Sam: "Oh boy..."

It's 3am the day after St. Patrick's day and I apparently have a blog now. The title, “Strictly Commercials”, was because I hoped to discuss advertising in all its forms.

I've never been big on the idea of blogs since people have been trying to sell them to me as the future of real journalism or the future of social communication. I think blogs are just the future of blurb style journalism for specific subjects, which is great because there is a huge dearth of humorous journalism in the mainstream media. Which is why I get all my film news from Film Drunk and my hockey news from Puck Daddy.

I'm even more opposed to the internet being considered social interaction. Blogs/live journals/tweets/facebook updates which are supposed to tell the world at large what you are doing ring false to me. If you want to know how I'm doing call me. This is why the only thing I have posted on my facebook status in the past year has been this video:

 

So, I want journalism to remain well edited and eloquent, and find reporting your personal life on the internet self-indulgent. But for reasons unknown my blog exists and you and I, dear reader, both have to live this down. So I’m gonna try to stick by my credo of not having this contain information about my personal life vomited unwillingly upon the masses, and I figured picking a broad topic would at least allow me to give the blog some direction and more importantly vaguely justify its existence in my blogophobic mind.

So advertising it is. My favorite art often seems to be commercial art. This is probably mostly due to the fact that I am an uncultured swine, but also definitely has its origins in my love of movie posters and album art. To me at least, I feel like having to make something both aesthetically pleasing and visually interesting and still make it get across to the consumer what it is supposed to is quite a feat. So that’s what I’m gonna talk about. The times when commercials are so effective that they also work as art or at least entertainment.