…at their advertised uses, but those “diet belts” on TV infomercials turn out to be great vibrators.

AUTHOR KEVIN PHILLIPS has a simple theory for all the corporate scandals: When the rich get too rich, you end up with “a taste for speculation and highly developed sense of “gimme” that winds up jeopardizing both the American economy and the vitality of the American democracy.”

…has taken old WWII domestic-propaganda posters and added new texts to create some scathing anti-Bush satires. (Warning: The site is on one of those free servers with a daily hit quota, so you might have to access it early in the day.)

AS PART OF my ongoing efforts to find gainful (paying) employment, I recently made my first voice-over demo recording. You can hear it at this link in the ever-popular MP3 format. Send it to anyone you know who might be responsible for casting commercials, industrial videos, documentaries, video-game soundtracks, etc., and be sure to send them this web address at the same time.

(APOLOGIES to those who’ve found the site inaccessible for much of the past three days. My server provider insists things are now back to normal, or will be soon.)

During this biggest advertising slump of the past umpteen years, Rolling Stone has decided to abscond with one of the last links to its past, the occasional long articles and essays on non-celebrity topics. It’s hired an editor from the British-born “bloke mag” FHM, who claims (as so many middle-aged people have always claimed about their youngers) that Those Kids Today just don’t like to read. What rot.

The shortening-down (dumbing-down?) tactic is nothing new, but is endemic to publications whose runners are now much older than their target readers, who imagine their (the publishers’) own generation were young geniuses but Those Kids Today don’t know nuttin’. I’m actually noticing, at least in my own town, a longer-attention-span generation of adolescents, and an even-longer-attention-span generation of grade schoolers following them.

But short attention spans are what advertisers wish audiences to have–all the better to bombard with flashy brand images. The new Rolling Stone won’t be more reader-friendly, it’ll be more advertiser-friendly. RS publisher Jann Wenner, ever the generational-bias hypocrite, simply refuses to publicly admit it.

THERE IS NO JOY IN B-BALL VILLE. The Lucking Fakers took it all again. Damn it. At least the righteous Red Wings won the hockey title.

REMEMBER THOSE ADS in comic books that combined superheroes with Hostess Twinkies? Here’s the memoir of one of the guys who wrote ’em.

…with images from the 1971 Sears catalog.

…an unusually lucid graffito (above); while (below) a produce store tries to drum up business with a less-than-weather-worthy banner.

…reviews a new book about today’s up-‘n’-coming miniature art forms, including film clips and trailers, websites, and even banner ads. (The book being reviewed is apparently not yet available Stateside.)

IT’S PHOTO DAY TODAY, starting with some more examples of American business standing up for our nation (don’t you dare imagine any commercial exploitation of the popular emotions could be involved.)

First, it’s good to know the bowling pins of America refuse to be knocked over by internal divisiveness…

…And almost as good to know that giant balloon eagles are valiantly defending our right to consume mass quantities of imported oil to power our big-ass RVs.

Meanwhile, some folks who had other ideas about America and commerce staged protests across the nation on Saturday. Locally, rallies took place at Westlake Park, the Seattle Central campus, and at Broadway and East Thomas Street (where activists staged a symbolic “Take Back the Streets” exercise in the middle of the intersection.)

Whilst phalanxes of cops protected oil-company assets, peaceful advocated advocated peace. Peace was about the only thing all the protesters seemed to be for (some attendeess also expressed support for the Palestinian cause).

The protests across the country were ostensibly about the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Protest leaders have depicted the organizations as loan sharks, ruining the economies of Third World countries for the benefit of big global corporations. But, as often happens in a lefty gathering, topic drift abounded.

So you got bashers of the Bush oil policy, the Bush Mideast policy, the sanctions against (and potential invasion of) Iraq, the war on drugs, SUVs, domestic banks, and capitalism in general.

Later on Saturday, about 100 fans of Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley held a quiet vigil at the Seattle Center International Fountain. Staley, 34, was found dead at his University District home late Friday night; probably from an overdose.

In his songs and in interviews, Staley frequently admitted that he’d used heroin and that it had turned his life into a living hell. His lyrical imagery was perfectly matched by the band’s music–heavy metal dirges, often slow and pounding.

By 1993 AIC’s brutal and tragic aesthetic, unrelieved by the pop-punk energy of Mudhoney or the cynical wit of Nirvana, had come to most purely embody what many people (including most rock people in Seattle) claimed they hated about the media’s “Seattle Scene” stereotype. By 1996, Staley had essentially retired from making music. He seldom appeared in public, stopped performing live, and contributed to only a handful of new recorded songs. The few friends who kept in contact with him didn’t talk.

A Stranger gossip item last year said he’d been seen, looking presumably healthy, at a local club. A lot of us wanted to believe it. Instead, it now turns out to have been one of many unsuccessful sobriety attempts.

Staley never glamorized drug use. His songs and interviews spoke plainly of heroin’s momentary joy and lingering sadness. He lived in a private hell; it ultimately didn’t matter that this hell was initially of his own making.

…to the memory of Jack Roberts, who, almost singlehandedly, kept two American traditions alive locally into the ’90s: (1) The locally-owned, independent appliance store; and (2) the wacky-pitchman TV commercial.

ONE OF THE ODD THINGS about the Net is the way news articles might not appear (or no longer appear) on the site of the organization that originated them, but might still be found on sites that buy syndicated content. Thus, this link peculiarly takes you to a site in India discussing a magazine that, to the best of my knowledge, still can’t legally be obtained there.

The magazine in question, Penthouse, is suffering from the publishing/advertising slump worse than most. Thirty-three years after it first launched as Playboy’s most ambitious rival to date (early slogan: “We’re going rabbit hunting”), and three years after bringing true hardcore porn imagery to regular newsstand-distributed magazines, it’s swimming in red ink and can’t borrow any more money. Bossman Bob Guccione (now a 70-year-old widower who’s battled cancer) has put his art collection up for hock and his NYC mansion up for sale. Circulation has fallen, as all the other skin mags (except Playboy and Perfect 10) have quickly moved to match its sleaze quotient, and as hardcore video and pay-per-view have grabbed a bigger share of American self-loving males’ inspiration budgets. Many of the magazine’s advertisers, meanwhile, have fled to the bureaucratically safer (though ultimately just as stupid) nipple-free “tease” magazines of the Maxim/FHM formula. Penthouse has tried to make some bucks in Net porn, but that effort was undercut by the fiscal troubles at its erstwhile online partner, Seattle-based Internet Entertainment Group.

If Penthouse does disappear sometime this or next year, as some financial analysts predict, it would mean the end to one of the odder experiments in magazine entertainment photography–the ongoing attempt to gussy up porn scenes (up to and including actual coitus) with pretentiously “arty” lighting and composition. (Of course, any aesthetic ambitions in the photo-narratives are immediately negated by the models’ kabuki-like copious amounts of bleach, silicone, and heel lengths.)

There’s still money to be made in 2-D representations of 3-D physiques. But the sleaze side of that market is way too overcrowded. The softcore side is almost totally the property of Playboy, which in its current ossified state is a tired (and not very enticing) remnant of its old formula. What this country needs is a good, respectable hetero sex mag. Those who would wish to help me start one can contact the email address below for investment opportunities.

CAN WE REALLY think for ourselves anymore after a century of sneaky PR campaigns? (I, of course, will say yes.)

A LUSCIOUS net-radio stream of snazzy lounge and swanky easy-listening music, coming to you from servers in Russia (where, presumably, it might escape the wrathful attacks of a corporate music industry out to essentially quash indie net radio.)

IT’S NOT JUST a dictionary, it’s YourDictionary!

SOME WEBLOGS attempt to be all things for all readers (or at least many readers). A blog called GoodShit simply reflects one man’s range of interests: Philosophical discussion, classical art, political debate, and breasts.

…surprise-surprise, turned out to be A Real Game for once, instead of a rout or a dogged defensive stalemate. It went all the way to the last second with a long-distanct FG by the team all the experts said would never make it.

There’s just one discomforting aspect: The winners just had to be the team in red-white-n’-blue, even named the Patriots. It was an almost scriptable result right after a three-hour pregame show, a halftime musical bombast, and umpteen paid and unpaid ads, all full to the proverbial brim with flag-waving sloganeering and solemnities. The whole interminable ad campaign for “America” as a product even made the Britney Spears Pepsi spots look comparatively tolerable.

…on the field? Just look at the league’s regulations regarding what corporate logos its players can wear in public.

THOSE OF YOU who looove written English as composed by non-native-English speakers will undoubtedly enjoy this instruction sheet from a box of imported Chinese “stop-smoking” tea bags. (Warning: 235K .jpg file!)

THERE ARE ODD TV COMMERCIALS, then there are the truly, utterly strange, quasi-surreal spots that make you wonder what the ad agency people were drinking; or, in this next case, eating.

The spot I describe aired on various network daytime shows in early January. It opens with a business-suited yes man addressing “Governor Kempthorne.” The scene opens up to reveal a replica of the Idaho governor’s office, with the real governor seated at the desk. The aide continues, “Good news. There’s only one person more popular than you–Spuddy Buddy.”

A poorly drawn cartoon potato suddenly pops up on screen. He dances and sings the praises of baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, fries, and assorted other ways you can devour his tuber brethern. The half-minute closes with the governor telling the potato toon, “I hope you’re not running for office anytime soon.”

The Spuddy Buddy character was created by the state’s potato commission two or three years back, at least partly as an icon for children’s merchandising. A major PR agency spent untold bucks and person-hours researching ways to get consumers to demand Idaho spuds instead of whatever’s cheapest, and apparently decided a lovable spokescritter would be a great teach-’em-while-they’re-young concept.

The cartoon spud, however awkward looking, does have enough fans to generate at least one fan-fiction story of a sort, to be mentioned as a prop in other net-fiction, and the subject of speculators’ attempts to create a new Beanie Baby-style collecting fad.

But the figure has a different meaning for me. He reminds me of my lonely-college-boy days in the UW School of Communications. The advertising majors loved to scoff at us editorial-journalism majors, boasting that they were sure to get high-paying careers and we weren’t.

Then, one day in a Communications Building classroom, I saw the image that made me decide once and for all to follow my dream and avoid the suckup world of bigtime corporate advertising. As you might be guessing, it was a storyboard for a mock TV commercial featuring a singing, dancing cartoon potato.

I’m thinking I ought to send out for the Spuddy Buddy plush doll, as a reminder of the ol’ road-not-taken thang.