| Thursday, April 28, 2005 |
11:42 - I bet they added "alright" to the OED too
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Has anybody else seen those late-night cable ads for "Bling It On!"? You know, the kit you can buy for $19.95 (a $49 value!™) from Department One, Richmond, VA, which contains patches and strips of little pieces of fake costume jewelry that you can stick on your iPod and cellphone while chanting the magic words Bling Bling?
It's simultaneously the saddest and most hilarious thing I've ever seen them try to sell. Sure, it's one thing to make up graphs demonstrating that the "% MVIC" of conventional ab-workout devices is a flat curve whereas the AbScissor™ has a % MVIC curve far surpassing it, meaning you'd better buy it or appear stupid for not knowing what "% MVIC" is. But this—who directed this ad? Does he dare put it on his demo reel? Ron Popeil surely has excommunicated him already from the rolls of the direct-sales insiders. Tacky is the bread and butter of the industry, but this is tack-kay.
It features a bunch of white-bread teens sticking these strips of baubles onto their phones and laptops, so carelessly they can't even fit them on in a straight line; the ad tries, freakishly, to demonstrate how alluring and classy it is to paste a 1-inch square of little bits of shiny plastic with a heart inscribed in it in red bits of plastic, onto the middle of the speaker/palmrest of your laptop. And then, the whitest of all white cubicle-worker women ever to bestride the earth shows off her horn-rimmed glasses bedecked with the little jewels, and with the most grotesquely forced smile on her face that I can remember seeing, she tells the camera: "It's not just a kid thing. I love to bling!"
Thus ensuring that street slang will never "verb" this particular noun, lest it appear to be following the lead of this ludicrous commercial.
It's about as painful as can be imagined—but in a pity-inspiring way, not the maddeningly condescending way that describes that weight-loss pill where the randomly interviewed woman on the street caws, "They let'cha try it free? ...It must be good!"
I know—if I step back a bit here, what I'm doing is demanding quality and respectful presentation from the depths of the squalid medium that's been ruining our lives for the past half-century. But it has its moments of pure inspired idiocy that far surpasses the general humdrum idiocy to which we've all become accustomed; and those moments just beg to be documented.
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Brian Tiemann
