Beer and Bears and Lauren Graham

The news lately has been a little slow, if you don’t count things like North Korean whack job Kim Jong-Il’s latest attempts to channel the spirit of Werner von Braun, Israel’s response to the kidnapping of one of their soldiers, oil selling at eight gazillion dollars per barrel or the closing of New Jersey, all of which have tragically taken place in the wake, evidently, of whatever plight is currently affecting actress Lindsay Lohan.

So, to fill the gap in the news, I have done some hard digging and let me just tell you, the mainstream media is asleep at the wheel, to judge from two examples I found in mere minutes.

The first story is about a young man called Raoul Balai, a design student, whatever the hell that means, in Holland, who has come up with what I think is easily the most wonderful idea to come down the pike since “Cogito ergo sum.” The idea—pay attention, Madison Avenue—is to advertise on, really, prostitutes. Also animals, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

On his website, www.instoresnow.nl, Balai has some modest examples, one of which, for Heineken, is quite memorable, although it will almost certainly not cause those who see it to think, “Hey, it’s all about the beer.”

Even though Balai’s Heineken advertising, which I have studied at some length, does in fact draw attention to the beer, which is long and taut and tanned and smooth and….OK, you've got this girl on your bed, you've had a few drinks, you've got her stretched out and her feet on the mantelpiece....

Ahem. Sorry. This is no FCC-regulated American beer ad, is the point.

[Ed. Note: The original draft actually stopped here. Apparently, the Emmy nominations rolled in on an RSS feed and Iggy went into a spittle-spewing rage over the fact that Lauren Graham—the woman he has publicly declared he someday wants to marry—has been overlooked yet again for her work in the Gilmore Girls. We were reminded, in his hastily-written commentary, of how extensive his vocabulary is, particularly when (you may have already noticed this) it comes to synonyms for “stupid” or “unimaginative” or “corrupt” or—we didn’t think this possible--“awards committee.” We were pretty sure there was only one way to say “awards committee.” We were wrong.

“Skanky gormless sushi-eating [doot]-brained [defilers of motherhood] who wouldn’t know their own [anuses] from a suppurating pustule if there weren’t a bribe attached to it,” is what the note says, and we can only assume that it refers to the aforementioned awards committee, unless he happened to be watching Fox News, in which case your guess is as good as ours, although we would frankly bet on Bill O’Reilly. Anyway, we contacted Iggy and gently prompted him to finish his thoughts on…well, whatever. Honestly? We just wanted another 500 words or so. The dubious results follow.]

Balai claims it’s satire, but what I’m saying is: sure, there might be a few kinks to work out (so to speak), but the concept is sound.

There’s no word on how the prostitutes feel about Balai’s plan, satire or no, but it’s probably safe to say they’re okay with it, since at least they didn’t sue the poor guy. An Amsterdam zoo, on the other hand, threatened to do exactly that when they realized that fish from their website were being used to advertise the Netherlandian, if that’s a word, equivalent of Mrs. Pauls. Which teaches us the very important lesson that humorlessness is universal. (Curiously, the zoo said nothing about the ads shown on their penguins and lions, presumably because either lions and penguins are naturally more phlegmatic about this sort of thing or because the ads were less potentially lethal to the wearer.)

The thing is, if we advertise on Zoo animals—and I, like design student Raoul Balai, see no reason we shouldn’t—there is nothing to hold us back from advertising on the bears that hang out in Stateline, Nevada. Over the July 4^th holiday, a bear cub climbed into a convertible owned by David Ziello, where it consumed, I read here, “barbecue-chicken-and-jalapeno pizza,” which it washed down with “a swig of a Jack Daniel’s mixer, some vodka and a beer taken from a cooler.” Mr. Ziello reported that the bear cub didn’t damage the car, but it did “slop cheese and jalapenos on the seats and floor.”

Talk about your missed opportunities. This bear cub, with a little help from Raoul Balai, could easily have had all the commercial subtlety of your better televangelists.

Jack Daniel’s, for example, could have advertised its mixers on the cub, and it goes without saying that had the brewing company thought to so advertise, it wouldn’t have been “…a beer taken from a cooler.” It would have been “a tasty cold, refreshing, manly groin-scratching, runaway-barge-rescuing Budweiser® brand beer,” assuming that’s what David had in the cooler, although we’d like to think it was Heineken.

It’s not like there’s an excuse for this commercial myopia. The Nevada Department of Wildlife is apparently tracking about two dozen of these potential ursine billboards right there in the South Tahoe area--enough, I would think, that the pizza company might see a healthy increase in sales of their barbecue-chicken-and-jalapeno pizza.

On the other hand, I think I'll rent some space on the bears, and take them to Hollywood California, where I will set them loose in the offices of the Pompous Television Academy of Smugly Brain Dead Reactionary Buttheads. There they, the bears, can wreak havoc on the so-called “awards committee,” which--by completely snubbing my wife-to-be, Lauren Graham-- has once again shown the sort of imagination and inspiration usually associated with the management of the Baltimore Orioles Baseball Organization.

The ad, by the way, would say either “Die, Cretinous Scum!” or “Lauren, I Love You!” I haven’t really made up my mind. I’m leaning toward the second one, but I have to wonder if it would maybe look better on a penguin.