Monthly Archives: September 2008

How I Managed to Alienate Two Obama Supporters

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A pair of middle-aged women showed up at my door the other night. They had clipboards and they were wearing blue buttons. They didn’t have to say it, but they did anyway: “We’re talking to people about voting for Barack Obama,” she said, in the passive, indirect way that a therapist would tell you to talk to somebody who disagreed with you.

An aside: I live on the outskirts of one of Pittsburgh’s wealthiest suburbs. Many of my friends grew up here, and they all agree that a democrat in this area is extremely rare.

My first instinct is to try to get rid of them. I don’t want to have a conversation with strangers about something as personal and potentially explosive as politics. Someone I used to know went door-to-door as a child, for religious reasons. She said that the only guaranteed way to get rid of their particular branch of the big X was to say you’re an atheist. Because their church so adamantly rejected independent thought, a person who didn’t believe in God was the biggest threat to an impressionable child’s supple mind.

I admire these two ladies for what they were doing. I sure couldn’t do it, and I’ve tried. My friend Becky ran for Magistrate one year, and all my ex and I had to do, as part of her street team, was go up to peoples’ homes and knock on their doors and ask them to vote for Magistrate, and then ask them to vote for Becky, who happened to be the only girl on the ticket. It was easy. We even had pink pens to give out.

Becky didn’t really have a chance, as we discovered later. The guy who won was a local cop for a long, long time and basically already knew the whole town. She might as well have been running against everybody’s cousin.

So I understood how hard it was for them to come up to the front door of somebody with an undermowed lawn and a talking Darth Vader on his car’s dashboard and ask him to vote for Barack Obama. Maybe they thought it was a slam dunk. The Apple sticker on my car probably got their hopes up.

“Do you know who you’re voting for?”

The first thing I did was apologize.

“I’m sorry. Yes, I do.”

“Oh?” they said, pencils raised.

“Probably Bob Barr?”

Long, pregnant pause.

“Well,” said the leader. “We’ll be sure to write that one down.”

I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. I’m still not sure. She made no move to write anything at all. Did she think I was making a name up?

“Well, I’m a Libertarian,” I said, adding a period to the end of the conversation.

“And you’re voting with your party,” she said, nodding. “Thanks for your time!”

“Thank you, and uh, well, um, good luck,” I said, and closed the door. Carriage return.

I don’t know if I would have gotten an argument if I had said I was a Republican, or if they would have tried to sway an admitted independent. Most folks don’t really know what to do with a Libertarian, because we probably agree with a lot of the things they believe, but with different priorities and different reasons.

It gave me an idea, though. Maybe the quickest way to get rid of door-to-door campaigners is to say you’re a Libertarian?

I have a story for you to read

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I’m not going to send you to my blog, though. I’m just going to post something here asking if anybody wants to read it for me and help me finish it.

I don’t need you to write anything, but I would like some feedback on how I can improve it. You’ve probably already read it, if you’ve known me long enough. Here is where I sigh.

I have a problem finishing things. It’s actually a complete story, but it still feels unfinished.

Anyone?

My Favorite Animal Is…

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I have finally picked my favorite animal. Some of you might be surprised by my choice.

My favorite animal is not the dog, which shouldn’t be that shocking. Dogs aren’t animals, they’re very furry people with sharp teeth and the good graces to not comment on how fat you are when you get naked in front of them. Having said that, dogs are definitely my favorite kind of person.

I arrived at my choice purely by accident. I was thinking about different animals and how gross most of them are. I’ve built up quite a mental library of disgusting facts about various animals over the years, and my favorite animal seems to have the fewest of them. If dogs weren’t people, they would probably have the most, a list which includes eating their own vomit, which might be the grossest thing an animal or person could do.

Another gross animal fact: a mother mouse will sometimes devour her entire brood. That means she eats her babies, which is something I thought was never supposed to happen.

My favorite anima doesn’t do that. My favorite animal doesn’t even have teeth.

And now, the big reveal: my favorite animal is the duck.

Look at this picture and tell me it doesn’t make you happy to be alive:

Here’s why the duck is my favorite animal:

1) They’re fluffy and smooth at the same time.

2) They have snowy white feathers.

3) They have an innate sense of style, since white and bright orange look so great together.

4) They never get wet, even though they spend their lives in water.

5) They can swim, walk and even fly.

6) They make a very funny noise that is even spelled funny.

I don’t have a pet duck, because they’re wild animals and wild animals don’t make very good pets. I also don’t want duck poop all over my house, which is one of the few gross things that ducks do.

If there is a special hell for ducks, I bet it’s empty.

Microsoft’s New Ads Are Dumb

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(Ben posted this video first)

They’re directly trying to combat the negative perception of Microsoft, fighting fire with fire against Apple’s switch ads, but they seem to misunderstand a few things.

1. Apple’s ads are short. Very short. The Microsoft ad goes on for two full minutes of weird non sequiturs, including stuff about wearing shoes in the shower.

2. The premise isn’t very funny. Here it is: two extraordinarily wealthy men buy shoes at a suburban mall. They talk about dumb things. Jerry Seinfeld mugs. Not funny.

3. Bill Gates is a zombie. He sucks the energy right out of it.

4. Jerry is funny when he plays straight, not monkey. He’s playing monkey, not straight.

5. Apple’s ads are iconic. Two guys stand in a white infinity. PC guy is the monkey, Apple guy is the straight.

6. Apple’s ads are clear. The two guys talk about how much better Macs are, and then they cut to a picture of a Mac. The Microsoft ads don’t mention Microsoft until the very end, and even then it’s some muddled dialogue about magic beans or something.

7. Apple’s ads are hip. It helps that Apple’s products are hip, too. Microsoft isn’t hip. Microsoft desperately wants to be hip, which is why it made this ad in the first place. That’s horribly misguided, because Microsoft’s stuff isn’t ever going to be hip. It’s so self-aware in its unhipness that the ad seems to think that this alone will propel it right back to being hip. But it doesn’t. It just looks lame.

8. Jerry Seinfeld was very popular in the 1990s. I don’t think he’s very popular now.

As is typical for Microsoft, they’re trying to appeal to people with a huge, committee-created, board-certified Marketing Initiative endeavor that supports a limp, unexciting, unhip, uninteresting product in a way that comes off as an old guy who buys New Balance sneakers and gets a tribal tattoo so the women he hits on won’t realize how old and flaccid he actually is.