Tag Archives: Television

Making Commercials

Posted on by
Reply

Almost every night we sit down and watch The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Right at the start I have to take time out to comment that The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson is some of the best television being made. We look forward to watching it every night. Beyond the program we have started to see a very beloved advertising campaign, the one for Aflac. It’s very strange to even think of affection and advertising in the same sentence, but this particular company has keyed in on what has to be the most subtly funny animal-based advertising campaign. Here it is.

We have been laughing so hard at this that it has not only become a catch-phrase for us, but we always stop the DVR and play this companies advertisements each time they come on. This is how commercials should be made.

Get Lost II

Posted on by
Reply

While discussing the nature of Lost on GeekTyrant’s blog, I had a thought:

Christian was dead cargo during the plane crash. I don’t know exactly how a corpse-in-a-pine-box can be an authority on what was real or unreal but it seems as though people have a huge investment in the Island being a real place and the things that happened on it likewise being real and not magical, make-believe, or purgatory from the start.

What I did enjoy was in the final scene, in the stained glass window behind Dead-Dad-In-A-Box was all the religious iconography – including a spoked wheel. That for me was all I needed to see the Island as a spiritual representation. I can’t really get past the Dharma Initiative and Namaste banner on the Island, Good and Evil being alive, Immortality, Miracles… for me it’s more likely that the Island is a dream-state-place rather than a real place. I also can’t get past the symmetry in Jack’s existence. He ‘woke up’ after the plane crash in the same exact place and pose that he laid down to finally die in. Did he ever really ‘wake up’ or was the past six years all about Jack and his trip through Purgatory? Were the other people on the plane real characters or just aspects that Jack needed to plug into his dying hallucination in a last-ditch bid for redemption?

Thanks to the writers, we’ll never ever really know. I find it an utter shame that Michael and Walt can’t get into heaven with the rest of the Lost. 😉

So that begs the question. Is LOST just the ramblings of a dying single mind? Six years of drama, characterization, development, scenes, meta, plot, myth… all of it just the flickering and guttering spark of Jack’s soul right before he dies on the Island? All the characters based on people he died with, that he saw on the plane, all just playing out Jack’s trip through Purgatory? Nobody else needed to actually be in Purgatory, it could have been Jack, all this time. Jack and Kate then would have been Jack just talking to himself. Jack and Christian, just Jack talking to himself. Just a big imaginary trip trying to seek redemption… Cuse and Lindelof perpetrating a six-year whammy on their loyal fans?

As I said on Twitter, it’s obvious to me that Jack is a Cylon. 🙂

The case of the poorly buried radioactive WMU President.

Posted on by
Reply

Just woke up from a comic/creepy/odd dream. I was on West Campus at Western, wandering around – the scene was industrial, a loading dock perhaps Dalton Hall but it was a nighttime and it was much larger than it really is, more spacious at least. I was walking just past the dock and ended up in an office and suddenly I was in a dream-storyline and was an observer of the story as it was playing out. This is what I saw.

I noticed that underneath the Welcome station for this buildings office receptionist there was a burial capstone set into the floor, off to the side, under her desk. Her desk was actually resting on the capstone and it was slightly ajar. Nobody thought this was upsetting in the least, except for me. The office was just beyond a door that lead to the aforementioned industrial dock area, just so we’re clear on the setting. For some reason I had a geiger counter and it was screaming off the charts, the pin buried at the top of it’s range, the radiation was pouring out of the slightly ajar capstone. For some reason I can’t explain I knew that there was a WMU President, an old dead one buried RIGHT THERE. I woke up thinking it was Sangren, but it could be anyone I suppose. I was screaming at everyone in the building “Why would you bury him HERE?”, “It’s horribly radioactive! You’re all going to DIE!” and nobody seemed the least bit concerned. It was then that I realized that everyone I was talking to were both there and not, they’d appear and dissapear, like a flickering hologram generator. I was then wandering the hall looking for someone to tell, and the plan was to find someone to help pop off the capstone, and clean up whatever it was that was pouring out so much radiation. There was so much that it looked like a faint blue haze or fog pouring out of the capstone. Eventually the scene fell out of a “WMU” context and into a kind of Indiana Jones adventure context, mood lighting and such. I woke up with the overwhelming desire to buy a geiger counter and bring it to work, just in case.

So there we go. The analysis of this dream pretty much writes itself.