Pen-Elayne on the Web

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Six straight hours of New York baseball yesterday yielded more than a misplaced sense of accomplishment at finally finishing my quarterly ironing jag (yes, wearable work clothes again! um, whoopie?) and a conclusion that this probably wasn't what whoever thought up Easter had in mind for its celebration. I was also somewhat taken aback that car ads during the games seemed to outnumber beer ads by a great margin, a little weird in a city where you can get to either Yankee or Shea Stadium fairly easily by relying entirely on public transportation. No, I'm not gonna blog about the inanity of car ads, others have done that in a variety of venues. Just wanted to observe a mini-trend at work of late. It began with a commercial for the Volkswagen Passat (I believe it's called "Epiphany" and is produced by Arnold Worldwide, but I can't find it on their website), wherein a fellow is walking down the street and suddenly receives a call on his cell phone - from himself in the future. It plays like a cute little Twilight Zone'y bit, his future self telling him three things he needs to do to make his life better (one being, of course, buy The Car), and it smartly taps into the what-if fantasy many of us have of this type of conversation-with-past-self. Well, now along the same line of "abilities far beyond those of mortals" comes a new series of ads for another auto brand (which one I don't remember, they more or less all look alike to me anyway), wherein touching The Car will bestow on someone the gift of psychometry, and they can see where that car's been and what it's done (usually involving a professional driver on a closed course). So I'm wondering, now that the ad agencies have moved from the idea of "car equals freedom" to "car equals superpowers," where can they go from here? Somehow, on the eve of Earth Day, I tend to doubt it'll be in the direction of "car equals environmental disaster" or "car equals supporting terrorism." Update: Or maybe we'll just throw off all pretense of the separation of religion and consumerism and worship beneath the lights of our local Jeep dealer, in an ad creepily reminiscient of a McDonald's one from a few years back wherein the light of the Golden Arches brought similar salvation...