Crowds cheer in support for PPR CEO Francois-Henri Pinault
Posted by: admin in Uncategorized on April 1st, 2009
Francois-Henri Pinault, the CEO of French luxury firm PPR, was greeted by a throng of cheering supporters in central Paris today, eager to get a chance to show their support for his steady leadership amid difficult economic circumstances for luxury brands.
Gucci bags were thrown to the crowd like loaves of bread to sate their appetite for the fabulous life. The crowd politely dispersed after being informed of Mr Pinault’s desire to make it on time for his private jet that would whisk him away to be with his wife, the actress Salma Hayek.
The rebranding of plastic as vegan
No long-winded philosophy for today. I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking.
A "vegan" laptop bag. But is it organic?
An example google search on vegan bags shows that an increasing number of vendors are picking up on the value inherent in the concept of veganism, and applying it to strange things like hand bags.
The bags may be vegan, but are they organic? What is their carbon footprint? Do they contain flax?
As a vegan bag, could you eat it? Ah, of course not, you’d probably die because it’s just a bag made of vinyl that has been used as a cheap material for decades, derived from non-renewable oil, made in china, shipped overseas (again, using non-renewable oil as a transport fuel) and then sold to people at a massive markup.
A nice touch is to also name their bags after counterculture and “underground” bands. A mere $295 buys you the chance to feel good about your commitment to “positivity”, your love of The Knife and the cow that still has its hide.
Sheer brilliance, if you ask me. It’s amazing that they get away with it. They must have MBAs.
Map of the world from the Midwest
Posted by: admin in perception on March 27th, 2009
Reader contribution - yes, I have readers!
I am pleased to post the second installment in the ‘map of the world’ series, this time from the Midwestern US.
Not being from the Midwest or having lived there, I am not “qualified” to create such a map, so I’m grateful to Mike who spent the time to create this map and contribute it!
On a side note, some people have sent me links to Our Dumb World . The first map of the world from los angeles was not inspired by that site, but rather by this map that has been floating around the internet for quite some time.
While The Onion’s site is great, the main problem that I have with it is that it presents the world as two places, America and the states of Not-America, perpetuating this myth that America and Americans are a homogenous, unifed bunch, or, at best, separated neatly into Bush supporters or haters, red or blue state. There are interesting aspects to the way Americans from one part of the country view another to be explored, and the degree they are involved, culturally and economically, with foreign countries.
While these maps obviously still make broad generalisations, there is a significant difference in the way Midwesterners, East Coasters, Southerners, West coasters, etc. view the world, and while we may be poking fun at these people through these maps, I would at least hope that it helps people outside the US to realize that America, a vast country of 300 million people, is a much more complicated place than commonly perceived.
Wow! And ad for ads! How meta
Posted by: admin in advertising, toronto on March 23rd, 2009
This post is dedicated to the free-thinking person that wrote what i think is the funniest graffiti defacing a poster that I’ve seen in a while:
"Wow! An ad for ads! How meta"
Sadly, my mobile phone camera is not the best, so I’ll set the scene.
The poster above was in a bathroom at The Lakeview restaurant, a 24-hour diner on Dundas just east of Ossignton in Toronto. Evidently Zoom Media is having trouble finding advertisers willing to pay money to have a drunk, vintage-clad hipsters plant their foreheads on their “innovative” ads while they liberate themselves from their pints of PBR (I don’t claim to know what goes on in the women’s bathroom)
A new series: The World as Viewed from Los Angeles
Posted by: admin in los angeles, perception on March 13th, 2009
It has been brought to my attention that people are not particularly interested in listening to my long, boring rants. I don’t take it personally, when I’m the one drunk off the kool-aid at a party I don’t want to hear whining from sober people about suspicious substances, imminent death, poison control and all that kind of nonsense.
So, I will try a more multimedia approach to showing us how absurd our perceptions of the world around us really are.
In what is the first in a series of a few places, I present “The World”, as viewed by a typical wealthy resident of Los Angeles (America doesn’t do “socialism” anyway so no one gives a damn what the poor think)
And just in case my LA friends think I’m picking on them, just you wait for my plans for NYC and Toronto maps….
(click on map to expand)
I’m too lazy to do all the math, but a breakdown
- Maybe 1-2% of the world’s population lives in the areas i’ve shaded reddish.
- 15-20% of the world’s population lives in the “cold” areas
- the remainder in the grey areas
Don’t ask me why parts of America are brownish or green. There was somewhere I was going with that…