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Posts Archived Under Advertising
 The Milestone Mo-Tel today. Winners get one free night. Losers get two. (That's the second time we've used that joke today.) |
If the whole world loves a winner, we have a weekend full of love ahead of us. Let's get started!
The most obvious winners will be declared Thursday when either Clint Robertson or Brandy Kuentzel wins the right to become Donald Trump's latest Apprentice for one year. (We hope that the loser isn't stuck for two years ...) One of the three remaining teams on "The Amazing Race" will win a million smackers on Sunday. (Perhaps eating that sheep's head may have been worth it.) It's almost guaranteed that none of these winners will make Barbara Walters' list of the year's "Most Fascinating People," (most fascinating to her, anyway ...) but we’ll find out for sure Thursday. (Our guess for #1 on her list? The cameraman who smears the Vaseline all over the lens that photographs her.) And on Friday, they'll be handing out the Nobel Prizes. The Nobels aren't like the Oscars; everyone already knows who won and the winners have actually accomplished something that matters, rather than playing loveable oddballs.
Saturday we'll see some sports winners. In the afternoon, someone (Cam Newton? Andrew Luck? LaMichael James?) will win the Heisman Trophy as the nation's finest college football player, and in the evening, either Georges St-Pierre or Josh Koscheck will take the welterweight championship at UFC 124 in Montreal. We assume the combatants will not resort to wheeling around the ring in roller skates, but while it would be appropriate (given that Thursday marks the anniversary of their 1884 patent), we'd have to warn them that such a thing would be just plain dangerous.)
Sunday also marks the 10th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Bush v. Gore, which ensured that George W. Bush became the nation's 43rd president. Whether that made the country a winner or a loser, we'll leave up to you. Falling into a similar category is Larry King's retirement from his CNN talk show on Friday. (As with President Bush, we won't say whether that's a plus or a minus.)
Weary travelers were winners 85 years ago Sunday, when the Milestone Mo-Tel, the world's first motel (short for "motor hotel"), opened in San Luis Obispo, California.
If we stretch the definition of "winner" to include those whose birthdays fall this weekend, then we're lousy with winners. For example, Thursday sees the birthdays of both Margaret Hamilton (1902) and Redd Foxx (1922). Hamilton is best known for her role as the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 classic, "The Wizard of Oz." Despite her indelible portrayal of one of the screen's great villains, Hamilton loved children and was a lifelong advocate for charities that benefitted kids and animals. Foxx was someone whose work, on the other hand, was decidedly not for kids. A veteran of the black vaudeville entertainment venues known as the "Chitlin' Circuit," Foxx recorded a series of "party records" in the 1950s that were both filthy and hilarious. He reached a mainstream fame in the '70s when he starred in "Sanford and Son," where his frequent feigned heart attacks were one of the show's running gags. In a supreme irony, he suffered an actual heart attack while rehearsing for another television show, but no one believed was it real until it was too late.
Sunday would have been the 95th birthday of Frank Sinatra. The greatest popular singer of the 20th century, Sinatra was also an Oscar-winning actor, starred in numerous TV specials that consisted of nothing but him singing with his guests, and was the biggest attraction in Las Vegas when that title actually meant something.
Monday, we celebrate the 192nd birthday of Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of Abraham Lincoln who was criticized in her time for her extravagant and spendthrift ways, and committed to a psychiatric hospital by her son Robert. While she was undoubtedly depressed, wouldn't any woman who’d lived through the death of three sons and the murder of her husband (while sitting next to him) feel the same? She was eventually declared competent and released, but her health was broken, and she died three years later.
If birthday celebrants are winners, so too are those is show business who meet success, like performers and lovers of country music, who can celebrate the 83rd anniversary of the first broadcast of the Grand Ole Opry on Friday. The Opry has been a staple of radio and television in the decades since it debuted, highlighting the best in country, from Hank Williams and Minnie Pearl to Clint Black and Carrie Underwood. Someone who's appeared at the Opry (but has yet to be inducted into its member ranks) is Taylor Swift. Perhaps the Opry has been waiting for her to turn 21 - in which case, it need wait no longer! The Grammy-winning singer reaches her majority on Monday.
Thursday will see the annual airing of the Rankin-Bass animated Christmas special, "The Year without a Santa Claus," which features memorable turns by Snow Miser and Heat Miser (who are also not members of the Opry).
Friday is also the 55th anniversary of the "Mighty Mouse Playhouse's" television premiere. In TV's early days, broadcasters were desperate for material to air, so old movies and cartoons were natural fodder, and Paul Terry's "Mighty Mouse" cartoons were some of the oddest programs to come to the screen. Mini operatic melodramas, they featured the eponymous rodent singing his was through battles with the villainous Oil Can Harry. Mighty made a brief comeback in the 80s in a brilliant TV series produced by Ralph Bakshi, but he's been in retirement since self-appointed censor Donald Wildmon mistook the mouse's flower sniffing for drug use. (No, really.) Wildmon isn't the only well-intentioned, if-misguided, protector we mention, though, since Thursday is the anniversary of the founding of the John Birch Society, which has been protecting Americans from the Communists lurking under their beds for 52 years.
Legitimate do-gooders have something to celebrate this weekend, too. Thursday is the U.N's annual International Anti-Corruption Day, dedicated to wiping out, well, corruption and promoting the rule of law, and Friday is both Human Rights Day and the beginning of Human Rights Week.
We end by noting a delightful juxtaposition on Thursday. December 9, 1792, saw the first cremation in America, when statesman Henry Laurens died at his plantation in Charleston, South Carolina, and per his will, his body was burned. On the same date in 1886, Clarence Birdseye, inventor of frozen food was born. We're reminded of the choice Curly Howard was given in a Three Stooges short: to be burned at the stake or to have his head cut off. He opted for the former, on the reasoning that a hot stake's better than a cold chop. Good night!
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 Don't even think of throwing a tomato at Klaatu |
Welcome back to The Spark, your weekly guide to Yahoo! Directory resources for the week's events. It’s not a jam-packed week, we’ll admit, but in the words of Spencer Tracy, there’s not much meat on it, "but what’s there is cherce."
Monday:
In the late 1890s, Fannie Farmer wrote a wildly-popular and influential cookbook; a book which virtually guaranteed results by standardizing measurements. On this day in 1902, she opened her own cooking school, "Mrs. Farmer's School of Cookery," beginning a mania for cooking, food, and recipes in America that continues to this day.
In 1912, dancer Gene Kelly was born in Pittsburgh. Kelly was (in our opinion) the second-greatest dancer in the golden age of movie musicals. Not content to be merely a hoofer, Kelly soon moved into co-directing (with Stanley Donen) his films in an attempt to make dance in film not just entertainment, but art. And in such films as "Singin' in the Rain," "The Pirate," and "An American in Paris," he succeeded.
As popular as Kelly was, his fame paled in comparison to that of Rudolph Valentino, though. Valentino emigrated from Italy in 1913 with virtually no money, and by 1921, he was one of the biggest stars in the history of the movies, and certainly one of the greatest screen lovers ever. He died of peritonitis in 1926, setting off a frenzy that makes Michael Jackson's death look like a chamber of commerce picnic. 100,000 people showed up at the funeral, and when the body was taken to Los Angeles by train, probably hundreds of thousands more turned out in hopes of getting a look at the coffin.
Two championships this week, one ending and one beginning. In Las Vegas, the Miss Universe pageant will name its winner (still no word if extraterrestrials will show up), and in Paris, the World Badminton Championships will begin in an attempt to find the greatest shuttlecock artist of them all.
Tuesday:
A day for noting historical events. In 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted in Italy, with an explosive force some 10,000 times the force of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Although the explosion wiped out the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, it was a boon for modern archaeologists, since those cities were almost perfectly preserved in cocoons of lava and ash.
In 1456, Johannes Gutenberg finished printing his first edition of the Bible. That Bible was double-edged: movable type made knowledge easier to disseminate to the masses, but those masses couldn’t afford to buy such expensive books.
Speaking of double edges, in 1891, Thomas Edison applied for a patent for the movie camera, but it couldn’t have been of much use, since he didn't apply for the patent for film until 1897.
In other patent news, in 1869, Cornelius Swarthout received his for inventing the waffle iron, making sure Southerners can enjoy breakfasts any time of the day. And while they were never patented, it was around this day in 1853, that Native American Chef George Crum invented potato chips at Moon's Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York. (Which is why you'll still sometimes see them referred to as "Saratoga chips."
And if you want a way to work off the calories from all those waffles and chips, you can emulate Duke Kahanamoku, whose 120th birthday this is. Kahanamoku was the native Hawaiian native who, if he didn't invent surfing, certainly popularized it.
Wednesday:
More food events today. In Buñol, Spain, La Tomatina begins, as thousands gather to, yes, throw tomatoes at each other. Why this is considered a good idea, we can't say. For those in a mood for a less-messy celebration, we point you to Mitchell, SD, where the annual Corn Palace Festival kicks off with a concert by Kenny Rogers. Every year, Mitchellites decorate their Moorish "Corn Palace" with husks of corn to create fabulous edible murals. This year’s theme is "Through the Ages."
In birthdays today, we begin with two men who are best known for two sentences. The first is actor Michael Rennie (1909). Rennie had a reasonably distinguished film career after World War II, but it was his appearance in 1951's "The Day the Earth Stood Still" that cemented his iconic status. Starring as the alien Klaatu, his instructions to the late Patricia Neal to give to the robot Gort, "Klaatu Barada Nikto," are known to even those who never saw the movie. The second is Walt Kelly (1913). In the 1950s and '60s, it would have been hard to find any American who was better-known than Kelly. A writer and cartoonist, he created the "Pogo" comic strip that, for years, poked fun at American society and politics. In 1970, to commemorate the first Earth Day, he pictured the strip's eponymous possum hero confronting the disaster his swamp home had become and proclaimed, "We have met the enemy, and he is us ..."
Two other birthdays are for men who are known for their overall bodies of work rather than for individual utterances: Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (1918) and Sean Connery (1930). Bernstein had a fairy-tale beginning to his career when, in 1943, he took over conducting the New York Philharmonic on a national radio broadcast as a last-minute substitute for music director Bruno Walter. The reception was overwhelming, and over the next half-century, Bernstein turned out symphonies, operas, and musicals like "West Side Story," and spanned the globe conducting orchestras and educating the public as to the power of classical music.
Connery had a brief career as a stage actor and bodybuilder before landing the role of James Bond in 1962. Although he's been mostly retired from acting since 2005 (not wanting to deal with the "idiots in Hollywood"), his role as Bond ("...James Bond") will forever define him -- well, that and his appearances on Jeopardy! ...
In these days of controversy of the 51 Park center in New York, we were struck that on this day in 1902, the first Arabic daily newspaper in the U.S., "Al-Hoda," began publication in New York City.
Thursday:
Today would have been the 70th birthday of Don LaFontaine, whom you know, even if you think you don't. LaFontaine was the movie trailer voice-over guy, who transfomed the phrase "In a world where ..." from a cliché to a monument.
In 1946, George Orwell's "Animal Farm" was published, much to the chagrin of schoolkids everywhere. Not that it's not a fine and important book, but it's gotten classified as just another notch in the summer reading belt and lost a lot of its power. Speaking of animals, there's that old saying that every dog has his day? Well, since today is National Dog Day, we guess this is it. And speaking of dogs, it was on this day in 1957 that the Ford Motor Company rolled the first Edsel off of the assembly line. And speaking of disasters, we can't help but think that the recent oil gusher in the Gulf was made possible at least in part by the good folks of Titusville, PA, who began operating the world's first oil well on this day in 1859.
Readers of a certain age will feel ancient as we note that Macaulay Culkin turns 30 today.
Friday:
The only things to note today are the birthdays of two men who couldn't be more different. In 1912, the King of the Jungle was "born" when Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Tarzan of the Apes" was published. And it's the 58th birthday of Paul Reubens -- better known in his persona of Pee-Wee Herman (and need we mention that Pee-Wee will open on Broadway in Ocotber?)
Saturday and Sunday:
This is a weekend to celebrate the births of groundbreaking creative artists.
In 1828, it was Leo Tolstoy, who's best known for his long and complex novels like "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" that deeply explore human psychology and relationships.
In 1898, writer and director Preston Sturges was born. Sturges had a streak of cinematic creativity in the 1940s that has never been matched, turning out a string of ten comedies that remain unrivaled for their characters, dialogue, and sheer lunacy. By 1948, he was all but washed up, but in the years before, he was unrivaled.
Actress Ingrid Bergman was born in 1915. After acting in 11 Swedish films in the 1930s, she was signed by American producer David O. Selznick, and spent the next 40 years making film classic after classic. From "Casablanca" to "Notorious" to "Murder on the Orient Express" (for which she won an Oscar), she left a series of indelible performances.
In 1917, comic writer and artist Jack Kirby was born. Kirby was "the King" of comics, with an imagination that was as limitless as the cosmic stories he illustrated. The list of characters he created or co-created -- Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, and the Challengers of the Unknown -- is enough to make any creator wish he'd have come up with just one of them.
1920 saw the birth of saxophonist Charlie Parker. Although deviled by drugs and alcohol in his brief 34 years, his postmodern method of playing jazz and bebop has influenced players ever since. Unfortunately, his genius came at a great cost. He lived high and hard, and when he died in 1955, the coroner estimated his age at between 50 and 60.
Speaking of "War and Peace," we should mention that, in the former category, Saturday will see UFC 118 and in the latter, Sunday is the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King's March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
And, finally, we note that on this weekend in 1922, the world heard its first radio commercial. The ad, which aired on New York station WEAF, was for the Queensboro Realty Corporation of Jackson Heights, who was trying to sell folks on their Hawthorne Court apartment complex in Queens.
Who knew then that one company's $100 investment would later turn into a multi-billion-dollar industry that would influence us all -- or try to?
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 There's some kind of mad genius in advertising gum on matchbook covers (Photo by Oliver Hammond)
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What's so great about William Wrigley Jr., anyway?
Sure, he founded his own company at age 29. And he was plucky, too, we suppose. He started as a soap salesman, wooing his customers with free baking soda. The baking soda became more popular than the soap, and Wrigley changed his business. He gave away chewing gum next, but again the freebies proved more popular.
Sounds like Mr. Supersalesman didn't even know what his customers really wanted. Granted, he did learn from his mistakes. He switched to gum sales, launching products like Juicy Fruit and Wrigley's Spearmint in 1893. But how big could the gum business be?
Well, Wrigley invested wisely and made good use of advertising, turning his small company into an international confectionery empire. And then there are the skyscrapers, mansions, hotels, and university research centers. And there's that island he bought and preserved from overdevelopment. And then, that Chicago neighborhood that's named for him. And the baseball team -- wait, teams.
Okay, we confess -- now that we've chewed it over, we're impressed.
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 Peter Graves greeting fans in October of 2009 |
We were all prepared to note Peter Graves' birthday today with a Spark about how B-level celebrities late in their careers find themselves squeezing the remnants of their fame to become commercial spokespeople. So, imagine how we felt reading of Graves’ unfortunate death last Sunday: all our plans were knocked into a cocked hat.
Now, don't get us wrong. We're not disparaging either Mr. Graves' talent or the product in any way. He was a fine and serious actor whose filmography is filled with enough classics -- "Stalag 17," "Night of the Hunter," "The Long Gray Line," "Airplane!," not to mention his iconic role on "Mission: Impossible" -- that his reputation is secure. Rather, we were just curious as to how Graves joined a parade of actors who ended up hawking such services.
Celebrities are, of course, no strangers to commercial endorsements, Mark Twain's image was used to sell cigars. Baseball players like Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams sold cigarettes, as did such classic movie actors as Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy, Bob Hope, and Henry Fonda. But at least those were more mainstream products.
We have to wonder what detours altered the career paths of Peter Graves and Robert Wagner to make them think that flogging for reverse mortgages was the best career move? Or Lindsey Wagner for mattresses? Or Bob Eubanks for a dating service? Or Wilford Brimley for diabetes supplies? Or Betty White for pet medicine? Or even Sam Waterston for robot insurance?
Commercials are, obviously, a lucrative option for many actors (and not just celebrities: look at, say, Stephanie Courtney, Dori Kelly, or Isaiah Mustafa), and while some stars -- Ed Harris, Gene Hackman, and James Stewart -- prefer to let their voices, rather than their faces, do the talking (literally) others are not so camera-shy. It's hard to turn on the television and get away from William Shatner, Michael Jordan, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, or Tiger Woods... okay, maybe not Tiger so much anymore.
This is not to mention, of course, another category of celebrity who's not too proud to appear on camera in commercials, but who doesn't want them seen in America. Foreign audiences have seen Paul Newman for coffee, Nicolas Cage for video games, Jennifer Aniston for beer, Leonardo DiCaprio for cell phones, Meg Ryan for GPS systems, Bruce Willis for credit cards, Keanu Reeves for whisky, Sean Connery for yogurt, and John Travolta for -- well, your guess is as good as ours.
As he had done for other clients, Graves, being the professional he was, played it straight and gave it all he had, and you can't ask for more than that. Now that he's passed, we have to wonder if the ads will continue to air. Sure, he's gone, but that doesn't seem to have stopped Billy Mays.
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 "His Master's Voice" (What you don't see is that Nipper is sitting on the coffin of his dead owner) |
In company logos and advertisements, animals are a fairly common sight. So common, in fact, that you probably haven't given these mascots a great deal of thought. But those whose job involves selecting an animal representative for an organization or company face no small task. With their choice, they will be aligning themselves with whatever qualities people tend to associate with that animal. Once they’ve found their totem, they may forever be associated with it.
A prime example of logo longevity is "His Master’s Voice," a design trademarked by the Victor Record Company on this day in 1900, sealing forever in our minds the image of Nipper the dog listening attentively to a Victrola, and connecting it further with the Gramophone Company (later known as HMV). In the ensuing century, plenty of other corporate critters have made their marks on our cultural consciousness. How many times have you heard Leo, the MGM lion roar?
Financial institutions have adopted symbols of strength, including an elk and a lion, though Merrill Lynch was wise to select a bull rather than a bear. Animals in advertising have also provided memorable and humorous moments.
Cuteness gives many animal representatives their appeal. The Geico gecko is pretty adorable, as is Snuggle, the Fabric Softener Bear. Some creatures are simply effective because they are cartoons, and appeal to kids, such as the Trix Rabbit and Sugar Bear.
Turns out there’s a science behind the success of animals (or "visual identifiers," as the marketing analysts call them). While some wine critics may claim they avoid "labels bearing cute animals," the rest of us are drawn to these images almost against our will, according to researchers. Did you pick up that bottle of Syrah because it had a kangaroo, chameleon, or a cute dog or kitty on it? It’s not your fault -– you're a victim of your own "perceptual fluency."
In light of the incredible sway these animals have over us, some mascots may not have been the best selections. Joe Camel, for example, the longtime rep for Camel cigarettes, was no longer depicted in cartoon form due to objections that he appealed to children too effectively, and Budweiser’s Spuds MacKenzie faded into obscurity before anyone noticed that a dog in a Hawaiian shirt was probably not the most appropriate spokes-animal for beer. After all, wouldn’t you rather share a tall one with a creepy penguin?
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Georges St-Pierre GSP RUSHFIT - 8 Week Trainging Camp GSP's MMA conditioning program www.gsprushfit.com
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Bus Tours Find Great Deals On All East Coast Tours. http://www.eworldtours...
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