My friend Melanie send me this screenshot from her Facebook feed. An advert for the Public Library system of Villeurbanne in the style of a promotion flyer for an african healer. Not surprisingly i find this utterly brilliant…

Ran into this ad while reading the economy section of yesterdays NRC on the toilet this morning. It is easily the most amazingly stupid copywriting i have come across in a while. i mean seriously who on earth still worries about ‘the soviets’ anymore?

‘i was 250.000 miles out in space. imagine what could have happend if the Soviets interfered in our data. How do you protect your data today?’ Eugene Andrew Cernan. Last man on the moon, 1972

So one of the worst things about living in the Netherlands has been that there has been no proper supply with Gold Bears (Gummibärchen) which did reduce my quality of life quite substantially. The only way they have been selling Harbio Gummibärchen has been in those ridiculous 300g bags that contain 30 or so 10g bags that contain macrobiotic quantities of tiny gold bears [the other option was to buy properly sized gold bears from one of the kosher shops in Buitenveldert, that import them from the US but they charge you €4 per bag the last time i checked…].

Now this morning i cycled past this advertisement which reads ‘now also BIG Gold Bears’. Never been this happy about an advertisement…

So since two weeks or so the counties’ biggest super market chain (Albert Hein) is having some stupid action where you get a plastic smurf every time you spend more than €15 on groceries. Plus the stores are full of smurf themed advertisements and they play stupid smurf music in the background and there is poster advertisements with smurfs on them all over the city. No idea why anyone would think that this is a good thing.

As far as i am concerned i can hardly think of anything more insulting and stupid than being asked by some 16 year old girl at the cash register if i would like to have a smurf with my groceries. but then there seem to be lots of people who are in fact happy with this infantilization of society….

Yesterday on my way to the albert hein we encountered a group of teenagers burning plastic smurfs on the pavement in front of the shop entrance, which gave me back a tiny little bit of hope: at least the kids (or some of them) are still alright!

Have missed this when i was in lebanon in april, but nat pointed this out the other night. the first national bank of lebanon has launched a plastic surgery loan programme (‘Beauty is no longer a luxury….’):

the BBC is reporting that this whole thing is a reaction to the tense political situation in Lebanon:

“We like to look our best… There are people who see this loan as their life raft,” Mr Nasr said.

Local media say the tense political climate and fears of another devastating war with Israel have not curbed Lebanon’s infamous urge for cosmetic enhancement, with demand increasing up to 20% since 2006.

“People are not going out anymore so they are staying home looking in the mirror,” industry representative Dr Nabih Sader told the Daily Star newspaper.

… and everybody is talking about the next war. seems to somehow involve iran, the US, israel, the valet parkers, Syria and Lebanon, but there is neither real agreement about the constellation nor does anyone come up with a credible motivation for someone to attack the others or the other way around (except maybe for the US to attack Iran). Meanwhile last summer war has once again (see here for last years favorite ad) been picked up by the advertising industry, this time in the form of an billboard-advertisment for a teenagers credit card, which seems to be inspired by this years world press photo (which caused quite a bit of confusion after it won the award):

If you ask me this is the most arrogant, most pretentious & most stupid advertising slogan i have come across in a long while …

… never liked the brand anyway (except when i was a 14 and i do not have fond memories of that period of my life).

Have been hanging out at the CeBIT IT trade show for the last 2 days and that is a pretty much brain wrecking experience. Among other things this means being exposed to a overkill of stupid advertising slogans. One that especially caught my attention was on a poster at the stall of WYSE computing (the self proclaimed leader in thin computing). Obviously inspired by thomas friedman the company seems to be on a mission to flatten the world. problem is that at least in my case that can evoke unintended connotations:

[photoshop is your best friend if you are off-line waiting for the tv-screen to be taken away so you can finally leave the booth and escape the your crazy neigbours]. And yes it looks like i have a 9/11 obsession lately. Further proof can be found here and here.

It seems that the Dutch are not the only ones to prepare themselves for the Soccer World Cup. In Berlin advertisements of the German red cross have started to appear on billboards in various s-bahn stations. The advertisements show a young red-cross paramedic (with a 70es haircut, a reference to ’74?) that bandages the knee of a fully dressed out Dutch football supporter:

The caption on the picture reads, ‘in action for everybody’, which at least to me sounds like ‘ we really help everybody, even those who are scum’… guess the Dutch won’t really appreciate this. And what ever happened to the red-cross? i always thought they where for peace, love and harmony.

… I would not sponsor a street called ’11th of spetember’ as this invokes slightly too much images of planes crashing into buildings in my head. Areolineas Argentinas (the argentininan flag carrier) seems to think otherwise as this street sign form the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Belgrano illustrates:

The street in question seems to have this name since before the 9/11 2004 but (at least to me) it is unclear what the name referrs to. One possibility would be that the name is given in commemoration of the 1973 military coup in neigbouring Chile (this is a slightly strange event to name a street after in itself but given Argentinias political history not inconcievable). The only genuine Argentinian event mentioned in the wikipedia entry for 11 september is the death of the Argentinian statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento who died on the 11th of September 1888.