NASCAR is basically hours upon hours of advertising going in circles, broken up by more linear advertising commercials. But the NFL, I think, embraces advertising in a way that boggles the imagination. Take, for example, this sequence of events:
Punt.
Commercials.
Turnover.
Commercials.
Touchdown.
Commercials.
Kickoff.
Commercials.
All told, that will run off about 45 seconds of game clock time and you will have enjoyed around 8 minutes of commercials. Which is to say that the signal to commercial noise ratio for pro football should averages around 1/2 (45 minutes of playing, since they don't actually use all 60 for doing stuff, and another 90 that's commercials), but can be as low as 1/10. What is the advertising elasticity of viewership for football? What would happen if they added 10% more commercials? I'm going to look this up - it's a thesis topic.
My mother is redesigning her kitchen and I have no doubt that it will be completely disagreeable to me. It'll probably look okay in a picture, but up close (and the individual pieces she has picked out) it will seem horrible to me.
The faucet is what I disagree with most. It is overly ornamental. It is a lesson in putting useless shit on a basic object. I have a gag reaction to it. It just isn't the correct faucet, especially for a kitchen and I have little doubt that its presence will impede the functionality potential of the kitchen.
A built-in soap dispenser, too - this is arguably the most useless thing, because this is what will happen: soap will get put into it once, it will leak, it won't get used, there will be old soap oozing out of it and it will be a useless, rotting reminder of every bad decision you've ever made in your entire life.
And I don't like the handles she picked out for drawers. Because the drawers are small and these are too big and the opening is at the bottom. It would make fine sense if we had cabinets that were above shoulder height, but no one does. To use the handle, you will have to bend lower than you would if you had a pull knob or just used the edge of the drawer.
These things make me kind of ill and I would really rather them not be purchased. It's a triumph of a theme over a sensitivity to the actual purposes and contexts in which the object is used.
I find "theme-ing" offensive, too, in that we impose our poor scholarship on a historical period or place and that is what our room is, with two dozen throw pillows and ruffly window treatments forever and ever amen.
Rather than actually understand our objects and things, we lump things together in a way that we find easy to understand - colonial, art deco, French countryside, Turkish prison, Vietnamese brothel - and purchase them as part of some lame supposed broader structure that we've bought into. Buying crap to reflect a theme or because it reflects a theme represents a poverty of both knowledge and conviction. It's all fucking kitsch and I hate it.
Today I spent most of my afternoon at work trying to figure out which photo of me they would show if I ever went on a killing spree. It's a good exercise - try it.
