Celebrity Disaster

Is she qualified? Who the hell cares? It's cold, and winter sports are king for me. As soon as I figure out what's going on, I'll try to figure out if she makes any sense or not.

Victoria Silvstedt

Danica Patrick

I adore Danica Patrick, but her Go Daddy ads have to go.

After watching several of them work their way through an otherwise OK Super Bowl telecast, I kept wondering why I didn't like the ads.

Go Daddy has never been much for innovation with their ads.

Boobies.

That's what they use. Titillation. Fine, but you can't sell that to everyone. Just weirdos who want to have their own websites.

Wait, that's what Go Daddy is counting on. They are counting on some idiot to register southbostonpoontangwatch.org and yomamaisadumptruck.info in order to stay in business. The only way to reach that person is to send them to the Go Daddy website in the hopes of seeing a woman almost get naked. So, while Danica's ads didn't really appeal to me (Danica is always appealing, however, and is a fantastic young lady), they probably did send a few louts out there to pay way too much to register website domains they'll forget they own when the next Super Bowl comes around.

I've been served.

I do like my yardbird. I've even reviewed several local yardbird distribution establishments, here and here. I keep going back for more. It's yardbird, for crying out loud. But don't expect me to defend this:

What we don't like is the lingering racist connotations that are associated with eating poultry (don't even get me started on swine), which is probably the real reason some black folks are upset by a controversial KFC ad that has some claiming the company is perpetuating racist stereotypes.

The KFC ad depicts a frustrated, white Australian cricket fan sitting among a crowd of black people who are happily dancing to the beat of steel drums while rooting for their team, which is apparently from a Caribbean nation. How does he get them to see things his way? He offers them a bucket of chicken and they quickly change their tune. As they grab pieces of chicken from the bucket, he looks at the camera and says, "Too easy."

Wow.

More racist than I would have believed, actually. So racist I can't do anything but look away in embarrassment. What were these people thinking? Ouch. Then, you have to consider the plight of the young actor who now becomes the face of KFC's Australian racism. That is not how you want to be remembered.

Chris Farley

That's the wrong question. It's never going to be appropriate to use the late Chris Farley in an ad like this:

DirecTV has raised a ruckus by raising the dead.

The satellite TV company has relied on dead celebrities to push its satellite television packages -- last year's "Poltergeist" ad starred the late Heather O'Rourke, for example -- but the cable company's latest promotion featuring Chris Farley in "Tommy Boy" has stirred up fresh controversy, with many believing that the ad was done in poor taste.

The 30-second spot features Farley, who died in 1997 of heart failure because of an overdose, in the infamous "Fat Boy in a Little Coat" scene from the 1995 comedy that co-starred David Spade.

The commercial looks like it was taken straight from the film reel, until Spade starts promoting DirecTV while Farley carries on his routine in the background.

"Great, I'm here with tons of fun, but I could be at home with DirecTV," Spade says in the commercial. "It never gets old," he says after Farley busts the seams on the too-small jacket.

What some viewers find especially shocking is that Spade, who wrote in a 1998 Rolling Stone article that he didn't attend Farley's funeral because he "couldn't be in the same room where Chris was in a box," went along with the promotion.

While I don't think one can be too precious about a dead comedian, I'd have the same reaction if this was done with the late John Candy--and it wouldn't be done with John Candy. I refuse to believe that any of the people who worked with him and were close enough to him to have done several films would do such a thing. Can you imagine Eugene Levy doing something like this?

The problem is, why is David Spade even in the discussion? When do we finally acknowledge that Spade couldn't sell icewater in hell?

Ralph Lauren Ad, Boing Boing Dot Com

There's a bit of an uproar over the image shown above--a Ralph Lauren ad which features a model that is, shall we say, photoshopped into an unrealistic body image. Photoshop does wonders for blemishes, but changing body shape is a little too much. There should be some way of disclosing the minimal photoshopping that takes place, on an interior page of a magazine where the photography credits are usually located. Simply tell us what you photoshopped. Who cares so long as you're showing your work?

The model could very well have a head larger than her hips and a body ridiculously tapered and thin out of all proportion, but at what cost to her health? Ralph Lauren doesn't want you to think about such things, and they are going to great lengths to silence anyone who says anything about the ad:

Last month, Xeni bloggedabout the photoshop disaster that is this Ralph Lauren advertisement, in which a model's proportions appear to have been altered to give her an impossibly skinny body ("Dude, her head's bigger than her pelvis"). Naturally, Xeni reproduced the ad in question. This is classic fair use: a reproduction "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting," etc.

However, Ralph Lauren's marketing arm and its law firm don't see it that way. According to them, this is an "infringing image," and they thoughtfully took the time to send a DMCA takedown notice to our awesome ISP, Canada's Priority Colo. One of the things that makes Priority Colo so awesome is that they don't automatically act on DMCA takedowns. Instead, they pass them on to us and we talk about whether they pass the giggle-test.

This one doesn't.

So, instead of responding to their legal threat by suppressing our criticism of their marketing images, we're gonna mock them. Hence this post.

As Wendy Seltzer from the Chilling Effects project said, "Sounds like a pretty solid fair use case to me. If criticism diminishes its effectiveness, that's different from the market substitution copyright protects against. And I've rarely seen a thinner DMCA form-letter."

Fair use is something I try to adhere to and respect as well. I think the ad featured above is damning to the eyes, sort of like an out-of-control Peter Jackson special effects shot--my eye isn't fooled and I'm not fooled because what I'm seeing is, obviously, fake. I prefer the real thing, as do most people who have begun to immediately distrust that which they see.