Tuesday, June 23, 2009

prettiest girl in pakistan

two of them actually, sat next to each other, smiling their best smiles, over a pizza. they absolutely beamed with joy. alas, they weren't real (as in not physically present), they were girls in a pizza hut billboard. so eating at pizza hut will bring me pretty girls? has the marketing team even seen karachi? for those you haven't had that pleasure, it's a step away from being a single large a dump. most of the population is impoverished and there is garbage on the sides of most roads. for some reason birds closely resembling the carrion variety fly around the city everywhere you look. and one very important fact: there are no girls dressed like those in the ad or as pretty.

of course, pizza hut isn't the only company guilty of false advertising. other examples:
1. wii ads, with people old and young excitedly huddled around the tv, ecstatic with joy playing some shit ass game. the reality is that the wii is sitting in its original box, with the box gathering dust somewhere. the bigger reality is that everyone hates their immediate family.
2. panasonic and their flat tv. three 20-somethings laughingly carry it and hang it on a wall opposite a couch in what can only be described as a hallway. apparently it was a tiny apartment. the kids immediately throw themselves on the couch and start enjoying their purchase. panasonic were emphasizing the slimness of the tv. what they also emphasized was the abject poverty of the owners, to live in a matchbox, yet somehow afford a flat screen tv.
3. airline ads showing people happily sleeping in their business and first class cabins, with stewardesses ascending on them like angels, carrying fresh food, taking their books and covering them while they sleep. the reality of course is that most of these stewardesses are not models who couldn't find other jobs, nor do they care if you are covered while sleeping. however, what the ads truly fail to capture is coach, where passengers are crammed in like sardines, the food is horrible (rubbery omelets, crunchy bread, limp salads anyone?), and there is a single stewardess for each 50 passengers.

Monday, June 22, 2009

the american legal system

i jab at americans quite often here. they've earned it.

the most recent jab comes from the news. a poor (not literally, but poor in the victim sense) lady was fined $80,000 dollars for each song she downloaded illegally off the internet. for 24 songs, she's being fined $1.9 million dollars. to put things in perspective, a legal download is 99 cents a pop. for $1.9 million dollars you can buy around 2 million songs. also, you can buy several exotic cars, a few houses, or live comfortably on the interest for a few years. but that's not my point. my point is this:

in an unrelated piece of tragic news, you must have heard of the crash of air france's flight 447, of which there were no survivors (even the wreckage hasn't been found). air france has been accused of not being sympathetic with the relatives of the families and decided to pay an initial $24,000 to each family. that's 30% of the value of a single song. in other words, a 32-year-old in minnesota has 3 times more incentive not to download songs than air france has to protect its passengers from death. even the warsaw convention, which governs the personal injury limit to airlines, sets that limit to around $27,000.

$80,000 per song. way to go.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

weight gain in a day

why do all hotel rooms have scales, yet they don't have, say, an iron ? what are the odds that i would want to weight myself after staying in a hotel for one or two days? who is that health conscious?

Sunday, June 07, 2009

word of the day

spherical idiots: those who appear to be idiots every way you look at them

Thursday, June 04, 2009

shaving using seventeen blades doesn't make you irresistable

neither does using a new deodorant, or using an anti-dandruff shampoo, or buying a new shirt. those girls you see on tv are paid to (a) stay thin and (b) pretend to be attracted to clean-shaven guys. incidentally, it doesn't make you more handsome or make your six-pack more prominent (or at all visible).

over 23

a restaurant was proudly displaying that they have over 23 branches around the country. what does that mean? do they have 24 branches? or 26? i mean how hard is it to actually count the branches, since there's over 23 of them! if they had, say, 11,000 branches, it might be irrelevant to say they have 11,467 branches, so over 11,000 might be called for. but over 23? jeese!

ps: this also applies to about 24 locations. about? so is it actually 23? or 25?

Monday, June 01, 2009

silly gmail

whenever i check my spam folder, it helpfully displays links to food recipes that use spam: spam omelet, spam burrito, etc.