Art Day 01

Sunday, July 13, 2003 I decided to take a temporary break from the story and relate to you all an experience from my life while I was in Tunisia a couple of months ago. The trip overall was a very positive experience for me, exempting a couple incidents, including the effects some of the food had on me physically. Turkish coffee, the drink that needs to be chewed, did a number on my digestive tract reducing me to lying in my bed in the fetal position moaning because of the aching in my stomach. This was mostly my fault because I did not know how to drink it properly. The coffee grounds sit in the bottom of the cup, so you get halfway through the cup and then there’s nothing but grounds. Now most people know this is when you stop drinking, but being the foreigner that I am, I thought, "I can’t just throw half of this away, it would be offensive!" So I tilted the cup back, and down the hatch went the grounds. And oh yes, I did pay for that.

As the bonus feature on today’s rant, I’m going to discuss with you an example of terrible marketing. In Tunisia there is a fast food restaurant chain known as Baguette & Baguette. It is intended to imitate American style meals – burgers, hoagies, pizza, and other such things. If I said that I enjoyed eating there I would be less than truthful. Anyway, while in Tunisia, the movie "Hannibal" was just being released and Baguette & Baguette was doing a promotional gimick and marketing a limited offer sandwich called "The Hannibal." There were posters for it all over the restaurant with pictures of Anthony Hopkins’ portraying the famous fictitious cannibal. Although I wouldn’t normally name a sandwich after a cannibal, that is something I could possibly overlook, but for the additional text added to the poster… "With Special Sauce."

Okay, so what we have here is possibly the worst example of marketing I’ve ever seen. Naming a hoagie full of various unnamed meats after a cannibal is risky enough, but if you do that this sandwich should not have a special sauce, or even if it does you should never advertise it as having "special sauce." Just what is this special sauce? There is no way to make that even remotely appealing when you associate it with cannibalism.

I’m going to wrap this rant up now because it’s getting really long and I want to go to bed. Normal story comics resume on Wednesday. Until then, have a great Monday and I hope my pain and cultural ignorance amuses you all.

-Kevin

Thursday, July 10, 2003

Yeah, I love that long faux german word. When we first came up with it almost a year (!!!) ago, we were trying to make fun of anime's rediculously long attack names. We were hoping we could find something in a foreign language that would be somewhat longer and less plain then "Sunglasses Crusher Beam". To that end we hooked up with Babelfish and typed in our happy little phrase little knowing that the freakishly long, impossible to pronounce, slightly german mess would be the result.

- Emrys