Truth in Advertising: Ads you'll probaly never hear

Heath Bars: One L short of health

KFC: There's a reason we hide the fried

Volkswagen! the Fuhrer's choice

Change is Bad; this is this IS your grandfathers Oldsmobile

Virginia Slims: You've got a Black Lung, baby!

Wine! The other soft drink

Miller Light: the Shampoo of bottled beers

Jack in the Box: Where the Burgers are now fully cooked

Burger King: Our ads may be creepy our burgers are OK

MacDonald's: Being supersized will be YOUR big surprise

U. S. Air: So wrong for "So Long!"

Furby keeps annoying me

The Furby is a really weird phenomenon. First of all, it uses both real and virtual media. It looks like a furry owl and the commercial makes it seem very cute, but there is a slightly darker side to the furby. It is programed to react to space just like an animal or a human being. It looks alive, acts alive, seems alive, but isn't alive. The Furby is cute but also annoying. Somehow you feel that if you don't love your furby, you're a bad person.

The furby scares me even in it's usual cute state because we are creating a new life form, playing god. This Frankenstein sense of the furby is brought home with the creepy skeleton furby shown here. It is the actual inside of a furby and programed to act like a monster. It is a bit creepy yet somehow I know it won't haunt my dreams. It's kind of an Addams family, Norman Bates, or FrankenFurby. This image has a train wreck fascination. You can't look away even though you're scared.

The furby makes me feel that we are a society both afraid of, and at the same time, ready to embrace technology. And that if it is cute, or fun, or appealing we are more likely to accept it.

Be honest- which scares you more?

To Monoplise or not to Monopolise

The early twentieth century was the golden age of the big trust and monopolies. Most of these had been broken up by the 1930s but people still wanted to own monopolies. In that same decade the Parker Brothers wanted to show the world it was not just big businesses that wanted to get monopolies. He believed that anyone who had the opportunity, would want to have a monopoly. He decided the best way to show this was with a game, which uses real space, in which the aim of the game was to get as many monopolies as you could. In theory, people would play willingly until they realized in horror what the game was really about (it was even called Monopoly for goodness sake) and in horror, stop playing, only that never happened. Actually I realized that and haven't played it since.

It didn't go back to this satirical aim until a father in the 1970s got upset that his son always beat him at Monopoly. He realized what the game was really about and sent a game that changed the rules of the game to not making monopolies. He called it Anti Monopoly. It was good in theory but people quickly got bored with a game that you play to lose. They have actually reissued the Anti Monopoly game now with the slogan the dark secrets of the Monopoly game revealed. I don't think this will sell as much as they hoped. It is a good message but a very lousy game. Who plays to lose?

This does show that we have a certain inclination to serve ourselves before others. I think that I might have a game of Monopoly where you play as a member of the Dark Side from Star Wars, but I don't think people would get the point even then.