The Question of Christmas Gifts

If you believe the commercials and ads running these days every single thing that a company sells would make an excellent Christmas present.  As for me, I am giving out my equivalent of a homemade gift.  I am giving what I am calling special editions of a novel I hope to sell to a publisher.  To those of you who are my family and not aware of what I am giving you, I apologize in advance.  I have this delusion that eventually, when I do become a hugely successful writer, the special editions will be worth a lot of money.  Yes, I stole this idea from Stephen King. 

If you watch Martha Stewart at all you know that whatever you are giving, no matter how expensive, it really isn’t worth a pile of wet snot compared to the thoughtful, time-consuming, ridiculously complicated things she wants you to make for people.  I saw something on television with Die Stewart-frauen and she was making homemade pillows.  Who the hell makes homemade pillows?  If you have enough time to make homemade pillows for everyone on your Christmas list you need to go out and start volunteering or start a dog-walking business or something before you start paper-mache-ing things or dipping candles. 

There are a lot of gifts that various advertising people are trying to convince you that you should buy for your friends and relatives that should never ever be bought without serious consideration of the ramifications.  For example: lottery tickets.  You hear the commercials and see them on television, perhaps, as I do.  I don’t know what kind of lottery your state has but I am betting whatever is there you see some kind of equivalent of these lottery commercials they run now.  These commercials always show some guy frantically trying to figure out what to buy his wife.  He is shopping last minute and everything is closed.  What on earth can he do?  Why buy a bunch of $1 scratch-off lottery tickets, of course! 

To those of you who might still be laboring under the delusion that buying lottery tickets for your spouse or girlfriend is a good idea let me dispel those beliefs for you.  They are terrible gifts.  They suck.  In the commercials, because they have writers writing them, each of those tickets ends up being a winner.  In real life you are more than likely to end up winning another lottery ticket or, perhaps, a dollar.  Unless you buy a lot of lottery tickets and use them to stick all over a large white box and inside that box is something very expensive and in the same class as jewelry if you are walking into your house on Christmas with nothing for your life but lottery tickets you should expect to be sleeping on the couch.  Also, you should expect to be sleeping there for a very, very, very, VERY long time. 

There is another branch of gift-giving that is somewhat endearing in its persistence that it is a good thing to give out to people you love and that would be the fast-food industry.  Is there anyone in your life who would really like to receive a gift certificate for some kind of heart-clogging, heart-attack-inducing fast food thing?  I remember getting McDonald’s gift certificates when I was a kid and thinking it was all right but hardly fun to play with.  I also remember their commercials that they would run during this time of year and everyone would be smiling and acting like an idiot when they pulled out a piece of paper entitling them to a cheeseburger.   

Once again if you were laboring under the delusion that someone you love and who means something to you would prefer to receive one of these rather than something else, anything else, then let me dispel those ideas right now.  No one wants to receive a gift certificate for food.  Some people seem to think that gift cards or certificates are impersonal.  Not me.  I love them.  I like taking the time to buy my own things rather than risk ending up with something I will not like and I think it is considerate of someone to think of me that way.  However, it would be galactically rude for someone to buy me a certificate for food!  Fast food! 

The beer companies have joined the fray over the past few years.  I think that this year the commercials I have heard at least suggest the idea that it might be best to buy beer for people who are throwing a holiday party.  To me, that makes sense.  It is polite to bring something when you are invited to someone’s home for a party.  However, I really doubt anyone in your family would like beer for the holidays.  As much as Budweiser would like to believe that there are scores of people out there buying cases of Bud for consumption on Christmas day I am doubting this is a gift that will make anyone’s face light up.  I would like to, for the record, separate the idea of buying someone a six-pack from signing someone up to some mail-delivered micro-brewery service for a year.  At least that would be unique and interesting.  Going down to the liquor store for a six-pack of Miller High Life, on the other hand, is not cool.  Of course you can probably also buy your lottery tickets there so if you are already going down this route you might as well go the rest of the way and pick up a handful of those as well. 

I understand how hard it can be to buy people gifts.  It is exhausting.  Right now there are probably thousands of husbands wandering aimlessly through malls.  They are the ones who look pale and haggard.  Their jackets are hanging open much like their mouths and they are probably wearing some kind of stocking cap on their hands.  They shuffle aimlessly, look dreadfully pale and, in all senses, look very much like a zombie out of a George A. Romero movie.  Many of them probably cling to the hopes that they can stop at a 7-Eleven on the way home and pick up a few lottery tickets and a few air fresheners and that will due.  These are the ones clinging to one last shred of sanity. 

A while ago I discovered that the internet was a great place to shop.  You can stay home.  You don’t even need to be dressed.  You don’t have to hunt for parking spaces.  You don’t have to fight off the crowds of people who are rioting near the toy store for a scrap of some sort of Elmo-shaped doll that does something like pass wind as it laughs.  You can have everything delivered at your home and some of the places even wrap the stuff for you and stick on a name tag.  For those of you unaware, the internet is actually full of more things that just porn. 

Of course you can actually make some homemade gifts.  These are very thoughtful and, really, should mean a lot more than anything store-bought.  It takes time and effort and thought.  If you are like me, it will also leave you weeping with glue on your fingers and wanting to stab yourself with a pair of scissors.  Merry Christmas. 

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is now available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.  It would make an EXCELLENT Christmas gift for the reader in your family.

The Starbuck-izing of America

I was thinking about the coffee chain Starbucks today.  I was doing this while standing in line to order my “tall” coffee which is always greeted with a strange kind of disappointment by the baristas.  They want me to come up with some convoluted concoction that they had to go to school to learn how to make.  What talents and dazzling skill does it take to simply grab a cup and turn a knob and poor coffee into a cup?  Not very much. 

Anyway, I was thinking about the general homogenization of
America.  I was keeping it to this country although, I guess, when you think about it enough companies are all over the world that the entire world has become homogenized.  What I mean by homogenized is that everything is pretty much the same no matter what city you go to.  This is never more evident, at least to me, than when you walk into a Starbucks. 

Personally, I find it somewhat comforting.  I recently had two friends come in from out of town.  While my friend’s wife was actually doing work it was up to me to entertain the husband.  I certainly didn’t mind.  I got to show off
Chicago which I absolutely love to do.  While we were walking around we stopped into some local coffee shop.  My friend is a true coffee addict.  I will also give him his “props” by saying he also makes a fantastic cup himself.  We tried a local place and his reaction to the liquid inside the cup was akin to the look you could get if someone handed you a cup of rancid milk.  Given the language he uses to order the drinks he wants, he could be asking for rancid milk for all I know.  We promptly disposed of the concoction from the local joint and found the nearest Starbucks.  Fortunately there is one ever two and a half feet so it wasn’t too hard to find. 

The thing about it is that each Starbucks operation has the same drinks and the same stuff no matter where you go.  Each employee is trained to prepare the drinks using the language that has now become common within the American language.  My friend, the addict, can walk into any Starbucks anywhere and ask for his venti, yabba dabba do, ipso facto, dingo, flatso, zipidee doo dah, flangie whopper with extra soy sauce or whatever the hell he gets and it will come out the exact same way every time.  To some people this is a bad thing, to me, this is a comforting thing. 

I hear a lot of people complain about this.  They say that the local flavor of communities and towns and cities are disappearing.  They say that the things that made each community and city and town unique are vanishing and everything is becoming the same.  They talk about this like it’s a bad thing.  Of course, I have no idea who “they” are exactly but you hear some people talking about this.  Maybe, since it is happening at a faster rate than ever, it isn’t a complaint as much as it used to be but you still hear some people lamenting this fact.  I am not one of them. 

I am the first to admit I am a homebody.  I like my home.  I have lived here most of my life.  I am comfortable with my city and my neighborhood and the people around here and the streets.  I know where to go to get a decent meal and a decent cup of coffee.  When I go to another place everything is very hit or miss.  You have no idea what you could end up with.  If you try hard enough, look up the information, search the phone books and ask the right people you can still find that local flavor.  However, you can never be sure about it.  What if the cook that everyone in town really likes is off that night?  It’s nice to know that some food is the same no matter what or where you are. 

I heard a lot of people complain about this sort of thing when strip malls and malls in general started sprouting up like weeds all over the place.  Yes, I agree there are some things that are lost with that.  I like the small book and independent bookstores, for example, than always going to a Borders or a Barnes and Noble.  However, even though I like to do that, it’s still nice to come across one of those big-chain stores and know what you can find in there. 

As I mentioned, you can still find the local flavor.  The great thing about those big chain stores is that they are also adaptable.  You can find some local flavor within those stores.  If you want you can find the accents or the little touches to the décor.  My friend was surprised to see that the Starbucks stores up here have breakfast sandwiches now.  Apparently in
St. Louis they haven’t started doing that yet.   

Granted the Starbucks here are not selling Chicago-style hot dogs.  However, you don’t have to go too far to find one.  You can pick up your Starbucks moopie, snoopy, slippy, dippy, mocha, cinco de mayo with soy milk and then walk about two blocks to pick up your Chicago-style hot dog, hold the peppers.  Local flavor can co-exist with the mass-produced stuff and it can do so successfully. 

The thing that is also interesting is how Starbucks has so permeated our culture.  What would happen if some mystical being were to cause every single Starbucks store to vanish into some alternate universe?  I think the world itself might collapse as we know it.  Certainly the people suffering from caffeine withdrawals would be enough to shut down offices and businesses around the world.  The entire world economy would collapse.  Anyway, the point is, how many people ever used the word “venti” before Starbucks came into being.   

The Starbucks people also have done cute little things to try and make you feel better as well.  They call the smallest size you can get a “tall.”  I always find it very endearing when an older person walks into a Starbucks and still orders a small, medium or large.  I once saw an interview with one of the guys who created the whole Starbucks brand and launched the stores and he said he just wanted people to feel good when ordering the smallest size.  Ordering a small just wasn’t as satisfying as ordering a tall. 

Not everything about this is good, mind you.  I am aware of that.  Those big-box stores have been accused of employing companies that use child labor and such, for example.  Homogenization is not without its flaws.  However, to me, it is just nice to know that if I am in London or, perhaps one day, Outer Mongolia, and I walk into a coffee place with a name I recognize from every street corner in America that I can order the coffee and it will be just the same as it was back in America.  I can then go out of the store and get onto my yak and go eat some raw beetles or something. 

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.

And Now a Word from Our Sponsors

You know you have to put up with them, provided you are not part of the TiVO generation.  These are the little bits of entertainment between the shows.  You may know them better as commercials.  Perhaps it’s been a while since you even watched these things.  Luckily for you, I am keeping an eye on things for you.  First thing you should know is that they have not gotten any better in the years since you first started using your remote to flip around when they came on. In fact, I am starting to think there may be a problem in the advertising world.  They seem to have completely lost the ability to create decent commercials.  I have a hard time blaming TiVO as the generation that will grow up with that device have not yet gotten jobs in the advertising field.  As such, they would not be there to create these infernal commercials that are not funny, not creative and not able to sell anything. 

At the top of the list has to be the old guy with the foreign accent selling the miles program for a national credit card company.  OK, I have never officially worked in the advertising agency but I can tell you that one of the things you should do when you have a spokesman is that you should try to find one that you can understand.  I have no idea what this guy is saying.  His sidekick is not funny but just stupid.  At the end of each commercial the old foreign dude says something that sounds like, “rewarring, veddy, veddy, rewarrring.” I have been morally opposed to the Burger King guy ever since I first saw him.  One of the other rules for advertising that I would like to put out there is that if you want to have a mascot then you should have a mascot that has moving facial features.  Its mouth should move or even an eyebrow.  At the very least it should wink.  The one exception to this would be the Jack-In-The-Box guy and even he can change facial expressions from time to time.  Essentially the actual Burger King himself is just creepy. 

The Army has been showing commercials lately that conveniently leave out certain facts about being in the Army.  Of course, that is also a rule in advertising that you shouldn’t put anything in there that might turn people off from your product.  Still the Army commercials where you show parents who are happy that the Army has made their son or daughter smarter or stronger or that they can run faster just seems a little odd to me.  Or the one where the father tells his son that he looked him in the eye and shook his hand for the first time.   I have just about had the end of the whole cell phone commercial thing.  The one where Joan Cusak is sitting in what looks like a shopping mall singing the words “Call me” over and over again has to mark a low-point in her career.  I am also getting tired of the guy in glasses who heads up the “network” of that one cell phone company.  His smirk is getting on my nerves.There are a few commercials out there that aren’t too bad.  I like the one where the car manages to fall through the center of the earth.  You just have to occasionally tip your hat at a commercial that obviously cost as much as Hollywood movie to make.  Of course, I kind of wish they would stop playing it every five seconds during football season. 

I am very tired of the commercial where the Loch Ness Monster attacks that car.  Who is screaming “shoot it, shoot it!” at the end of that commercial anyway?  Why would someone want to just shoot the monster having finally just discovered it?  None of those particular special effects look good anymore. I am liking nearly every commercial that star Peyton Manning these days.  I would have to say my favorite commercial from last year was the one where he was walking around getting autographs from guys working in grocery stores and asking wait-staff for their aprons.  I also like the one where he is selling some kind of cell phone with the goofy wig and mustache.   

I recently saw a commercial where two guys shoveled up some dog poop and then slapped it into the hand of an obnoxious neighbor.  I am both amused and utterly repulsed by this commercial.  Part of the problem is, of course, the way in which the message comes across is so shocking I don’t think I could tell you what the product was if you put a gun to my head.  I also would like to put a moratorium on the drugs for men with erectile dysfunction.  At the very least they should make an attempt to make sense.  I don’t know about the old couple who appear to be headed upstairs when their grandkids suddenly stop by.  How would you feel if grandma and grandpa kept giving each other lewd looks the entire time you were visiting?  Also, what place in the world has bathtubs in the middle of the ocean?  Is there a lighthouse somewhere with this feature?  This commercial needs to be selling vacation packages to that place and not for the pills. 

I guess I just don’t understand where these advertising guys are coming from.  I guess they just want to try and be different.  I can appreciate that, but why do you have to go from different to ridiculous?  It has always been my impression that most of those ads are created by teams of people.  These teams of people sit around and have brainstorms and they come up with ads.  At some point do they completely lose touch and end up with monster living in the lungs of children who then get coughed away?  Do we need anthropomorphic phlegm?  Who decides what phlegm should look like?  What is phlegm doing that it can evidently have children? So, what I am saying is that in all of those meeting with all of those people sitting around and staring at their screens and drawing storyboards do they eventually decide animated phlegm is the only way to sell a medicine that is supposed to make you hawk loogies?  At some point, when it is late at night and you haven’t seen your children in a week because you have been sleeping at the office do you just throw up your hands and agree that animated phlegm is the way to go?  I just don’t know.  If I were the drug company I would personally go back to letting pharmacists recommend my product and not trying to make phlegm look cute. 

Finally, as a word to advertisers, it bothers me that everyone in commercials uses their credit cards upside down.  I know, you want the label and the name of the card to be seen, but no one has a magnetic stripe on the bottom of the card so you can swipe it right-side up.  It just doesn’t happen.  It never will happen.  Stop it.  Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.