Well, sadly Lorne Gunter of the Edmonton Journal/National Post has still yet to post anything on his blog. I know he's still writing, he had a bit in the Redmonton Urinal this morning. He's been silent since before the Western Standard Cruise, and it might have something to do with the National Post's website redesign. It left the old link as rotted out, and for a while was preventing posting. It may again. The problem is that one has to see the Genital Herpes ad that Macromedia insists on pasting next to the column. This whole Flash animation advertising thing is more than a little annoying: back when I was in Linux all the time, the flash plugin would often not read the site properly, and the "close" button on the popups which sometimes occur wasn't visible (often along with the top 10% of the graphic). This meant that the flash animation blocked off part of the article, and I couldn't read the lead-in. The only solution was to disable flash by re-routing the plugin to an external ap, and that caused more than a few headaches as well. Honestly, is .gif that unpleasant for their needs?
Anyways, back to the point at hand: genital herpes commericals on legitimate news sites (not even a porn site, which makes sense since most porn viewers probably don't have to worry about STDs). But there have also been genital herpes ads on TV at all hours. And not to mention the Viagra commercials, the Viagra knockoff commecials, and the like. Not meaning to sound like an old man here, but my father was telling me that once upon a time they weren't allowed to (or chose not to for societal pressure reasons) advertise feminine hygeine products during the supper hour. And before THAT they weren't allowed to advertise them at all. And before THAT you never even had to see them! He relates that when he was a boy (10-12 I'm guessing) his mother got severely ill and she had to send her husband and son to town for supplies. Well, one of the things she needed was "those things", and all my Grandpa had to do was whisper it to the pharmacist (or confecionist, or alchemist, or chemist, or whatever they were called back then) what was needed, and the plain package with the feminine products was wrapped twice in brown paper, and carted out of the store with none the wiser, to avoid Grandpa the embarassment and public humiliation of being seen handling such items. Not meaning to overly endorse a "Beaver Cleaver" or "Pleasantville" sort of arrangement, but as a man that seems much more pleasurable. No more of these freaking commercials showing how women in maxipads can go about their daily lives [why in a car commerical do you see people driving, in a shoe commerical you see people running, and in a tampon commerical you see people playing tennis? -ed], no more demonstrations of the absorption potential of tampons, and no more explanation of the potential of wings. Why do they have wings? Don't answer that!
A few other things come to my mind:
- I tried out this Boxing Day shopping deal: it didn't work well for me. The things I wanted weren't on sale, so all it meant was the trip took 8 times longer than it should. Quote of the day at work (not by me, mind you): "Muslims don't even believe in the holiday, they shouldn't be able to reap the rewards like that".
- My buddy and his fiancee were in the city so we went shopping for their Chinese Gift Exchange party. We'd had our family one on Christmas. While we were there, we got bored in Indigo and came up with some of the books that you should see flying off store shelves, but dont:
Gramma Sutra
Dora the Explorer Gets Called a Spic
His fiancee made us stop after that one. - My father remains convinced that a Chinese Gift Exchange works best if there are massive steals, but I don't necessarily see the logic in that. I never had my item stolen, and I'm happy for it.. its GOOD.
