Too Many Commercials

I hate when I go through my list of 6 radio stations in the morning, and all 6 are playing commercials. For a second I stopped on the Mix because Eric and Kathy were talking, but then I realized that they were pushing Vermont Teddy Bears for Mother's Day.

I'm convinced that the most evil people in this country are not the lawyers, but those in the advertising industry*. They are probably also the smartest people in this country too, but there's nothing to celebrate about evil genius. These fockers find every way imaginable to increase the amount of ads they can surround us with, and every way imaginable to increase the effectiveness of these ads. Worst of all, they don't care about anything other than maximizing their profits.

Everywhere you look or listen, these people have found a way to fill it with advertising. It's not just billboards, magazine ads, or commercial breaks on TV/radio. It's the sides of buses, banner ads on websites, and even on top of urinals so you can read them while you pee. It's the short commercials like the Coca-Cola Refreshing Moviemakers Award or Celine Dion driving a Chrysler that they show before movie previews, which are actually commercials themselves. Think about that, ads that precede more ads, it's ridiculous.

Not only this, but they continue to find new ways to make their advertising sneakier and more intrusive into our lives. They're not just harmless "click here" banner ads anymore, they are pop-up windows and Flash animations that fly in your face and cover up the article you are trying to read, forcing you to pay attention. You're not free from advertising once the TV show or movie starts, either. There's product placement all over the place, from that Men's Health magazine being read by the dad on Everybody Loves Raymond, to the Mazda RX-8 in X2.

I know that without advertising, many of the things we know in life would not exist. There wouldn't be free TV or free internet sites like ESPN.com and Yahoo. And I have to admit that a lot of ads are pretty well done and entertaining in themselves, not just annoying. Most of the Superbowl commercials end up being pretty clever, and I definitely thought the Aston Martin in Tomorrow Never Dies was cool.

But as they teach you in the first days of economics class, "there is no such thing as a free lunch". Sure, you don't directly pay to watch TV or play Fantasy Baseball on Yahoo. But it should be obvious that somewhere, somehow, they are making money off of you. If it weren't profitable, they would've all been long gone by now. A 30-second spot during the Superbowl wouldn't be worth millions if it didn't somehow cause us to spend more by watching it. For that matter, nobody would pay millions of dollars to Michael Jordan for wearing their shoes, if it weren't bringing back millions more in return.

I'm personally at a point of saturation when it comes to advertising. It would be one thing if the only way it affected me was the annoyance of having to delete all the spam emails or sit through commercial breaks between innings of the Sox game. I'd even be able to accept it, to a certain degree, if the ads subconsciously or consciously made me want to buy more stuff. But I really think it goes much deeper than that. There's way too much advertising, and it is costing us more than the money we spend or the time we waste. It is seriously hurting and draining our society.

The most disturbing thing to me is that advertising controls almost everything we see and hear, which in turn shapes the way we think. This is going too far. We've all heard about the girls who develop eating disorders because they want to be like the impossibly-thin models in the magazine ads, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. With nearly everything in the media being ratings-driven, everything we see and hear is somehow tailored to maximize the exposure and effects of advertising. Sadly, not even the news we watch is immune to its influence. Because CNN has to worry about ratings and profits, we're seeing less and less objective, responsible news reporting, and more and more signs of tabloid journalism, which plays up emotions and stirs up controversy in hopes of attracting more viewers.

The world of advertising is the epitome of capitalism at its best and worst. While it brings us many positive things, in excess it brings plenty of negative results as well. Without further exploding the length of this blog, all I want to say is that we can't only look at the benefits of commercialization without realizing the danger of over-commercialization. And yes, I do consider it a real danger, not just a matter of mere annoyance.

* The evilness of the advertising industry I'm talking about does not include the lovely people whose job is to buy advertising time from the networks for the ad agencies

Ramblings

Yesterday I ate dinner at a buffet for the first time in a long time. Buffets are awesome, but only once in a while because you are guaranteed to leave the place feeling bloated and cursing yourself for being greedy. By the way, if anyone knows whether or not there was an Old Country Buffet (OCB) down in Champaign please let me know so I can settle an argument.

This was followed by a trip to Barnes & Noble in Deer Park. The area there was one of the nicer places I've seen, surrounded by a outdoor mall which reminded me of Danada in the Wheaton area. Besides picking up a cookbook on the "Asian Kitchen", I also did some leisurely reading for an hour or two.

One book I picked up was on war planes throughout history. It had some good background on how bombers and fighters evolved between the various wars of the past 100 years. I especially enjoyed the material on the Northrop B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber and the Grumman F-14 Tomcat. A lot of the stuff on Russian MiGs and French Dassault fighters was interesting too. The bad thing was that they didn't even mention Taiwan's Ching-Kuo I.D.F. It's supposed to stand for "Indigenous Defense Fighter", but according to my dad, it's actually short for "I Don't Fly". Maybe that's why it wasn't included in the book.

Interesting note: In his younger days, the legendary airplane designer Jack Northrop worked in a place run by the Loughead brothers. Later on, he would create the company that became the giant which is Northrop Grumman today. Meanwhile, the Loughead brothers eventually changed the spelling of their name to better fit its pronunciation, and they went on to found the company that has become NG's top competitor in the defense industry, "Lockheed" Martin. Okay, maybe that fact is only cool to me, and a select few others. Moving on...

Another interesting note: Besides humans, the only animal in the world to have a fingerprint that is different for every individual is not the chimpanzee, not any sort of monkey, but the koala. Not only this, but if you took a fingerprint from a koala and compared it to a human fingerprint, they would be indistinguishable. I learned this from Mancow's Morning Madhouse.

Other than the book on war planes, I checked out this book that had the first 10 editions of the original X-men comic book from the 1960's. Man, were these awful or what. The concept was always cool, but the writing in these episodes was so bad it had me laughing out loud. I couldn't make it past the second issue because it was so terrible. Good thing the quality of X-men has increased throughout the years.

Anyways, these are exciting times in the life of Joseph Y. Chen. I now have a cookbook sitting on my desk, a e755 PPC on its way, and this morning before leaving for work I noticed that the Orion Telescope catalog arrived in the mail yesterday. I'm proud of myself for setting goals, and now slowly but steadily executing them.

I achieved a huge accomplishment earlier this evening. With a walkoff HR by Jason Kendall, I finally defeated Piya in World Series Baseball 2K3. This ended weeks of frustration. Maybe the next step for me is to beat him when he doesn't handicap his own batting cursor. One step at a time though....

A Toshiba e755 Pocket PC and a 256 MB Secure Digital memory card should now be in the mail, addressed to me. I'm excited, but not for the $600 charge coming on my bill next month. Basically, I expect this thing to be my notepad, mp3 player, phone number/birthday/email organizer, and maybe more functions to be explored. Updates to come soon.

I hate when places close at 9. Lately I have noticed that a lot of places do, such as the library, Best Buy, and the mall. Even though my bedtime is about 10 or 11 anyways, I still believe that every place should be like Meijer, Powerhouse, and Your Mom - always open. tahaaaaa.....

When I hear those annoying announcements like "We will be closing in 15 minutes. Please bring your items to checkout" it reminds me of the old days studying late at Grainger. They would threaten us like "Grainger Engineering Library is now closed. Exit the building immediately. If anyone is found on the premises, they will be reported to Campus Police". As if we were criminals for studying past 1am. Nerds, maybe, but what's the big deal? I've always wondered what would happen if we refused to leave. Would they arrest us on charges of "felony reading"?

More proof that I am becoming too in touch with my feelings: I just saw a Cheerios commercial when a little girl brings a box of Cheerios to her mom and dad in bed and sings "Happy Mothers Day To You" to the tune of "Happy Birthday". Instead of my first reaction being "wow, what a gay commercial", I was like "awww... that's cute." This is not the direction I want to be heading in. To resolve this issue, I will try to watch more episodes of Jackass.

Currently playing on my Winamp: Coldplay - God Put A Smile Upon Your Face

(I haven't done this in a while because I have been writing more at work and I don't have Winamp at work)

Updates

Computer - I formatted my hard drive and reinstalled Windows yesterday. Would've done this earlier last week, but fortunately realized in time that my original Starcraft CD was at home and I wouldn't be able to reinstall it after formatting. Phew, that was a close one... might have been craft-less for as much a week.

So after church yesterday I stopped by the D-town pad and picked up the goods. Spent most of the afternoon formatting, installing stuff, and changing all the settings back to what I'm used to. For now, it's all running smoothly and no random freezing so far. By the way, if anyone has good cheap anti-virus software to recommend, please do. I got used to getting free McAfee updates as a University student but now I'm just a regular guy who has to pay for this stuff. >:-O

*****

TV - Since I was home, I thought why not bring one of our 4 TV's back to Palatine. So I grabbed the one from the basement, not too fancy or big, but it does the job. The next time I need to get a TV, I've promised myself to buy a flat-screen HD, no less than 27".

Bringing the TV to my room paid dividends almost immediately. Even though the Sox game sucked, the TV made up for it by showing me some quality episodes of Punk'd and Jackass afterwards. I have to say that Jackass is one of the best shows ever. The best ones are where Bam Margera tries to beat up his dad, who is like twice as big as him but never fights back for some reason. Pretty much any stunt with Johnny Knoxville or Steve-o is guaranteed to be hilarious too. Although they are all disturbing at the same time.

Yesterday, one of the guys dressed up in a pink bunny suit and then they sent a trained attack dog after him. Even though I saw that one before, I could not stop laughing because come on, what can be funnier than seeing a big pink bunny being taken down by an angry dog? Just writing about it now and thinking about those images is cracking me up here at my desk. Meanwhile, the other guy in my cube is wondering, what could possibly so funny about 1553 modules and Digital-to-Analog-Converter cards in a VXI card cage?

*****

Telescope - I spent a little time looking up info online about telescopes. Telescope.com is a decent source, run by Orion, which is apparently a major manufacturer of 'scopes. Basically, I learned that there are 3 main types of telescopes. There's the traditional long one where you point the big end to the sky and look through the small end. Then there's the "Newtonian" style which is shorter, and you look through a eyepiece that is mounted near the top end. Finally, there is the short, fat kind that looks and acts like a "bucket of light". It just captures the image and reflects it back and forth inside before it reaches your eye. All three types have pros and cons, which I am still learning about. But over the weekend I talked to Ray (who bought a telescope last year when I still had zero interest in the subject), and he recommended a Newtonian to me. Since I like Ray, I will probably heed his advice.

Also important advice I learned is, don't buy a telescope from Walmart or Target. Those are too cheap to see anything cool, and usually almost impossible to mount and use in the right way.

And yes, once again, I am serious about getting a telescope. I ordered a catalog from Orion and expect to have a 'scope set up and ready to go in my room within a month.

I am driving
85 in the
kind of morning that
lasts all afternoon...
just stuck inside the gloom

4 more exits to
my apartment but
I am tempted to keep the car in drive...
and leave it all behind

Cause I wonder sometimes
about the outcome
of a still verdictless life

Am I living it right?
Am I living it right?
Am I living it right?
Why... why, Georgia, why?

I rent a room and
I fill the spaces with
wood in places to
make it feel like home

But all I feel's alone
it might be a quarter life crisis
or just the stirring in my soul

Either way I wonder sometimes
about the outcome
of a still verdictless life

Am I living it right?
Am I living it right?
Am I living it right?
Why... why, Georgia, why?