BUZZURRO

Wouldn’t it be a better world if all advertising in the world were true ?

I’m really tired of all the advertisements that say for example “Buy Tide because it’s the best you’ll ever get!” and then the same company comes out and says “Buy Tide New and Improved version because it’s really the best you’ll ever get! ” as if to say that their original product stinks.

I also hate when a restaurant advertises “a buffet lunch every day” only to find out that Saturday and Sunday are not included.
Are Saturday and Sunday not considered days? How sad for them. Maybe the advertisement should be changed to say “buffet lunch every weekday” but I guess that takes too much effort.

I’m also not impressed by the various sleep aid medications that list drowsiness as a possible side effect.
Shouldn’t drowsiness be the main principle effect ? I mean that’s why a consumer would want to buy a sleep aid product in the first place - for it’s drowsiness causing effects and instead the manufacturer is saying that it only might possibly work and cause drowsiness. Why buy it ?

Or how about the cable company that advertises how you should choose them because they are fast and such a good bargain when they hold a monopoly in the area and you either choose them or choose them if you want cable.
Why pretend that there is a choice ? Why not say “You clients are stuck with us so we can charge whatever we want and give you slow and crappy service because you can’t do anything about it.”

A few years ago while living in Southern California I was in an infomercial for a car wax product.
They made outrageous claims and then used trick photography to make it look like those claims were true.
Of course they weren’t. One claim was that it was fireproof as they showed a car with that was waxed with this product that didn’t burn.
That could be very dangerous if someone were to see it and think they could wax their car with it and drive through fires unscorched.
I was so disgusted that I almost walked off the set.
Truth means nothing to an advertiser.
Then a crew member set me straight. He said to me “Well, a company can’t exactly say to a potential consumer, “Buy our product. It’s OK. In fact it’s just as good as the other products on the market. The companies HAVE to make these outrageous claims to get consumers to buy their products.Nobody really believes these claims anyway”. And with that I finished the shoot.

But still, honesty in advertising would be nice.

Food porn: a gallery of photos of 200 calorie portions of foods. Anyone of you is on diet ?
Now, let me go to the fridge.

(H/T Lifehacker)

Yesterday as I was walking outside I saw my landlord putting up a row of paper bags alongside his house. “What are those bags ?” I asked him while pointing to one. “They are farolitos.” He responded. “Faro WHAT ?” I asked. And he replied “Farolitos. They are a New Mexican Christmas decoration. They are traditional. These one I am using are electric, but many times they are just paper bags filled with sand and candles.” “Oh.” I responded, not thinking that a row of brown paper bags was very aesthetically appealing, as Christmas decorations usually are.
Nevertheless, when I got home I did like any other computer geek would do. I Googled ‘farolitos’, I wanted to know their history and why they are a New Mexico tradition. I found out that what are called ‘ farolitos’ in Santa Fe and other Northern New Mexican towns are called ‘luminarias’ in Albuquerque and other Southern or Central New Mexican towns. New Mexico is very unlike New Jersey or California where I have also lived. They have a lot of traditions here, many of them Spanish in origin.
This is what I found.

At nighttime I left the house to take a look at these farolitos. They look pretty.

Here is a picture of some farolitos at night:

Several months ago while looking for a job in the newspaper Santa Fe New Mexican, a coworker said to me, ” Why are you reading the Santa Fe New Mexican? It is the absolute worst newspaper I have ever seen. Try the Albuquerque Journal. (a statewide newspaper). I answered “I’m looking for a job in Santa Fe. Those classifieds are more helpful to me because it is from Santa Fe.” ” That makes sense, but the rest of it really sucks.”
Today I picked up a Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper. One of the stories was of the suicide bomber in Iraq who drove his truck to an area where many poor Shiite seeking work gather. He offered them a job, and then as they gathered around the truck he exploded it. It was packed with explosives and many people died, with many more maimed victims. The article was on page 3, but there was a quote on the front page which is what grabbed my attention. It said “76 Iraqis seeking work are dead from suicide bomber, but they knew that the area had several suicide bombings in the past.”
As if to say their deaths were indirectly their fault for being at that location in the first place.
As a person who has sought work before, as most have done at somepoint in their lives, I was deeply offended. These poor people were just seeking work. They nneeded money. They weren’t kidnapping others for ransom or doing anything horrible; just seeking work and they do not deserve to die or even to carry a small amount of blame for their deaths as the person who wrote /said the quote implied on the first page. It’s a tragedy. A big tragedy. The terrorists who did this horrible act are one hundred percent guilty of being the most scoundrelly low form of life, and to even imply that the victims were at fault for seeking work in an area known for having had several suicide bombers in the past is completely wrong.
I decided with much anger to turn to page 3 to see what other crap was said in this terrible article that in effect blamed the victims. This is the article titled For Laborers, Seeking Work Is Risking Death.
I read the article once and then I read it twice. Nowhere in that article is the blurb I read on page one telling the reader to read the story on page 3. My question is “Who write this crap? Someone from Iraqi terrorists are really good guys fan club? .” I can’t believe an American newspaper, one that tries to impartially report the news, would be so favorable to the humanoid forms that brought about such a horrible attack. Obviously though, someone at the Santa Fe New Mexican thinks up and writes such crap..
It is true that I picked up the newspaper which is what the editor wants all possible customers to do, but I’m not going to pay any money for this junk. I’ll buy a real newspaper. The Santa Fe New Mexican really is the absolute worst newspaper.

It is quite chic these days to criticize Wal-mart and to say that one is contrary to their existence for numerous reasons, yet every time I go there to shop it is always packed with patrons.
Of course if one takes a closer look at the Wal-mart shoppers one can see that they are poorer than those that protest wholeheartedly against it.
Many of these protestors say that they are for all social causes including the poor in Africa or Iraq.
But why are they not for the poor here in the US ? Do these”socially aware” protestors even think of the interests of the American lower class at all ?

Wal-Mart with its lower prices has allowed poorer folks to own more consumer goods that they might not have owned had Wal-mart not existed.
In a world that is so technical and computerized not having consumer goods would doom these people to a continued life of poverty.
Shouldn’t they have the same opportunities as their richer bretheren who don’t shop there ?

Wal-Mart allows many of these poorer people to have jobs.
Of course a cashier at Wal-Mart doesn’t make $20 an hour like an employee at General Electric might make, but does a cashier at any other retail store make $20 an hour ?
Wal-Mart does not offer “exploitation wages” as many anti-Wal-mart people say they do. Wal-mart pays what other stores pay, a little over minimum wage, or minimum wage itself.
That is the market price for those kinds of jobs.
Perhaps minimum wage, or a little over minimum wage doesn’t sound like a good salary to many (including me), but to a student in school or a retiree it’s fair.
It’s what the market pays for those types of jobs.

A Wal-mart store opened up near Chicago and they received 75,000 job applications. If Wal-mart’s payrate was so unreasonably low not that many people would have applied for jobs there.

Besides, I have never seen any employees at Wal-mart that are chained to a cash register and forced to work there at gunpoint. If some employees are unhappy with their wages then they can always look elsewhere for a job. There are many lower paying retail jobs available, and not just at Wal-Mart.

Also contrary to popular protestor opinion Wal-Mart does offer health insurance. Most employees have either the insurance offered by Wal-Mart or that of their parents or Medicare.
Some choose willingly not to have insurance at all, as does a 41 year old friend of mine who works for the US Army and has nothing to do with Wal-Mart, yet I don’t hear the voices accusing the US Army of exploiting him.

Wal-Mart offers discounts to its employees just as many other retailers do. They really are no better or no worse then any other retail store but I don’t recall hearing the protests when Target, or other retailers decide to expand. It seem rather unfair to criticize one store when others do the exact same things and are not criticized.

I myself am not a part of the poor class, but part of a class that likes to save a dollar here or there and find the lowest prices possible. I am proud of the fact that I spent 50 cents today at Wal-mart on a product that costs $1.09 in another store. I don’t know why so many others aren’t.

UPDATE (12/06): apparently some found this post interesting.

There are some imperfections in this interpretation, yet it is enjoyable.

If you people want to try this at home and you can play piano, here you can download the score for free (luckily, we don’t have to pay royalties to Debussy).

The sophisticated (?) actress Gwyneth Paltrow released an interview to the Portuguese newspaper “Diario de Noticias” stating that:

“The British are much more intelligent and civilized than the Americans.”

Moreover, she said:

“I love the English lifestyle, it’s not as capitalistic as America.”

Shitty capitalism ! Capitalismo di merda ! The root of all evil.
A couple of days after the publishing of her interview, maybe after someone close to her made her understand that her statements against Americans might upset her fellow citizens, she retracted:

“First of all I feel so lucky to be American. When you look at the rest of the world, we’re so lucky, and that’s something my dad always instilled in me,” Paltrow tells PEOPLE. “I feel so proud to be American.”

When is she sincere, when she bashes Americans or when she seems more patriotic than Benjamin Franklin ?
After all, in 2003 she strongly doubted that America was a good place where to raise her child:

It’s a strange time to be an American now. I feel like we’re really in trouble. I just had a baby and thought, ‘I don’t want to live there.’ Bush’s anti-environment, pro-war policies are a disgrace.

So, one would understand that she prefers UK over USA ? No no no no, neither UK is a nice place to live, because:

“My husband thinks I’m way too obsessed with cleanliness and germs. I’m just like, ‘The street is filthy, could we take off our shoes before we come into the house?’, Gwyneth declared.
“Also, the customer service is just rubbish in England,” the California-born actress added.

“They’ll tell you it’ll take two weeks for your Internet service to be fixed! It drives me nuts. And I miss being able to get anything at any time of day. You can’t do that there.”
She has also complained about the weather, saying that in London it rains very often.

Well, after discovering that in London it rains very often, she also complained about UK, because they don’t let you park illegally:

Miss Paltrow called British traffic wardens officious for not allowing illegal parking and said that fines were ‘inordinately high’.

So, as you can see, a big lack of neurons.
If she doesn’t like neither USA nor UK, she might try this town.

This morning I learned some terrible news. Blogger Nickie Goomba died in Italy.

I have never met Nickie Goomba in real life. I don’t know his real name, address or profession. In that respect he is more like a stranger, but I do know his mind… well some of it at least. He was the author of a wonderful blog. His humor and satire of world events made his blog special. Buzzurro and I looked forward to reading every new post, just as much as we looked forward to the humorous,witty comments he left on our blog.
We were so greatly honored when Nickie Goomba decided to include us in his ‘famiglia Goomba’ a group of select blogs that was prominent on his own blog. We were also so greatly honored when he nominated our blog of just a few months for the Weblog Awards, which was a thing we never heard about and could never even hope to earn a nomination for.
I didn’t even know Nickie was sick until 6 months ago when he stopped blogging. I knew he must have been seriously ill because I could tell by his posts that he really, really enjoyed blogging. I kept returning to his blog hoping for a recovery and a new post, but unfortunately God had other plans.
Good bye my friend, Nickie Goomba. Rest in peace. Riposa in Pace.

A tribute to Nickie Goomba