Carbonated Beverages No Longer For Females

Posted on October 13, 2011 by | 1 comment

Most people have heard about the accusations regarding Coca-Cola and unethical practices around the world. While the most serious allegations [union leaders killed in South America1 ] lack concrete evidence, there’s one thing we can be sure of: Dr Pepper hates women.

That may be a little harsh and something I should explain. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s a series of moving pictures to back up what I’m saying:

Dr Pepper Ten, a low-calorie beverage from the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, seeks to target the market of men who aren’t comfortable with drinking diet sodas. John Sicher, editor and publisher of Beverage Digest, reports that “Regular sugared soft drinks have declined in recent years, and some consumers have taste issues with some of the diet sodas.”23

While it’s not a bad idea to have an advertising campaign directed at men, Dr Pepper has gone quite a few steps past that by explicitly excluding women. Like most ad campaigns this one features a Facebook page. A page that can only be viewed if your gender on Facebook is male.

The image above is a pretty good look at that page. One of the many features is a “Manly Shooting Gallery,” as well as a corner for “Man-cronyms,” an example of which is G.O.L.F [Guys Outside Lady-Free]4

Suffice to say, people are upset. There’s been a definite backlash against the product’s ads, primarily from women. In response to these comments, Jim Trebilcock, EVP of marketing for Dr. Pepper, said that “Women get the joke.” The ads were trialed in six US markets prior to being released, and the women polled were not offended.5

The ad campaign does offend me, but not in the same way it does many out there. I’m perplexed and dismayed that this campaign was released in the first place, and that someone thought this would be a good idea. What sort of advertising seeks to cut out half of its possible market? Why was Deutsch LA, the ad agency responsible, thinking?

My guess is that this is all an effect of the  oh-so-popular Old Spice ads that starred Isaiah Mustafa. The proceeding commercials with the Fabio6 and the sea captain7 follow the same formula, and similar ads can be seen coming from other companies, Dairy Queen included. Dr Pepper appears to have tried to cash in on this craze, but clearly missed the mark.

1. If that’s something you’re interested in, here’s a link: .http://killercoke.org/

2. From the Associated Press: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_DR_PEPPER_TEN?SITE=KFDMTV&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

3. I would love to read Beverage Digest.

4. My hatred for this stems from the fact that it’s not even clever. It’s spelled “acronyms,” not “ancronyms.”

5. From this article: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2116660/dr-pepper-draws-female-ire-facebook

6. That weird European guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie8yn2J08Qc

7. The coins eventually drowning the couple gets me every time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzowzUsq6iY&

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The People’s Library of Occupy Wall Street

Posted on October 10, 2011 by | Leave a comment

It’s day 24 of Occupy Wall Street 1 and the thousands of protesters there have been organizing themselves into pseudo governments and various working groups. 2 The place is turning into a petri-dish kind of accelerated model of semi-anarchic social planning. The coolest aspect of the new microsociety, however long it’s going to last, is the The People’s Library of #OccupyWallStreet.

source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/listentomyvoice/6215907949/in/pool-1820877@N22
The OWSL was started by an NYU library studies student setting out a pile of books – other protesters started adding books, found protection for the books from the weather, and (now) have made a catalogue of the books and are collecting donations. On the library’s blog, OWSL announced that a criminal justice attorney for a New York nonprofit offered her legal services to the library as it deals with the semi-sketch logistics of being an uncovered library located in a public park. The library has about 15 volunteers (described as “a mix of librarians and library enthusiasts”) and a barcode scanner.

According to their catalogue, the library has about 400 books, with about 50 donations per day coming for the last few days. OWSL’s catalogue includes kind of what is to be expected in the library of a strange semianarchy made up of people with too much time, from Reading Lolita in Tehran to The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Volunteers say that they’re having constant requests for copies of A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. There are a few less expected titles in the catalogue, though, too, like Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement3 and Cloudy with a chance of meatballs.

OWSL volunteers say that they do not discriminate when it comes to which books they put out – by nature of those donating, they have mostly liberal political and philosophical theory. But, one of the volunteers said, “if someone came with a truckload of Rush Limbaugh’s books, we’d put them out. We’re not opposed to having a dissenting voice.”4

One volunteer was asked to describe the library’s purpose: “People want to know, ‘What’s your agenda?’” he said. “Well, the status quo doesn’t have an agenda. Everyone here, in the aggregate, are people who feel disenfranchised and powerless. It’s perfectly legitimate to be frustrated. I don’t have a solution. I’m not an anarchist. I’m here because I love books.”

I'm not an anarchist. I'm here because I love books.

This attitude is what gives a sense of legitimacy to OWSL: its dedication to the availability of information in general, not just the forward movement of the protesters’ varying agendas. It’s admittedly heartening to see that one of the first things that develops in a group of people staying still for a while is a library. The agendas and decisions of the protest aside, let’s hope that the spirit of the indiscriminate availability of information and discourse remains in at least this aspect of the movement.

1 If you’re not terribly aware of what’s going on in NYC, and are interested in politics or social media or culture or anthropology or basically anything, read up on the Wiki page – for more laughs, read the .
2 For example: Sanitation, Food and Kitchen, Arts & Culture, Public Relations, Direct Action, Media Spokesperson Relations, Internet, Information, and “Peacemakers” [Security]. source: http://www.examiner.com/populist-in-long-island/night-and-day-life-at-occupy-wall-street
3 For substantial feelings of anger, horror, and loss of hope, Google the Quiverfull movement.
4 source:
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/10/10/occupy-wall-street-their-own-mini-government-complete-with-library/#ixzz1aOZwBPAe

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Epic Meal Time: Leaving Grease Stains on Pop Culture

Posted on October 6, 2011 by | 3 comments

Last week the comics publication that I run put out an Epic Meal Time themed issue. While many here didn’t get it [need to better gauge my audience] it’s undeniable that the YouTube cooking show is nothing short of a cultural phenomenon.

It began back almost exactly a year ago, when Harley Morenstein uploaded a video of him and his friends eating a pizza they covered in fast food [it included an entire Big Mac and a Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme]. Ever since then Morenstein and co. have spiraled out of control, taking the internet by storm.

The following video is my personal favourite of theirs, and inarguably their most popular [at almost 11 million hits at the time of this writing]:

How big can a bunch of guys covering food in bacon get, you ask?1 Big enough to appear on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and do a live show at the 2011 San Diego Comic Con. Type in “Epic Meal Time” followed by either “tribute” or “parody” on YouTube and prepare to be buried under an avalanche of internet video creators mimicking Morenstein’s in-your-face way of narrating the show.2

I watch these videos for more than the knowledge of how many different combinations of pork and alcohol3 there are, though. I believe this is a legitimately well-made show.

Continuity has allowed for characters like “Muscles Glasses” [Alex Perrault] to become this invincible juxtaposition of steely biceps and iron stomach. His ability to down shots of hard liquor mixed with anything from Big Mac sauce to gravy may not be inspiring, but is definitely impressive.

Tyler Lemco is without a doubt the comic relief of the show. Since the episode Maximum Mac & Cheese he’s begun devolving into a simpleton of sorts, a trend I definitely don’t have a problem with. It’s the little things, like him placing trays of bacon into the dishwasher with the phrase, “You put them in the oven, and then you’re done.” It may also have a lot to do with the fact that he appears to be the only one who has gained a significant amount of weight.

Josh Helkin has one one eyebrow perpetually raised.4 David Heuff’s always wears an exaggerated frown. Ameer Atari is, well, kind of a doofus.5 But I don’t hold that against him.

Harley Morenstein is the creator of Epic Meal Time, but since he edits the videos, conceptualizes most if not all of the episodes, and narrates using his own material he deserves a decent amount of credit.6 It may only be a three to eight minute show, but the content is still funny, the ideas fairly fresh, and the production values high.

With a little help from his friends Morenstein has created a generation of people who now believe bacon is one of the five major food groups. He’s making money off of YouTube by cooking meat with meat. He’s affecting and making culture, inspiring dozens upon dozens of young people to stuff their faces for the sheer posterity of it. Epic Meal Time has left an indelible mark on pop culture. Probably because grease stains are just so difficult to get out.

1. I did realize that this was a pun. But only after I had already written it.
2. The best ones are definitely Vegan Meal Time and the Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time series.
3. And there you go. I just realized what a nightmare this show must be to devout Muslims.
4. He also looks high. A lot of the time.
5. That is a sweet name, though. Seriously.
6. Not to mention the beard. It pretty much has a life of its own at this point.

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Does The Onion Even Have Lines? #CongressHostage

Posted on October 3, 2011 by | Leave a comment

So The Onion tweeted [#CongressHostage] about Congress holding schoolchildren hostage last Thursday. The Internet, as expected, exploded for a bit in a few places and then returned to normalcy.

A rather convincing photograph of what appears to be Speaker of the House John Boehner holding a little girl hostage

The tweets were fake live-action reports of an Onion headline that day that reported that Congress had taken hostage 12 schoolchildren and were demanding, for their release, 12 trillion dollars “in cash”. A less tasteful part of the story involved John Boehner threatening to kill “one child every hour” until the money was given, with a rather amusing photoshopped picture of Boehner holding a gun to a girl’s head.

The US Capitol police responded with a release affirming that there was no situation of any kind at the Capitol, which created a scad of angry tweets ridiculing at anyone who could “be so stupid to believe” the story – and by scad I mean like hundreds, which seems to be many more than the small amount of people who took the story to be actual news. Time asked if The Onion went to far with #CongressHostage, and lots of followers said that they did, which created another scad of angry tweets ridiculing anyone who would be offended by The Onion story and lamented over the lack of education about satire, etc. etc. Basically summarizing the whole debate, @GS_Design responded to Time’s question: “Does the Onion *have* lines?”

Some people compared the event to the War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938; @kevinhamel55 asked, “@TheOnion today, War of The Worlds in 1938; is there any difference?” (the answer is yes, yes there is, because this time nobody thought the world was actually ending and hundreds of people weren’t calling studios panicked, afraid for their lives; whether this makes the Onion more or less successful than the 1938 broadcast is another matter altogether).

Admittedly, in perhaps poor taste The Onion’s #CongressHostage thing started with this tweet: “BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside Capitol building.“, which wasn’t really funny or entirely unbelievable in any way. Further tweets were more appropriately hilarious: “Reports from those who know Congress say the legislative body had seemed desperate as of late“. Another tweet that isn’t really funny enough to justify its offensiveness was: “Two chaperones are also being held, one of whom is said to be pregnant “. It’s sort of amusing just because it’s so intensely typical of a hostage situation report, but it had nothing to do with the story’s strongest point, the nature of Congress in real life – as exemplified by the tweet: ‘Obama on bullhorn: “John, I know you can hear me in there. Please, you don’t need to do this.”‘

The article was a pretty accurate metaphor about Congress’ sense of desperation, as well as the public and presidential opinion of Congress this year, and the #CongressHostage stunt did a good job of drawing attention to it, at least. @TheOnion’s twitter account gained something like 7,000 followers, and the article received a ridiculous amount of news and blog coverage. The whole event was just another example of The Onion doing what The Onion does – drawing public attention to the nature of veracity and sensationalism in news sources, which is almost always good. The best summary of the situation in the current cultural context, in my opinion, came from @FultonMatt, who tweeted: “@TheOnion’s #CongressHostage has gone too far. Why can’t they just hack dead kid’s phones like a real news org?”

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Attitudes Towards Feminism in the Past Week 2

Posted on September 29, 2011 by | 9 comments

My first post ever on this blog was the first “Attitudes Towards Feminism in the Past Week.” It’s been quite a few months since then, but I guess it’s just that time again. To be more accurate, though, these are observations I’ve made in the past two to three weeks.

Most everyone knows about DC’s “New 52.” Well, people who know comics know about it. To summarize it quickly, the people at DC comics have decided to relaunch [reboot] 52 new titles this year. Most have since come out.

Since I am wont to read a comic book every now and then, I perused a few of the bigger titles. I specifically went out of my way to read Catwoman and Red Hood and the Outlaws, two releases that  appeared to have been garnering more than their fair share of attention. They weren’t.

Comics Alliance and io9 put it into much better words than I do, and I strongly, strongly suggest you read at least one of their articles. If I were to personally point out the problems with both comics, they would go as follows:

In Catwoman her first on-panel appearance involves her changing into her suit; red lingerie and butt/boob-shots abound. The issue ends [SPOILER] with her and Batman having sex. It ends with a whole page of them just- going at it.

Red Hood and the Outlaws is a comic which features Starfire, a character who also showed up in the immensely popular cartoon Teen Titans. My problem here isn’t so much with her costume design [on the right]; it’s what you expect from most female heroes nowadays. My problem is that she spends most of her time out of that costume and in a barely-there bikini. She also wants to basically have sex with everyone.

DC’s responded to fans’ reactions about Starfire on Twitter. Essentially, we’re not supposed to be letting our kids read these comics.

This past Sunday I watched Ironclad, a period piece which features Paul Giamatti as an irate Prince John trying to take over in spite of the Magna Carta he just signed. Baron William de Albany, played by Brian Cox1, must defend a castle alongside templar Thomas Marshal [James Purefoy]. Kate Mara plays Lady Isabel, who occupies the keep they guard.

Lady Isabel serves two purposes.

1) To be a strong female character in a heavily male-dominated film/era.

2) To incessantly try to seduce Marshal, haranguing him about how his vows keep him from love and that he should listen to his emotions.

I hated Lady Isabel.

Mara’s character strives to be both fierce and independent [she hits a man in the face with a mace]2, yet her single goal seems to be trying to get into a templar’s pants [tights?]. As a role model she teaches that the ultimate victory is not over the iron grip of royalty, but instead the taking of a holy warrior’s virginity.

In two comic issues and one film [all released in 2011] we’re given a picture of what strong female characters should be. Attractive, certainly, but also sexually aggressive. Sexual freedom and independence seems to be what helps define a woman as strong and in control. This has caused me to come to the conclusion that the last thing I want my daughter becoming is a “strong female character.”

This has been  attitudes towards feminism in the past week. Two.

1. Who I must point out was also Colonel William Stryker in X2. It’s the only thing I can think when I see him.

2. Though when you take into account the fact that one man is cleaved in twain and another is beat in the face with a disembodied arm, it’s not that big an accomplishment.

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#OccupyWallStreet: Protesting with Hashtags

Posted on September 26, 2011 by | Leave a comment

So there’s about a thousand people protesting on Wall Street (ish) right now and I don’t really know exactly for what. The movement is #OccupyWallStreet and it started on September 17 and consists of about 1,000 (mostly) student-aged people (My official estimate of the demographic: I’m picturing literary references and lots of beards) just kind of hanging around the Wall Street area. Sometimes there are marches. People are sleeping in the park. People online are ordering pizzas to be delivered to the protesters. One girl took off her shirt.

You might want to know what people are actually protesting – that’s where things get more vague. Some advertisements speak of the need for One Demand, but nobody has decided what that demand is or should be or could be. Interviews with the protesters range from the idiotic to the informed, revealing mostly a mixture of the two (along the “I don’t know who my house representative is but I can tell you the percentage of the population that holds 50% of the wealth” line). The attitudes seem to be predominately socialist, or at least anti-capitalist, with lots of complaints alluding to the Bush tax cuts, the 2008 bank bailouts (if you don’t really know what those are about either, a good explanation by my friend Chris here.), and a lot of derogatory use of the word “corporations”.

An #OccupyWallStreet protester with an Anonymous mask and a hijab.

The whole situation is a strange crossover between internet networking and the real world – the Twitter support and piles of enthusiastic comments and exclamation all over the web have only translated to about 1,000 protesters at any time, and not even in the street the protest was planned for (the NYPD blocked off the key sections of Wall Street before any protesters got there). Online, however, the results are impressive (it’s kind of like looking at the Ron Paul campaign) – Anonymous, the 4chan-based hacker group with frightening amounts of power, is credited for much of the protest’s popularity.

It’s fascinating and kind of beautiful to watch – this is the first generation that grew up with the internet, and you can tell. Twitter-based protests are just called “protests” now. We are the generation that will use hashtags in our protest signs. It’s like old protests, but improved: we still have unconstructive platitudes, but at least some of them are ironic, dangit.

The coming-of-age of the first generation raised on the internet looks like this.

The use of the word “Occupy” in the title seems inaccurate, as if the protesters knew what they would do if they actually got control of the place. I’m imagining collages made with cut-up quarterly reports.

The thing is that Wall Street is now just as nonphysical as the organization of the protests – there’s not really much actual money to burn, anymore, and there aren’t safes full of the hoarded wealth of the rich. Significant money never really physically goes to Wall Street, or really anywhere – money is numbers in a computer and property value and stock value; it’s kind of hard to figure out where it actually exists.

The physicality of the protest is less impressive than its internet following and even seems a little incongruous – it’s like the event is being swallowed by its own abstractness; an internet-developed protest trying to cross the line of physical reality and occur in front of a physically symbolic place just doesn’t work out in the digital age.

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