics tug at our heart strings, and invite us along on great and wonderful adventures.

But do they always have to be so darn serious?

Election Results – Good for Obama, McCain, Bad to worse day for Hillary. Huckabee still nuts.

Barack Obama and John McCain came out the big winners in the “Potomac Primaries” of Virginia, Maryland, and D.C. today. The Obama tide continues to turn as he took over 75% of the vote in D.C., and 65% in VA and MD. I suspect that insiders in the Democratic Party are noticing these large margins of victory. Obama has also started to eat into Hillary Clinton’s coalition of voters, as her support continues to erode.

McCain took all three primaries in slim wins over crazy pastor, and believer that the earth is only 9,000 years old, Mike Huckabee. Mr. McCain himself is a confirmed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder sufferer, after being tortured in a Viet Cong Prison for several years during the Vietnam war. While that makes him a noble, loyal warrior to be thanked for his service to be sure, do we really want someone known to be that unstable to be in charge?

Rev. Huckabee on the other hand is just plain crazy. He has said “I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ”, and he means it. He also thinks that wives should just “submit” to their husbands. On a lighter note, he has vowed to be the anti-obesity president, a self titled “foodaholic” himself, who has lost over 120 pounds.

The Clinton campaign continues to struggle, with even Yahoo getting snarky, “As the votes were counted in her latest setbacks, her deputy campaign manager stepped down. Mike Henry announced his departure one day after Patti Solis Doyle was replaced as campaign manager with Maggie Williams, a longtime confidante of the former first lady.” Hillary’s top two campaign staffers are out, they have suffered 10 losses in a row, and they are running out of money. No wonder she has been railing at MSNBC over Chelsea being slighted. She has focused her energies on winning Texas and Ohio.

Mike Huckabee still has the coolest endorsement ad ever though. Chuck Norris approved.

McCain Response to the Obama “Yes we can” video

I just got this new link to John McCain’s response to the Barack Obama “Yes we can” video. It is entitled john.he.is. All I can say is, wow.

Debunking the tin foil hat theorists…

There has been so much speculation for the past two weeks about the many fiber optic telecommunications cables being cut in the middle east, including here, that someone wrote a Wikipedia Article about the disruptions and the theories surrounding those breaks.

My own speculation led me to consider the soon to open Iranian Oil Bourse as a motive for these disruptions. In fairness though, I did also mention James Bond like spies, and The Incredible Mr. Limpet as possible suspects in the outage too. But if you must, go ahead and color me a tin foil hat weirdo. I am guilty, I guess.

As a techie, I still find it odd that so many cables in the area went down concurrently. Original reports had Iran 100% down, and that was incorrect. It certainly made me reconsider sources for future links.

I think that this has been an interesting experiment in media studies for me – seeing how much speculation and chaos could come from a bunch of nerds wondering why something broke. The bigger issue is that the speculation itself became a bigger story than the original outages. I am still getting several hundred hits a day on the postings from this story.

Because of all this, I learned a lot about the Iranian Oil Bourse, or commodities market. This is a very big story on it’s own, and is definitely worth learning something about. It of course has had very little mention in the U.S. media, despite how much it may change (or not) our economy, and the oil market globally.

Yours in the brotherhood of weirdness,

the (still) inquisitive techie

titles and propaganda

I found this old quote the other day, and I was pondering it.

“The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.”

It is a statement by Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian Educator, Communications Theorist, and Philosopher. The late Mr. McLuhan also made the more famous statement “The media is the message”. His life work was studying media, and the effects of communication as a strong persuader and a mechanism for cultural control. His work is standard advertising industry and communication school course material.

But I was distracted from my more serious reading by something. That word. Philosopher. Hmm. What a cool title. It invokes sweeping visions of flowing robes, long beards, and long nights arguing the meaning of life.

Being a philosopher means having a job where you are so smart, that all you have to do is think, and tell people what you are thinking about. What a gig.

I want that on my resume. Philosopher. That’s way better than any technical certification you can get, or university granted acronym like MBA, or PhD. They all have to work, to produce something. Thinking sounds much easier.

But I was corrected. Philosopher is not nearly the best title ever, points out a friend. He told me that the coolest title ever belongs to Wile E. Coyote, SUPER-GENIUS. I have been trumped. That is definitely a much cooler title.

yours truly,

Mark C. Kirsch

Super-Genius, Consultant, and Philosopher.

Improv Everywhere Rocks

Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. they have executed over 70 missions involving thousands of undercover “agents”. The performance art group is based in New York City, and despite their grumblings, has shown to be one of the best examples of/inspirations for the flash mob scene. Here is a New York Times article on the group.

Their “missions” just keep getting funnier and more creative. Check out the No Shirts mission to Abercrombie and Fitch, or the Slo-Mo Home Depot mission. One of my favorites was the Best Buy mission, since I shop there a lot.

It’s fascinating to see a group of people tweak the establishment in such creative ways. Note the reaction shots of the crowds lured into being part of the stunts as some people discover the prank, some join in, and some never get it. Getting a crowd in New York to stop, call their friends, and say “you will never believe what I am seeing” is a feat in itself.

Oh, and when I said that Improv Everywhere rocks, I meant it.

Warning: Do not drink beverages while looking at the following website

The Best of Craigslist

You may destroy your keyboard.
Some of these Craigslist entries are truly hysterical.

On the other hand if you aren’t familiar with craigslist.org check it out.
This is a great site and a great people “watching” destination on the web.