When Advertising Goes Bad

As you can see above, I definitely had a sufficiently fun weekend. I have other pictures, but many of the others were inside jokes. We played soccer Friday, went to the zoo Saturday, ate at Pluckers, took shots of Patron (not cheap, by the way) while watching Pulp Fiction, player poker for the empty bottle, and then played basketball today. And now, I have to work hard tomorrow to release my first project on Tuesday as I had promised. Anyway, you can see more pictures here if you're interested through Picasa web albums, which is actually not half bad. What brought me to center today's topic around what I decided to center it around was this article about how some dude bought Chappelle's Show on iTunes and complained because it had a few very short ads on it. You may say that a couple of 10 second ads isn't a big deal, but when you pay for a show it should be ad-free or else the price should be subsidized. Apple told him to wait a couple of weeks to download it, which we have reason to believe means that they're fixing up things with Comedy Central but just don't want to say it publicly. It sounds like an honest mistake though, right? Well that brings me to my next article, which is pretty far from an honest mistake: Best Buy is favoring Blu-ray over HD-DVD. Why? I'll give you one guess: it's green, smells funny, and Best Buy loves raking it in. I suppose we don't know for sure that Sony paid them off, but why else would they specifically instruct employees to not play movies on HD-DVD players and to sell Blu-ray players, despite the lower picture quality, solely because of "higher margins." What happened to retailers having some damn integrity?! Yes, I cursed, because this is curse-worthy. I'm not saying that I believe either one is particularly better since I think the whole format war is idiotic, but the fact that such a major retailer that already makes tons of money would do this is despicable. If you want to just carry one brand of product that's fine, but don't pretend to be an impartial retailer if you're just someone's bitch.

I spent too much time on laundry, so I'm going to have to go through the rest of this post rather quickly I'm afraid. Going off the advertising theme, Google has starting testing out video ads on Google Video. What's awesome is that it means that certain shows that you usually have to pay for would be free because of the ad-support, and I really like that idea. A new Digg will be premiering very soon (I believe this week, actually), and it sounds like he's actually putting new features in. You can hear what Kevin Rose himself had to say over here, and it sounds like they're implementing some video component but I didn't quite get the specifics. Apple appears to be vamping up Leopard to compete more directly with Vista with features like an integrated mapping technology, comparable to Virtual Earth. This isn't surprising, I just didn't know that they were coming up with such software, but it is just a rumor. Oh, and while I'm on Apple, you should watch this video if you want a blast from the past. Tim Berners-Lee has come out swinging to support other big whigs (like Vincent Cerf) in supporting net neutrality and highlighting how vital it is. He does a great job of explaining what it is and isn't to clear up confusion, and it's a must-read. Lastly, the Wii looks like it will support SD memory, which is really exciting to me because it could mean that you can put pictures from your camera and stuff on it, and it's not a proprietary format (i.e. unlike Sony's MemoryStick).

I was rather surprised to learn that Click reigned supreme this weekend with a whopping $40 million. Also impressive was Cars only dropping a third of its audience to come in second place, and I can't believe that the Da Vinci Code is still on the chart at #10. We're going to see some craziness this coming weekend though with Superman Returns's release. Did you know that they've made another sequel to I Know What You Did Last Summer? I was pretty sickened, too, and AICN got a bum review of it from Vern. Why do they keep doing this? It's a Scream or a Saw. Lastly, Apple seems to have a final trailer for Clerks 2, which is only slightly revised from what we've seen before. Still, now it's in Quicktime glory.

Now for some Unconscious Mutterings:

I say ... and you think ... ?

1. Newspaper :: Bathroom


2. Crucify :: Jesus


3. Sausage :: Biscuit


4. Handy :: Man


5. Cloak :: Dagger


6. Drunk :: Stupor


7. Fuel :: Band


8. Caress :: Lotion


9. Itch :: Scratch


10. Vehicle :: Car