Do you ever see a car advertised for a low price in the newspaper? Then when you go to the dealer, you find out it has two dozen rebates you don’t qualify for? What the heck is a farm bureau rebate in the city? Or a public safety rebate? Maybe they will have a pregnant giraffe rebate next time? All of these rebates should be disclosed in the ads before you even get out of your easy chair.
Finally when you go into the dealership and sit down with them to buy the car, then they try to tack on an advertising fee. Oh and don’t forget the doc fee, because we all know how hard it is to fill out the paperwork to make a sale. Just give me the paperwork and I will fill it out. They can pay me the $150.00 instead.
Another pet peeve of mine is the low or good miles listed in a used car ad. Why not just list the mileage? What is good miles vs. low miles? To a dealer 100,000 miles may be low miles or to a customer 25,000 miles listed on the odometer may be low. They could easily just put the actual odometer mileage in the ad without the BS. We figure from there.
Do dealers think that if a vehicle is listed in a used car ad as having low or good mileage and you end up in the showroom only to find the car has a 150,000 miles that you are going notice? Or how about when they list the used car as being better than new? Better than new! WTF! Who thinks a used car is better than a brand spanky shiny new one?
I don’t know about you but I am going to try and find a pregnant giraffe so I can qualify for the next dealer rebate….
When I was little I had the honor of growing up in a family that watched a lot of tv. We were also one of the first cable subscribers in our area. We have been Cable customers since 1974. When I think of week ends of my childhood I remember specifically mostly on Sundays, watching the greats of old comedies, and eating eggs, linguisa (italian sausage), and breakfast potatoes. I love old comedy. My earliest memories include, “our gang” (aka little rascals), Laurel and Hardy, the three stooges, Marx Brothers, I love Lucy, and Ma and Pa Kettle.
I really like Ma and Pa Kettle because in certain ways they remind me of my grand parents. Their comedy was really off the wall. It is very similar to some of the comedy of today. Below I have some information about Ma and Pa Kettle via Wikipedia as well as a video of how they do math.
Ma and Pa Kettle are comic characters who first appeared in the 1945 novel The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald about life on a chicken farm. She based them on real-life farming neighbors in Washington state, U.S.A. In 1947, Universal Pictures adapted it into a film starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray, with Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride as the Kettles. After positive audience reaction, Ma and Pa Kettle and their fifteen children became the subject a series of their own very popular comic films.
Pa (Franklin Kettle, played by Percy Kilbride) is a gentle, slow-speaking, slow-thinking and lazy man. His only talents appear to be avoiding work and winning contests. Ma (Phoebe Kettle, played by Marjorie Main) is a robust country woman with a potato sack figure, raucous, more ambitious and smarter than Pa, but not by much, and can easily be fooled. She is content with her role as mother to fifteen rambunctious, mischievous children on their ramshackle farm in rural Cape Flattery, Washington state. Because she has so many children, Ma Kettle sometimes gets their names confused. A misspelled sign “Be-ware of childrun” is posted in front of the farmhouse to warn unwanted visitors of hurled rocks, projectiles from slingshots, pea shooters and other missiles from the rowdy and unpredictable Kettle brood.
In the first film of the series, Ma and Pa Kettle, the family moves into a modern home with numerous electronic gadgets that Pa has won in a tobacco slogan writing contest. As the series continued, various reasons were devised to have the family relocate to the “old place”, sometimes for extended periods of time.
Much of the comedy is cornball humor arising from preposterous situations, such as Pa being mistaken for a wealthy industrialist (“P.A. Kettle” in Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki, 1955) or being jailed after he accidentally causes race horses to eat feed laced with concrete (Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair, 1952). (Wikipedia)
Because I have worked in advertising in countries around the world, I am familiar with the practice of multinational organisations who re-use TV commercials in different markets and over-dub them in the local language. This produces cringe-enducing howlers from time to time, one of which was brought to my attention this morning by John Ward of Not Born Yesterday and The Slog fame in his weekend Slogger’s Review Bar. I just had to share it with you.
This classic from Gaviscon comes under John’s “In The Media” headline. I’m not sure how it works, but my guess is that the storyboard he has shown is an English language commercial, translated into some foreign tongue and then back again to English to demonstrate the mistakes that ESL (English as a Second Language) produces from time to time.
If you can’t come up with Pants on Fire nominees to add to my previous post you might find the opportunity to post examples of ESL irresistable. With stuff like this out there we could start a whole new blog!
According to a report by auto research website Edmunds.com, Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F – News) has become the second-biggest automaker in the U.S. behind General Motors. With this, Ford has overtaken Toyota Motor Corp. (NYSE: TM – News) in the wake of Toyota’s damaging parade of recalls.
According to the website, Toyota is expected to lose more than 1 percentage point of the U.S. market share to hit 16.45% in 2010 due to its global recall of 8.5 million vehicles related to their problem accelerator gas pedals and braking systems. Meanwhile, Ford is expected to achieve 16.57% of the market in the year following General Motors with 18.12% of the market.
I can remember sitting on our back-porch steps with my next-door neighbor. I was driving a 1952 Plymouth and he was tooling along in his 1951 Chevy. We were both about eight years old and never gave a thought to drag racing. We were just enjoying driving side by side through the colorful countryside.
Other memories include riding a bicycle and pretending it was a horse, or motorcycle… depending on the game we were playing at the time.
Most of the boys I grew up with had very few toys. The one exception was Donny Yarling. I think that was his last name. As I recall, he was big into Captain Video and had space helmets, ray guns, and numerous other space-related items.
Donny didn’t play outside much, and his family moved away when we were all very young. I don’t recall him ever letting us play with his toys, so we weren’t all that heartbroken when he left.
My parents didn’t allow us to have toy guns – except on the Fourth of July. Therefore, we pretended to have guns whenever we played “war” or “cowboys and Indians”. The cap guns we were given for Independence Day were only a small part of our arsenal. We were also given hammer type devices with feathered tops. We’d place a cap or two in the head of the hammer, press in the feathered top, and smack the hammer on a concrete block. That would cause the caps to explode and the feathered top to go sailing through the air.
Come to think of it, I’m surprised my mother allowed us to play with such things. We could’ve put an eye out!
The other Fourth of July “play things” were the sparklers. One of our parents or older sibling would provide the flame to ignite the stick. We’d then twirl it around and be dazzled by the light. We were easily amused. I’m not sure what I pretended as I flashed my sparkler around, but I’m sure my vivid imagination had me fighting a foreign enemy with a sword or something. Had “Star Wars” been around back then, that sparkler would have quickly turned into a light saber.
As an adult, I often wonder how much we relied on our imaginations simply because we had so few toys. I watch my grandchildren play with their toys (I should say their abundance of toys) and realize there is still a good bit of pretending involved.
One thing the children up north don’t have to do right now is pretend there is snow on the ground.
Some of my favorite childhood memories are centered around the many hills in Western Pennsylvania and the abundance of snow. We would ride our sleds for hours… on city streets!
I never measured the distance, but we had a course that would’ve done Olympic bob-sledders proud. We’d start at the intersection of Stratmore and Hollywood streets. We’d sled down Hollywood, across Arnold, and circle around to where Hollywood ran into Arnold a second time.
If we had enough speed, we’d make the turn onto Arnold and continue in the direction of Hollywood until our momentum finally died away. Then, we’d pull our sleds up Ford Street and walk along Stratmore to Hollywood and repeat the run.
One time, just to be different, I went down Ford Street with the intention of turning up Arnold. I missed the turn and slid into the curb. With bloody lips, I dragged my sled back up the hill and returned to the Hollywood run. By the time I got back to the top of the hill, the bleeding had stopped, so I just kept on going.
Often times, in the summer, we’d find ourselves really missing the snow and sledding. That’s when we would walk down to Bodnar’s Appliance store and get a cardboard refrigerator box.
There used to be a vacant lot at the corner of Stratmore and Ford. We never thought they’d build a house there because the lot was basically a cliff – great for sliding down the hill in a box or on a snow disc, but not really suitable for a home with a lawn.
Our favorite sport was to load five or six boys in the box, and then roll it sideways down the hill, Our bodies would be bouncing and rolling over one another until we came to a sudden stop at the bottom. Cut lips, bloody noses, and black eyes didn’t discourage us one bit. We’d drag the box back to the top and do it again… and again… and again… until the box was torn to shreds.
I just realized I’m pretending to be back in that box. Or maybe I’m sitting with my friend on the back-porch steps driving my 1952 Plymouth through the countryside.
I live in San Lorenzo California, which is a small community. The next town over is San Leandro. I have a bunch of photos that I found on Ebay, and found their location via Google Maps. I thought it would be cool to do a before and after. I always think about places in San Lorenzo, Hayward, and San Leandro and how they may have looked when they were first built or the changes that were made around some of the still standing buildings and local historical landmarks. I think its interesting how much things have changed just during my life.
East 14th Street
East 14th Street
East 14th Street/ 144th Ave
Hesperian Blvd and Olive Ave
San Leandro Blvd and Williams St
Estudillo Ave
Here are a few postcards of what would be Washington Ave and East 14th Street (All of this has been torn down.)
Below you can see the bus stop area and also that Washington Ave does no longer go through, instead runs right into the shopping centers parking lot.
I know that most of you won’t recognize the places in these photographs, but I did this to try to spark the interest to see what your surroundings once looked like way back when. I hope you enjoyed the photos. If you have any before and after photos like this I am interested in seeing them.
Below you can see the bus stop area and also that Washington Ave does no longer go through, instead runs right into the shopping centers parking lot.