Our American Cousin

Sic Semper Tyrannis, anyone?

Steve Hall, one of the premiere ad bloggers, pictured here, is being sued by Virgin America, part of the Virgin Group, of which SIR RICHARD Branson, also pictured here, is the Chairman. As far as I know, SIR RICHARD has done nothing like ride a black horse into the thick of battle to defend the Throne and is therefore undeserving of the title SIR. (Then again, all Elton John did was write stupid ballads and they call him SIR over there, too.)

Virgin is angry because Steve's blog posted a fake ad they received promoting Virgin America. The offending ad showed US Air's flight 1529 in the Hudson. The ad was clearly fake, and the original post said as much, but SIR RICHARD is not a man to make light of (diverted and avoided) tragedy. He will defend his HONOUR, as he is a SIR. (Full story here.)

This is clearly a case of spoiled Brit Babies taking out their frustrations on carefree and fun-loving Americans. Steve Hall is from Boston. Coincidence? I think not. Time for some sort of Revived Boston Tea Party, where we dump a bunch of Virgin Mobile phones in the HARBOUR.

Lighten up, Richard. Or can I call you Dick?

Tuesday Tees: Link Laundry

Throwing some stories /posts / thoughts I enjoyed or benefitted from in some way out on the line, found at a few of my regular stops in this giant Blog Mall.















(I found plenty of others, but was challenged beyond my abilities at the moment to come up with a good T-shirt design for them. If some of you would work on your Blog Branding™, I'll have something to work with for next Tuesday's airing of Freshly Laundered Links™. I know, you're busy doing real client work and putting in late hours. I'm not, obviously. Someone hire me.)

(And yes, Head of Captain Kirk is seen here wearing the one and only "Where's My Jetpack?" shirt in existence. His glasses, however, are not real Ray-Bans®.)

Steve Hall to Replace Imus at CBS

Not really, but Steve sure opened up a hot topic over at AdRants. People are obviously far more passionate about this issue than they are about advertising.

Usually you can count on about 4 to 5 comments on any one of Steve's or Angela's posts, but presently he's approaching 100 on his gun control "commercial break." They run the gamut from "Right on, man!" to "You're an idiot." Steve has figured out the secret to good radio: Say something that will light up the phones.

And where do I stand on the whole gun debate? That doesn't matter. Whatever I say would piss off someone.

No SuperBowl Spots Reviewed Here

Let's just call it the SuperBlow from now on. The hype is never worth the delivery. Nor are the ensuing analyses worth much either.

AdRants has already posted enough spot reviews to make up for EVERYONE. (Geez, Steve, do you even let Angela sleep? 35 posts (and counting) yesterday is a little insane. One might even call it shark-jumping, if that term can apply to blogs. But I guess ad reviews are your job...so good job. But Angela's review of Prince's performance has awakened the Prince Army.)

Then again, in Steve's defense, at least he didn't set up a whole site devoted to critiquing Super Bowl spots.

Stuart Elliott, desperate for a new and "literary" angle, goes way off the deep end in his New York Times analysis: "No commercial that appeared last night during Super Bowl XLI directly addressed Iraq...but the ongoing war seemed to linger just below the surface of many of this year’s commercials." Stuart thought the commercials were too violent and attributes that to the Iraq war. Quite a stretch, Stu.

Hopefully, we can all move on now.


Henry Winkler as Arthur Fonzarelli, giving birth to the term "jumped the shark."