| Quotables |
"Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. ... I felt
very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
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"On the surface, it sounds irresponsible, but to flourish in a rapidly changing world, you actually need to make more mistakes. Fail quickly. Fail often. If you do something and it
doesn't work, just recover in a hurry and try something else. ... Help develop a culture that is willing to fail its way to the future."
-- Price Pritchett, Culture Shift |
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"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction -- every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
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| a word from our 10,000 sponsors |
| Friday, July 3, 2009 |
Tonight (I guess it was technically last night), my folks and I went up to a ball game at the stadium and got shut down 4-1. But that's not what I'm here to complain about.
As a side note... does it trouble anyone else that I have come home from every single ball game this year with a complaint? It's almost as though going to a game is a chore anymore, which is a bad sign.
This isn't a new complaint, though, and it's not limited to the ballpark by any stretch, it's all around us: everything... and let me emphasize this properly...
EVERYTHING...
... has a goddamn logo on it. A fucking sponsor. Some dumb ass company splashing their name across it so that you'll see it and want to buy something. You can't wipe your ass anymore without taking a trip to the Coca-Cola Restroom Facilities. It makes me ill, to be perfectly honest.
At our ballpark, they have bits of entertainment on the scoreboard in between innings that are fun to watch, but they're included in the advertising madness. There's the Heinz Hot Dog Derby, the Schweigert Hot Dog Launch, the John Deere Lawn Mower Race, the Midwest Airlines Suitcase Shuffle, and much, much more.
The kid-size baseball diamond called The Little K? It's now the John Deere Little K. We've also got the Pepsi Party Porch, the Miller Lite Party Deck, as well as the MLB2K9 Game Lounge, and entire sections of seating called the Dri-Duck Fountain Seats and the Hy-Vee View Level.
Entire stadiums and arenas have fallen victim to this, and some of them have shed some pretty historic names in the process: in 2003, Comisky Park was re-named U.S. Cellular Field after those asswipes purchased the naming rights for $68 million. Seattle has Safeco Field; Tampa has Tropicana Field; Detroit has Comerica Park; Cleveland has Progressive Field; and that's just American League Teams.
Never mind the National League stadiums, which include Citizens Bank Park, AT&T Park, Petco Park, PNC Park, and Minute Maid Park.
Altogether, a whopping eighteen of the thirty Major League Baseball stadiums have sold out their names to a fucking sponsor.
Can't we just have a party deck? Why can't we just have fountain seats? Two years ago at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City, the grass beyond the center field wall was just that -- outfield grass. And that was nice... until John Deere paid to mow their fucking logo into the grass for a hefty sponsorship fee.
We can't even have grass without somebody slapping a goddamn logo on it.
Many cities and towns across the country have considered selling ad space on police cars to raise revenue. And then there was that wretched idea to put satellite billboards in space that would be visible in the night sky from the ground. When you think about the lengths to which these marketing weasels are willing to go to make their next buck, a company logo cut into the stadium grass shouldn't surprise me... but somehow it still does.
Needless to say, I'm going to buy what I'm going to buy -- half the time it's generic store brands anyway -- and no amount of hitting me over the head with company logos is going to make any difference.
I'm off to my Mattress Firm bed now; I'll shut down my Dell computer, brush my Arm & Hammer Baking Soda teeth, and get myself a good night's sleep, sponsored by Unisom.
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posted by N.T. @ 12:40 AM  |
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