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There are many ads on TV these days for various drugs and treatments for various ailments. Back when I was growing up, pharmaceutical companies didn’t advertise to the general public. So I have no memories of those commercials from my childhood.

Nowadays, it seems like over half the ads are for some new drug that I’m supposed to ask my doctor if it’s right for me. Well, not for these next several weeks as political ads have taken over. But once the election cycle is done I’m sure they’ll go back to normal.

On one hand it’s annoying seeing the same few commercials. On the other hand it’s nice of them to pay for the TV content, and someone’s gotta have the ads.

All of this to say, whatever happened to Ring Around the Collar?

Back when I was a child, that was the major ailment was plaguing everyone. At least that is how it seemed, based on the number of ads that were out there claiming to get rid of ring around the collar.

I’ll have to play some of those old ads for my kids, so they know how rough we had it growing up, and they can be glad that they live in a day and age where they never have to worry about ring around the collar.

As a note for the detergent makers, if you want to drum up more business, you need to find a more modern equivalent of ring-around-the-collar. My proposal: Ring Around The Hoodie. If there’s a way that someone’s hoodie could be perceived as not good, that might scare up some extra sales of your product.

A friend of ours got a case of Bai flavored water (I forget if she was given it or it was just a really good deal so she bought it) but once she tried it she realized she didn’t really like it. So we got to try some Bai flavors and take what we wanted.

That was my introduction to Bai. I don’t particularly like it because it tastes like fake sugar. My son thought it was okay.

Anyway, that’s all the background for why I was thinking about Bai. And while thinking about Bai, I thought they missed an opportunity for an ad campaign with NSYNC.

It’s a perfect fit, if you ask me. They don’t even have to change the song, just put images of Bai water on the screen each time NSYNC sings the word “bye”.

What is the point of checking in online before you get to the airport? The point of checking in, in general, is to confirm you are there. It shouldn’t be possible to check in, in absentia.

Maybe if they’d have picked a different term for it, it would make more sense to me. Use RSVP or something.

The companies that are getting it right are the grocery stores, when you order for pickup. When they send us the notice that the order is ready, we can click a button to let them know we are on our way. Then, once we are there, we can click a button to check in and let them know we are physically there.

We tried once to check-in as we were getting close to the store. But it actually declined us, because they noticed the pickup spots were empty. They must have had some cameras.

And most of the stores nowadays make you indicate which parking spot you are in. You can’t check in without being there, because you don’t know which spots are going to be open.

Anyway, I dislike the airlines use the term “check-in” for “let us know you’re still planning on flying with us soon”. Maybe RSVP isn’t a good term either, because it really is just “print your boarding pass now” or if you’re going with Southwest it’s “is your trigger finger faster than the rest of the people on this flight”.

I was tasked with making a food item, and so I started following the recipe. First item of business: gather the ingredients.

One of the ingredients was 16 ounces of cream cheese. No problem, I opened the fridge, found a 16-oz box of cream cheese, and then got the rest of the items.

Once I had all the stuff, I started mixing them. But when I got to the cream cheese, I noticed something wasn’t quite right. I opened the 16-oz box and pulled out one foil pouch of cream cheese.

If you look, you can see that the measurement on the pouch indicates it contains 8 oz of cream cheese.

And the box clearly says 16 oz. And it’s a 2 pack, but it contained only one pack of cream cheese.

I think it’s a very misleading label on the box.

What they meant is that this is one box of a 2-box pack, and this box contains only 8 ounces but if you have both boxes (each labeled as 16 oz) then you get the 16 oz.

And it says in the top left that it is two individually wrapped 8 oz packages, and so I was expecting the box to contain the foil package that it did contain. But it contained only one foil pouch not two, and that’s what caused me to consider how I had been mislead by this awful packaging.

My wife bought a bag of gluten.

Side note: if you ever wonder what they do with all the gluten they take out of things to make them gluten-free, apparently they put all the gluten in containers and sell it separately. I bet they get to charge more for the gluten-free stuff, plus they charge people to buy bags of gluten. It’s a win-win for the company, I suppose.

But that was not the point of this post. The point was the marketing stuff they put on the bag. maybe not so much marketing, but the character or personality they’re trying to portray for the company.

Here’s a photo of the back of the bag:

The part that I noticed was at the top, in prominent letters, almost like they wanted you to notice it most. So I suppose it worked.

I, knowing they wanted me to wonder was was so forbidden about the underside of the bag, did not give in and went about my normal business, ignoring the bag.

But my younger son was not so good at self-control and has not learned to insulate himself so much from marketing. He picked up the bag and said “Look, dad!” So I looked, and that prompted a dad lesson from me, which I’m going to start after I show you the bottom of the bag.

As you might be able to guess, my complaint is their furthering of disobedience. They are saying they like people who don’t follow directions? Then they say to store in a cool dry place. Does that mean they’ll like it if I store their product in a hot tub?

If they ever send me recipes, I know those’ll be worthless.

And the person who decided to put that stuff on the bag – what if his boss told him to do something? Is the culture at that company such that he would get promoted if he went against some simple clear instructions from his boss?

At least these people ended up somewhere where it doesn’t matter too much. Can you imagine if they worked somewhere else, like at a tax-preparation place or a hospital or airplane maintenance? I get that sometimes you have to disobey orders or instructions, but you should at least have a good reason and it should not be your default attitude.

Or maybe they’re saying they like incompetent people. I suppose that’s slightly better, as it’s not willful disobedience. But I doubt that’s what they were trying to convey.

Some of our kids’ teachers sent out a link to a site that we could use to keep up on grammar lessons while schools are prohibited from meeting. It is called No Red Ink. It appears they are thorough in that their website promos display good grammar.

I half expected the marketing copy to have the common error of matching the verb with the nearest text rather than the actual subject – but it didn’t so I’m impressed. In case you’re wondering, the subject is one school district so the correct verb is uses to match the singular subject. The common mistake is to take the closest noun (2 school districts) and match the verb to that.

I also noticed they use the Oxford comma, so that makes me happy. I haven’t seen one of their actual lessons, so I can’t vouch for the completely, but their first impression was a good one.

I’ve noticed that Google is announcing their gaming platform, Stadia.

All that reminds me of is one of my favorite pairs of shoes. I wore a white-and-gray-with-blue-accents pair of Stadia tennis shoes for a significant amount of time. I don’t remember exactly when, my guess is late junior high / early high school timeframe.

I don’t remember any of my other shoes from that time, other than my spikes I used for cross country and track. I didn’t use the Stadia for anything in particular, just my normal daily shoes.

What was memorable about them was the logo: a stylized Roman coliseum. I’m picturing it on the top of the tongue, in blue.

They don’t make ’em like they used to.

Speaking of shoes, I heard an ad for Skechers shoes on the radio the other day, and it amused me. Their main line was “No shoes are as comfortable as Skechers.”

I enjoy ambiguous grammar that I can misinterpret.

So, Skechers company, you’re saying that going barefoot is just as comfortable as Skechers? In that case, I can save my money and use no shoes rather than buy Skechers.