Football Sunday commercials and old coffee pots

Monday, damp and dark. There is a metaphor in that, I feel, which could be easily exploited if it weren't Monday and I weren't feeling it.  Hoorah for a now-percolating pot of yerba mate and the wakey-wakey energy it promises! I've taken to brewing my office mate in a venerable old Farberware electric percolator I received as a high school graduation gift. This same pot came with me to the big city of Seattle when I first shipped off to university, and there gave me an ulcer brewing pot after pot of strong Starbucks coffee to keep me awake while typing and retyping papers.  That was the era when Starbucks was still a single student-run store in the Pike Place Market and when retyping a paper really did mean retyping the whole blasted thing because there were no word processors (you had either a manual or electric typewriter and a bottle of White-Out).  This same percolator served many years of active duty in our household until we decided there were better, fancier, (and larger!) coffee makers to be had. It still works beautifully and there is something about the sound of perking coffee that says warm goodness approaching.

There seemed to be a higher-than-usual number of massive trucks hauling individual commuters to their destinations this morning. Maybe all that Sunday football advertising really does reach a large and susceptible audience?  If so, those folks probably also drink light beer over their pizzas made (surprisingly) with 100% real cheese, and their over-sized vehicles are insured by geckos.

It was the Acura commercials that struck me this Sunday. They always ran two adds in each commercial segment they bought time for.  The first would make fun of those who spent money on frivolous things and were prone to overspending, with the inference that going out and buying a new Acura would somehow make you one of the smarter "under-spenders." The second would highlight the same kind of conspicuous consumer set (this time as the right and proper upholders of the Great American Consumer Dream) and promoted the idea of giving an Acura to family members as a logical thing do.  The really sad bit in this paring of seemingly crossed messages is that it will represent the upshot of a great deal of market research.  It will be running exactly this way because there is a body of research that shows our society will be vulnerable to just these sets of messages.

I also noticed a BMW commercial that ran several times.  They were encouraging folks to not settle for anything less than the real thing, that other options were not "just as good as" driving a real BMW.  The add features a number of beautifully video-graphed cars being piloted on totally empty curvy roads by drivers looking like they had slipped into Nirvana-behind-the-wheel. Along the bottom of the screen, briefly, flashes the notice that none of the models shown in the commercial were US models. What you see on the screen in this US commercial is not available in the US.  Um... what do you think that tells us?  Here's hoping the US models are "just as good as" the ones on the screen. 

Generally, though, the European models of cars sold on both continents are better than the models offered here in the US.  Why? Mostly because we're all too easy (in the aggregate) to market to and don't require the care and attention to detail that less susceptible European shoppers do. Also, European models generally bring better mileage and emissions controls, which we still don't care about sufficiently. We're still into oversized vehicles, though we have gotten just smart enough that a new vehicle segment name had to be created to keep selling them to us.  Truck, then SUV, now crossover.  Now made with 100% real American cheese.

If I were a good writer and this were a well-thought out article instead of the very finite musings of an every-morning blog, I would deftly tie the old coffee pot and my observations of Sunday commercials together, here at the end of the post.  If I were really good, I'd even manage to have it all segue smoothly into this morning's random track selection.  However, this is just my morning post-commute thought grab bag and I am not a powerful enough weaver of words to make that happen.  Especially not on a Monday morning. 

This morning's playlist was very upbeat, until I got to campus and Jonsi & Alex shifted musical gears toward ambient and atmospheric:

 - Doves: Sky Starts Falling

 - Big Head Todd & The Monsters:  Midnight Radio

 - Jay Nash: Wayfarer

 - Jonsi & Alex: Daniell in the Sea