Here's a Fark thread that's worth a few minutes of gigglage. The theme is "Photoshopped 'Think Different' Ads", and it's not as painful as I initially thought it would be.
A lot of the entries, granted, are simply ignorant and/or mean, as one might expect. Many are perspicacious and incisive, like the "Think Bait-&-Switch" one about .Mac. But a lot of them are in fact genuinely funny, and worth waiting for the page to load. John Cleese in "Walk Different", for example, and the George Bush one with "Think Differentably"-- brilliant. And I just about blew chunks all over my monitor when I saw the Newton one.
There are the to-be-expected jabs about Apple stealing the GUI from Xerox PARC, and later on there are petulant postings of desparate myth-debunking from people explaining for the nth time how Apple legally acquired the rights to the concepts they saw and hired the engineers to develop them from Xerox, while Microsoft reverse-engineered the whole thing from Apple code (as I've discussed here over and over again).
But there are a couple of things that I really wish these people would understand... namely, 1) Get with the times-- the "Think Different" ad campaign hasn't been actively used for almost two years now; and 2) "Think Different" is not ungrammatical, you pinheads. Haven't you ever heard or used a phrase like "Think Big"? It's an adjective. The form of the phrase is "Think in terms of something which is [adjective]". Think Big. Think Green. Think Cool. Think Different.
One other thing, though, of which I must make mention is the people whe are making fun of Ellen Feiss, the vacuous high-school girl from the Switch ads. She is a very easy target... but you know what? That's on purpose! Why would Apple make an ad that deliberately plays up her stoned, clueless appearance? If they considered this to be an embarrassing face for the company, why would they be airing it instead of filming a bunch of prettyboys? Clue time: It's self-effacing humor. It's irony. It's acknowledgment of the realities of the world. And when people make fun of it, they're entirely missing the point. Such mockery comes across to me like this:
Sheri/Terri: Look at Missus Potato Head! She has a head made out of lettuce. [Giggles.] Ralph: I can't believe I used to go out with you. Janie: Are you going to marry a carrot, Lisa? Lisa: [Rolling her eyes.] Yes, I'm going to marry a carrot. Sherri/Terri: Ohh! She admitted it. She's going to marry a carrot!
Give it a rest, guys. All you're doing is making yourselves appear as though your own brains are mounted on rather soft suspension points.
Ah well. At least there are some pro-Mac guys in the thread, which would have been ridiculous in Fark a year or two ago.
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