ADVERTISING AS AN ADJECTIVE
I just coined a new word. 'Advertising'. That is, advertising as an adjective. I was on a web page that had a banner ad which dropped down a menu every time the pointer passed over it. Not when you clicked it, even hovered on it, but every time you passed over on your way somewhere else. And as the banner goes about two thirds of the way across the top of the page, this happened pretty frequently. "This advert's bloody irritating," I meant to say, but what came out was "This irrit's bloody advertising." It struck me then that 'advertising' is the ideal adjective to describe something that's persistently, repetitively, unbearably mindless. Something that compels your attention and yet is simultaneously tedious beyond words. A lot of politics is very advertising, for example. If someone else is drunk while you're sober, their witty conversation soon becomes advertising. When you're a teenager your parents seem so advertising they're unbearable. And most advertising, of course, is advertising in the extreme.
Especially those which make themselves memorable by being deliberately annoying. Radio ads are probably the worst culprit here. Somewhere there are advertising executives who say things like "This jingle will make the listener want to kill their entire family with a broken mop handle. It's a hit!" How do these people live with themselves? More importantly, how will they die alone? The technique is banally logical; people actually will prefer a familiar brand name - no matter how it became familiar. Keep shouting "Vomit Cola!" at somebody day in, day out, and they will eventually come to think of it as good old Vomit Cola. Well it won't work on me. I keep a 'death list' of products which I will simply never buy, ever, because they annoyed me just one time too often. Once on this list, a product never comes off. And one day I'm going to publish it.
I mentioned politics, but that's the last you'll hear of it here this week. Now that an election's been called [Ireland went to the polls this week] politics is going to get more advertising than I can stand.
Instead, let me tell you my own news: I got a web site! [Yes, if you're reading this you know that. It's an archive. Bear with me.] I'm reviving my weekly 'Brain' strip for it, and there's a new fortnightly cartoon feature called 'Patent Pending' that hasn't been seen in Ireland yet. Okay, the world and his dog have a website now, (www.theworldandhisdog.org), but I'm inordinately proud because I did it myself. An entire second career opens up in front of me. I could be a freelance web designer! Though I don't need to, as I'm already broke.
Guess I'll put up some of these columns too. Maybe all of them! A searchable archive of every opinion I've ever held in the last five years or so - many for as long as five minutes. Yes, that would be ... advertising.