The day I was followed by a Smart car with a toilet mounted on its roof.
Weirdest ad display in Waterloo Region.
Penguins Corralled on Texas Highway
Yet another headline that I can’t pass without clicking to the article…
Bad Marketing Idea
What sort of idiot tries to set up a (supposedly) profitable minor-pro basketball team in Quebec city, and calls it the Jumping Frogs?!
Bad Marketing Idea Number Two
So, there’s a new pill out there called Lipozene, which is supposed to help you shed fat and save you the pain of going through liposuction. It’s one of those commercials that highlights the differences between Canadian and American television ads. Drug ads in Canada never make promises they (potentially) can’t keep, and only advice you to talk to your doctor (a sound policy, in my opinion) while American ads are funny in that they provide you with the promises, but also a list of potential side effects the length of your arm (“unholy pregnancy, baby born with the head of a goat, et cetera”).
But Lipozene goes further, with the voice-over guy extolling us to buy by phone because: “remember! Lipozene will never be offered in pharmacies or drug stores.”
Um… never? Why would that be?
Could it be because pharmacies and drug stores are interested only in selling serious drugs that have passed stringent medical tests?
The makers are probably hoping that you don’t think about that.
Stock Market Forecasts Terrorism?
On a more serious note, a couple of days ago I heard something interesting off of the stock reports on CablePulse 24. On the day before the announcement of the foiled terrorist plot in the United Kingdom, the stock markets in North America turned sharply down in the afternoon. Why the analyst mentioned this was because, on the eve of the September 11 terrorist attacks, some people made a significant purchase of “push” stocks.
I don’t really understand how these sorts of stock transactions work, but “push” stocks are, apparently, bets that the market is going to drop. And, of course, the stock market did drop, rather dramatically, once they reopened following the attacks. The analyst was careful to point out that no Al Queda connection was ever made, or that this was anything more than a coincidence, but somebody profited rather handsomely from the stock market as a result of the September 11 attacks. And if something similar happened before the arrested attacks in the United Kingdom, that makes you go ‘hmm…’
Mind you, I’m betting that the security forces do have their ear on the stock market for just this sort of suspicious behaviour.