More Olympic Mythology

I hate running with a passion.  Swimming - all day long.  Running, well, let's just say that at this point in my life if a car comes bearing down on me, I'm done for.  I have about one or two steps in me and that's that.  However, I have great respect for runners and I am enjoying watching the runners in the Olympics.

AT&T has just put out a commercial that you may have seen that I think is absolutely fantastic.  It combines my two loves - literature and mythology.  Here is a little light reading Ryan Hall style:




Go USA!

Worse Mythology Allusion - EVER!

Congratulations to Burger King for winning the coveted Bubo's Blog award for WORST MYTHOLOGY ALLUSION EVER!  (applause) (cheers)

I was going to give them an award for a current commercial about the god of hamburgers, which is just a cheesy commercial.  Not cheesy as in Thunder Cats cheesy or old Batman TV show cheesy, but as in OMG(s) that's stupid cheesy.  However, I could not find that commercial on You Tube yet.  No worries, because I found another ad by Burger King that tops the bad cheesy commercial and wins this award hands down.  Here is the ad:

This ad appeared in Spain in 2009.  For those of you who don't read Spanish (like me) the above slogan reads "A SNACK THAT'S SACRED."  The goddess on the sign is Lakshmi, a Hindu goddess.

Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth and prosperity.  She is also a goddess of fertility and courage. People look to her to bring good luck and she can keep you from economic woes.  Unless, of course, you use her to sell meat, which is forbidden.  

God Checker says this about her:

She can pop into your feet, thigh or naughty bits, or your bosom, heart neck or face. All these will bring good fortune appropriate to the part involved.

We can hear you muttering 'that's only six', but she will also do your head in if that's where she enters — and that is bad fortune. So the odds are six to one.

So I guess Burger King got it in the head.

Now I might say that using a goddess from a religion that is not only opposed to meat, but look at cows as sacred beings, to sell your hamburger products is clever.  I might would, if people no longer worshiped the Hindu gods.  However, there are approximately 950 million Hindus in the world.  It is an offensive comparison and down right stupid on Burger King's part.  They truly deserve this award.

Just to be fair, Burger King did issue the following statement shortly after the ad was released: "Burger King Corp. values and respects all of its guests as well as the communities we serve. This in-store advertisement was running to support a limited-time only local promotion for three restaurants in Spain and was not intended to offend anyone. Out of respect for the Hindu community, the in-store advertisement has been removed from the restaurants."

I challenge anyone to find me a worse allusion than this.

Medusa's Shampoo Revisited

Not too terribly long ago I added the most viewed posts widget to the side.  I find it interesting to see what is being looked at.  Some come and some go.  The Medusa shampoo post is a consistently top ranking one.  Recently, when doing a You Tube search, I ran across a longer version of that same commercial.  So I am going to post both of them here so that you can see the difference in the two.

The Short Version

The Long Version

Which do you like better?  I'm kind of partial to the short one, but that is the one that inspired me to begin with.

While we're at it, I might as well throw in this little Red Vines Medusa commercial:

~

God of Awesome

Check out this Scion commercial:



So the question is, is that Hera with him?

Here are some "Behind the Scenes" with Zeus:

It Speaks To Me Too

My wife says this is us:

Legendary Tough

Egyptian Deities

I am reading a book titled Nick of Time at the moment.  It was a book donated to my classroom and for the most part a pretty good boy's adventure story.  It has all the right materials - pirates, Nazis, and spies, not to mention time travel too.  In this book I ran across something that doubtlessly you guys know about.  I didn't, so I'm going to post about it here.

One of the heroes was offered a cigarette by one of the Nazis.  The Nazi said, "You'll like them, their Egyptian Deities."  So I did a little  research and sure enough there were some Egyptian Deities cigarettes back in the day.  I don't know if they still make them or not, but here are some ads for them.  I just think it funny to think of Egyptian gods and goddesses sitting around smoking.

This one is from 1906 -

And this one from 1916 -

1919 - (the price goes up I notice)

And from 1920 -

This one is my favorite.  I'm going to have to search for that tambourine playing goddess.  I don't remember her.


So, if you are a person of culture and refinement (obviously that leaves me out (and Peyton too, by the way)), then you are obviously going to want to get right on this and find ouot if they still make them.  You don't want to be considered uncouth by the other cultured types.

Nike vs. Adidas

While I'm on the show kick, check out this old commercial:

$Mother Nature$

Mother Nature has to do a lot. Make flowers grow, control the tides, send in storms, gentle showers, sunshine, take care of forests, wild life, combat pollution, make rainbows, the list goes on and on. Over the years and thorough out the multitudes of cultures, mankind (excuse me, I was being sexist there) peoplekind have given her many names from Gaia (Greek) to Tonantzin Tlalli (ancient Mexico) to Phra Mae Thorani (Thailand). In fact, only the Egyptians screwed it up thinking that earth was male (Geb).

Seeing how important she is to us, we can forgive her for seeking out a few ways to make an extra buck or two. Even if she chooses to make a cheesy commercial now and then. If you are as old as I am, you grew up knowing that Mother Nature does NOT like to be fooled by margarine:

O.K., How much money do you think she earned from those commercials? Well, it was enough to keep her busy for two and a half decades. In the meantime, she has been making a nice living hawking environmental products on her online store.

And by keeping people informed on her own cable news channel (although times are tough for her there as she has been reduced to showing reruns of Captain Planet).

She also made a few bucks guest appearances in a few kids' shows every now and then, like her cameo onThe Year without a Santa Claus:

In fact, she is in quite a lot of Christmas specials (as I remembered after plugging in Santa Claus and Mother Nature into Google images a minute ago).

But now, she's back in the commercial biz again and I have to say, 1. I miss the old maragarine days and 2. Mother Nature isn't looking too good lately.

In today's time, everyone going green and all, you would think that Mother Nature would pick an ad for a hot news environmentally sound sports car or something like that. But no. Check out her newest ad line:

I guess the true lesson here is that money really does make the world go 'round.