Plato at Work

The sociology of gettin’ high:

H/t The Daily Dish

What happens if you get too high:

Be happy, be safe.

I was completely freaked out by this image and now can't forget it. Perhaps more importantly, I'll always remember that peanuts have more antioxidants than broccoli.

Traveling back from Chinatown, I was hit with this unnerving ad of a little girl that, to me, is dressed like a kid that could have been pulled from a horror movie like The Exorcist. My camera is not distorting the color at all–the ad is truly that sickly of a yellow. Once more, the clothing/”costume” denotes an era long past, or, at the very least, one in which the little girl does not belong. So, either she’s dead or is meant to remind us that she could be.

I tried to be positive, but then look at the font! Was she scrawling that message to her mother right before she passed into the darkest, deepest depths of pain and sorrow? And the organization of the words is extremely accusatory — I mean, more important than anything else in this message is that “MOM” knows what happened. So, now we’re scaring mothers? And–sorry–but what is with the dog? Is it satan’s minion bringing the little girl downtown, or did the girl for some reason take the dog down on her way out?

This really freaked me out, and I felt compelled to react.

But then, that’s precisely what made it SO effective. No matter how hard I try, I can’t find a distaste for peanuts due to the image. The goodness of peanuts bears no possible conceptual relationship to the badness of the image–at least as far as my intuition can feel/tell. Once more, though the image itself is disturbing, it’s unusual quality is worth fixating upon, and along with focusing on the image inevitably comes a digestion of the message. I consumed that image in full, and, perhaps most importantly, peanuts just justifiably stole market-share from broccoli due to the latter’s deficit in antioxidants.

Without this ad, I would have NEVER considered peanuts as being in the same category as broccoli. But hold on–there’s more! Imagine mothers looking at that image: a scary, sickly-looking little girl pleads that MOMs need to know about the virtue of peanuts versus broccoli. What kid even likes broccoli anyway? This ad makes broccoli a more elastic good in relation to peanuts! What a coup d’etat of the broccoli industry by the peanut industry (let alone what this implies vis a vis peanuts and the rest of the nuts industry). Who ever saw that one coming? Any mother (or typical person for that matter) viewing this image has a proactive reason to give into their compulsion to reject basic-tasting (“basic” in a chemical sense) broccoli in favor of typically salty and occasionally honey-roasted peanuts.

Brilliant or just fucking weird? Smart advertising, or just dumb luck?

It’s interesting to mull over the difference between pure ugly and “ugly+.”

Pure ugly tends to be an entity distorted and/or unworthy of explanation and therefore inexplicable. It evokes disgust from confusion, like these images do (it’s ok to click — it’s just “ugly” typed into Google Images).

“Ugly+” reaches for something a bit more meaningful, like the image of  a pug. For whatever reason, pugs are so ugly that they’re cute. Mother nature has a sense of humor.

Make no mistake. This is by typical human aesthetic an ugly animal--however, such exaggerated eyes in an otherwise ugly mug creates, well, a cute pug. This is the phenomenon of ugly+.