Day 1147

My learning journey continues. Oatmeal mixed with fresh blueberries and strawberries and sweetened with a little Stevia is actually delicious. Who would have thought? Maybe I can live without bacon after all. I also learned that the Kale I'm eating in my salad is actually the very same purple plant that I used to buy in pots at the garden store to put on the front porch during the Winter. I always thought these ornamental plants were pretty, but never knew you could eat them. I certainly had no idea they were healthy.

I wish I would discover some equally enlightening things about my chosen profession. I'm really starting to get burned out with what advertising has become in recent years. The stuff I write never was intended to be Anna Karenina or Moby Dick. It's depressing how mindless advertising messaging has become however. For the past three or four years I keep thinking that the Super Bowl ads keep getting worse with each succeeding year. There is no subtlety anymore. It's all rudeness and explosions these days. Coke, GoDaddy, Priceline... there wasn't a coherent idea between them. I didn't even like a lot of the commercials that the young bloggers gave rave reviews on their websites. I thought the Taco Bell spot with the old people escaping the retirement home was kind of insulting and even though I thought the Tide "Stain" spot was clever, it wasn't that great. On the other hand I did like some of the commercials that the young folk thought were insulting. The Volkswagen spot featuring white people talking like Jamaicans was panned by many reviewers who said the spot was racially insensitive. What a bunch of politically correct nonsense. That Volkswagen commercial was one of the few genuinely funny spots I saw all night.

Like many of you, I loved the Paul Harvey "Farmer" spot for Dodge Ram. I was terribly disappointed however to discover that the Dodge Ram ad agency didn't actually come up with this idea. A much smaller Chicago agency had already used the exact same Paul Harvey dialog in another commercial earlier. This is sad to me. Copying has become so mainstream that people don't even think it is wrong anymore. Most of my clients would actually rather copy or emulate something that already exists than to take a chance on something genuinely original. I haven't been asked to do anything genuinely original in years.

I was really busy today, but like I've already mentioned, I wasn't doing much original thinking. That monkey the Iranians sent into space recently could have taken my place today. I changed out pictures on websites. I paraphrased things I found on Wikipedia. I replied to mindless questions with equally mindless answers. Maybe something original will happen tomorrow.

Duke is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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