The appeal of the Jeep Renegade TV advertisement in Australia

I have always been fascinated by advertising and marketing because it reflects society.  By trying to capture our attention advertising informs us about ourselves in the hope that it will appeal to our wallet.

Advertising is a gamble even if it’s well researched beforehand.  It’s no secret that I like the Specsavers ad when the hunky myopic guy rescues a seal believing it to be a young child. The ad is amusing, pleasant to watch and sends the right message.  “Go to Specsavers if you’re having a problem with your sight.”  Simple, amusing and effective.

On the contrary,  the Ford ad with that prissy little bitchy lady in the blue dress has a counterproductive effect and I have not been an admirer of that ad.

I do like the Jeep Renegade commercial, however, because of its catchy music and great masculine visuals.  I’ve even found the ad on You Tube and am enjoying listening to the band, the X  Ambassadors who perform in the ad.  It’s message is simple.   The Jeep Renegade is Now.  It is  adventurous, sexy,  and promises real excitement.  Music and product go well together and make their point.

Contrast that with that stupid Ford commercial whose message is lost by poor casting and visuals and you’ll understand why some ads work while others fail.

Shark Attacks- Don’t blame the sharks.

Every couple of weeks or so someone in Australian waters gets attacked by a shark. In fact, Australia is getting the reputation for being the shark attack epicentre of our planet.

It’s always a shock and everyone becomes outraged about the attack.  Why is this happening? What shall we do about it?  Should we build a net around Australia to stop the shark attacks?

The answer is simple really. Sharks will attack us only if we are wet. They will attack us if we invade their domain and they may also attack us if they are peckish.

They will not come into your home while you are watching TV or having dinner or having a bath or whatever.

So it’s up to you to decide whether it’s worth the risk to play in the shark’s milieu. If you choose to do so don’t complain cause you’re the one doing the home invasion.

Sharks are only doing what they are programmed to do,  that is  swim,  search for food , attack,  eat and reproduce.  In a way,  we are programmed to do the same thing as the sharks  but we should stick to our own territory when we do so.

The Dressmaker–what in the world?

I have a suggestion for Peter Dutton, who is the Immigration and Border Protection Minster of Australia.  Whenever a boat carrying  “asylum seekers” is caught trying to reach our shores,  he should screen for them  “The Dressmaker”.

I guarantee that the boat people would beg the smugglers to turn the boat around and escape as far as possible from the image of Australia depicted in this film.

The setting for this Aussie production is the town of Dungatar which is made up of an extremely phony collection of sheds and outhouses.  Its inhabitants look like escapees from a Bruegel painting,  a bunch of weird caricatures.  There aren’t many of them in the town of Dungapoo but we have the village idiot, the cross-dressing policeman,  the demented mother of the dressmaker who is a hoarder,  the sex-starved fatty, the mean rich man who bosses everyone around,  all overacted by usually reputable Aussie actors.

Apparently,  the producers needed a celebrity for the title role of Tilly Dunnage who  has arrived to wreak havoc on the town that done her wrong by accusing her of murder.  So they chose Kate Winslet.  Alas, poor Kate. If only she had found a box of matches sooner and put us out of our misery long before the two hours of  “The Dressmaker.”

Francis Bacon said that  “revenge is a kind of wild justice” and boy does Tilly go wild. She outsews the opposition, cleans up her mother’s messy home,  cures her mother’s madness,  slims down The Biggest Loser by making her a new dress, finds out that the nasty man who drugs his wife and then has sex with her while she is knocked out, is actually Tilly’s father. Enough already.

In my defence, we were given these cinema tickets for free, but we overpaid!   We stayed until the apocalyptic end because I could not believe that this film which other people said I should go see was not going to improve.  Not even the town hunk who plays football can save this film.

Wouldn’t you think I would have learned my lesson by now?

 

 

The Australian Muslim Community speaks at last about the terrorist attacks in Paris

Apparently, the Grand Mufti of Australia has spoken. We don’t know what he said because he doesn’t speak English.

Hard to believe, but I read that he’s been in Australia some 18,  yes 18 years, and great scholar that he is couldn’t be bothered learning English. He has been the Grand Mufti since 2011 and has seen no reason to learn English yet, it seems.

What made me laugh today, however,  is that on Al Jazeera TV there was a breaking news documentary called

“The Day Israel attacked America.”  Hmm, I thought. I wonder what that’s about?

Well, it’s about the day,  50 years ago,  yep 50 years ago during the Six Day War when the Israelis accidentally hit an American vessel while Israel was defending itself against attacks by Five Arab nations.

All I could conclude from that Al Jazeera ploy is that the Muslims must be in a lot of trouble to dig up that old story in order to distract their viewers from what’s really happening in Paris right now.

 

Here we go again with Australia’s lenient judiciary

A fourteen year old girl was abducted and gang raped in Geelong for over one hour by a group of men whose surname is Wild.  Yep, Wild by name and Wild by nature. One of them,  twenty-seven year old Rowan Gavin Wild, has been granted bail by a female magistrate called Jelena Popovic.  Rowan  Wild  had been uncooperative with the police who opposed bail and had even disguised himself to avoid detection.

But Popovic let him go.

This gang rape was so violent and cruel that the mind boggles at how a magistrate could grant bail to such an animal, but there you are,  it’s another case of the judiciary having no guts.

This sort of thing happens far too often in Australian courts which seem to be on the side of the perpetrators of crime. The victim’s plight appears to be incidental and all effort is devoted to how the alleged criminal is treated.

The worst culprits by far are female magistrates who find it difficult to sympathise with the rape victim.

It’s a woman thing.

As I have often said and written,  if I’m ever accused of any crime I hope that I do not have a female jury and a female judge at my trial.

The sisterhood is a myth.

p.s  The latest news this morning is that all four charged rapists of that poor child of fourteen may get bail.   Jelena Popovic is certainly a model magistrate, is she not?

I wonder if this would even be considered  possible  had the rapists been women in their twenties charged with raping a boy of fourteen.

Climate Change and flatulence

Just when we are on the brink of conceding that climate change is all our fault,  scientists in New Zealand are going to present us with a Christmas gift.

Apparently,  they will know by Christmas whether they have found a cure for flatulence in cattle. This flatulence produces methane emissions which lead to the formation of greenhouses gases which are bad for the environment.

Scientists,  bless their little hearts,  are trying to create methane inhibitors.  They are fiddling with all sorts of compounds to achieve this breakthrough.

In other words, they want to reduce farting in cattle.  Something like a charcoal pill, I suppose. But it’s far too complicated for me to explain the whole thing because this is extremely highbrow chemistry or physics or thermodynamics.  I just threw in the last word because it sounds pretty scientific.

Nevertheless,  I still wonder what could happen if the experiment goes sour. What if instead of inhibiting the amount of methane that a cow produces it ends up full of it like some zeppelin until it explodes and whizzes around like a burst party balloon?

Imagine the number of  UFO’s that will be reported!

Anyhow, I wish the Kiwis all the luck in the world with this one. There’s so much hot air around the topic of climate change that any method of reducing it would be most welcome.

 

Climate Change? Yes, No, Maybe or Whatever….

Hardly a day goes by that somebody somewhere does not reiterate that climate change is a scientific reality. The research has been done and 120% of scientists say it is a fact.

We cannot argue against a scientific fact,  I guess,  but I am led to believe that not everybody is convinced it’s the fault of homo sapiens. We must change our ways,  however,  even if it’s not our fault warn the prophets of doom.

The planet will dry out or it will get flooded and islands will hit rock bottom, so to speak.

It’s a grim outlook, is it not?

Heaven help us if we question this apocalyptic prediction.  Look what happened to the witches of Salem!

So I’m not going to do that.

What I will say is that I don’t know,  but it’s hard to be convinced by any prophesy about climate when one considers how inexact a science weather forecasting is in general.

In any case I have lost interest in the topic because it’s possible,  just a suggestion mind,  that this world is not really worth saving and perhaps it’s time to start all over again.