My Squelchy Life

Dasani do you any good

Dasani do you any good after all...

Oopsies! According to the Beeb,
Coca Cola's water isn't as pure as touted:
"Coca-Cola is to recall all bottles of its Dasani water in the UK,
after levels of bromate were found to exceed legal levels.
"The recall is an embarrassment for the drinks giant, which has faced
criticism for selling what is treated and purified tap water."
Schadenfreude, you say? Never! Well, only when it's well-deserved :-)

Wouldn't it be nice... ...if

Wouldn't it be nice...

...if everything could be softer and more comfortable?So
I'm sitting in the barbershop last night, and they have ABC News on the
TV. Up comes this commercial, and it's this sort of cartoonized woman,
sitting on a park bench. The forms of the image suggest it was based on
real film/whatever, and then treated to look all brushstroked, a little
bit arty, all in nice pastel blues and yellows. I guess she looks a
little uncomfortable on the bench, but that's OK, cos suddenly it
morphs, first into a big cushy armchair, and then the whole hog into
big, plush couch, which she leans back into and swivels to recline on.
The voiceover comes in and says "Wouldn't it be nice if everything
could be softer and more comfortable? Well, with Dulcolax, it can!"
Now, I'm sort of half tuned-out, and I freely admit I'm not overly
familiar with the world of marketing, so I'm thinking oh, it must be an
ad for fabric conditioner or something - it looks just like that, whith
the fresh outdoors, the pastel colors, butterflies, birds, etc. I'm
thinking about how soft the fabric of the couch would be to the touch,
the fresh scent, and so on. Then the voice starts talking about hard
stools, and how Dulcolax, unlike traditional laxatives, softens them to
make them more comfortable to pass. So they're talking about this
woman's shit! They're talking about how she's got a smelly brick up her
ass, and how their product is gonna kind of knead it, or something, to
make it softer and more gentle. So when she next squeezes one out,
presumably, it'll feel like reclining on a big, plush couch in the
great outdoors, surrounded by butterflies and birds, all in soothing,
pastel colors.
I love the way these people are so frank about these things. I guess
this kind of shock is what I get for a) not watching network TV and, b)
TiVOing past the commercials. I wish - sometimes - I could set my TiVO
to *only* record commercials. That certainly would provide some
welcome, um, relief to the tedium of the programming :-)

Soft drink is purified tap

Soft drink is purified tap water

I
remember a conversation I had with Pete Sewell on a train about, ooh,
18 years ago? We joked about the genius of putting water in bottles and
selling it - we were thinking Perrier, which was about the only bottled
water you could get in the UK at the time. The jist of the conversation
was something like "I mean, it's *water*! You can get water out of the
tap!"
We went on to discuss, in jest, what a great idea it would be to put
Reading tap water in a bottle and sell it, marketing it as exactly what
it was - tap water from Reading.
Of course it was only a matter of time before somebody did this:
"Judith Snyder, brand PR manager for Dasani, confirmed "municipal"
water supplies were used"
What really makes me laugh about this stuff (I've seen it over here),
is that the water is so pure they have to actually *add chemicals to
it* to give it a watery flavor! ``Coca-Cola says "reverse osmosis", "a
technique perfected by Nasa to purify fluids on spacecraft", is then
used to filter the water further before minerals are added to "enhance
the pure taste".''
They go to all the trouble of taking the bastards out, only to have to
put them back in again!!!
What an amazing world! That's why I love it so much - and it's all
thanks to folks like Coca-Cola :-)