Those would be advertising and flies. Yes, flies. A German company decided to attract attention by attaching banner advertisements to flies at a trade show.

I assume that means that they’re responsible for introducing flies into the trade show, rather than having harvested flies already present, which is… interesting.

Apparently in response to increased public interest in eating better, the American food manufacturing industry has put together a campaign called Smart Choices. This is essentially a marketing effort masquerading as a health information campaign, as demonstrated quite well by the fact that Froot Loops qualify as a “smart choice”.

To defend this, the president of the Smart Choices board, Eileen T. Kennedy, gave the New York Times one of the most egregious pieces of dodgy rhetoric I’ve seen in quite some time:

“You’re rushing around, you’re trying to think about healthy eating for your kids and you have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal,” Dr. Kennedy said, evoking a hypothetical parent in the supermarket. “So Froot Loops is a better choice.”

—William Neuman. “For Your Health, Froot Loops”. The New York Times, 04 September 2009.

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A distraction of an entirely different kind, taking my mind off things by being deeply reprehensible, creepy, and disturbing:

This is a side-scrolling platform/puzzle game based on the idea of a “portal gun” that can create portals on surfaces. Fire one onto one wall, the second onto another wall, step through the first, emerge through the second. It’s essentially an ad for the three-dimensional version from Valve, but it’s still fun.
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I’m reading Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs at the moment. It’s an exploration of what Levy calls “raunch culture”, the pornographization of American mainstream culture. One of her points that I think is worth examining is the distinction between sexiness and sexuality.
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One of the key problems with attempting to suppress certain behaviors in a subject population is that you end up introducing corruption into your system of government. I’m really referring to attempts to suppress behaviors that are popular in themselves (drinking alcohol being a classic example). You can’t really enforce demand, and most of the population will know that the proscribed activity goes on all the time behind closed doors.
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I’ll probably write about the game itself at some point, but wow, I thought the ads were terrible.
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