Random Thursday: The Friday Edition
Category: Random Thursday...
Posted Friday, April 27, 2007 at 09:07 AM [GMT-6]

Pondering some trivialities while strategizing how best to reveal the fact that I'm actually Miss America from 1978, working a long-term undercover operation.

• Two of my favorite TV ad "franchises" are those for Rozerem (the prescription "sleep aid") and Jimmy Dean Sausage (touting its nutritious and delicious microwave breakfasts). The latter may be a regional thing -- I don't know if Big John has gone national or not -- but it features characters dressed up as celestial bodies (and I'm not referring to Jessica Simpson) and meteorological phenomenon. I especially like the one where a despondent guy dressed as a waning moon (which could, of course, be part of his problem) is confronted by the perpetually up-beat guy dressed as the sun (he never breaks a sweat). "Hey," says the sun, "I thought you were supposed to be full." "I'm not feelin' it," responds the moon. The sun breaks out breakfast and the next shot shows the moon swollen to full girth. The Deanster obviously doesn't care about the subliminal message, and the whole concept is funny.


• I'm sure everyone with a TV is familiar with the Rozerem spots, wherein a sleepless guy is confronted by characters from his dreams: a hip but achingly sympathetic Abe Lincoln (does anyone still dream about Abe?), a sardonic beaver (real subtle, guys...like we didn't all go to junior high at some point in our lives), and a disturbingly anonymous deep sea diver (which a friend mistook for an astronaut, to his eternal embarrassment). I like the way the main ad is followed by a throw-away scene seemingly created just for entertainment, like the one where Abe is playing folded-paper-placekicker using the annoyed beaver as the goalpost.


• One of our local early morning news anchors has acquired the habit of announcing the time with these words: "The time on the clock is..." At first, I found this to be annoying -- cue the beaver -- but have since realized that she's simply being accurate. In the immortal words of Chicago, does anyone really know what time it is? Of course not. We have eleven clocks in our home, and the best we can do is hope to average their displays to try to figure out whether we're late or not. (We are.) So that anchorette is simply providing us with a reference point which we can choose to accept or not. She could say, "I don't know what time you think it is, and I also don't know whether our means of measuring time is accurate, but the best I can do for you is to point out that our clock says this." I can live with that.


• Note to Apple: Would it just kill you guys to give us a full minute to sample music in the iTunes Store? I mean, I just checked and your market cap is $85B, you have $6.5B in cash, you're not paying any dividends, and I'm assuming that you have, like, a mega-T1 line or something so that bandwidth shouldn't be a problem. You'd still have enough money left over to cover legal fees and fines related to those backdated options.


• Well, for that matter, Apple, why don't you just downsample the music to something like 96kbps, put it in mono, and let us listen to the whole dang song? The people who'd use AudioHijack to steal it instead of buying it aren't going to buy it anyway, and you'd more than make up for it by selling additional copies to people who aren't willing to risk 99 cents on an inadequate test drive.


• OK, if neither of those options works as a Store-wide policy, why not let each artist decide the length and quality of the sample you provide?

By the way, I'm taking a cue from the Pointy-Haired Boss and letting Abbye handle the rest of my posts today. After reading the previous one, she's thinking it's way past time.