Adverts and packaging

Some of the ideas that marketing people get paid to use to promote a product worry me, for instance...

‘Made from all natural ingredients’ – what are unnatural ingredients? Ectoplasm?

‘New Improved!’ – What was wrong with the old product? Have you been selling me an inferior product all these years? I want my money back

‘Organic!’ The opposite of organic is inorganic, does this mean that food not labelled organic may contain Arsenic trioxide, copper sulphate or cadmium fluoride to name but a few inorganic compounds.

‘Fun sized!’ More like small and poor-value-for-money size.

Don’t hang around singing about fruit juice you foolish blackcurrant! – run for your life!

Putting vitamins or certain plants in something you wash your hair with makes it healthier? How does your hair digest this food?

As for Fairy washing up liquid, it clearly said in the advertisement that it would wash up a whole load of dishes and showed me how many. I left it with my dirty dishes all night and it did not wash up a single dish!

‘Just Spray on’ shower cleaner. Nothing about rinsing and wiping after? Sure it cleans, like a layer of some sticky chemical over the shower tiles is clean.

Another thing that worries me is, according to some adverts how some people let their sinks/toilets etc become disgustingly filthy before they consider going out to buy something to clean them. The idea that these products will actually clean up ten years of neglect in a single wipe is a little optimistic and it must prove deeply disappointing when these lazy suckers actually buy the product.

‘Kills 99% of all known germs!’ In terms of a risk assessment that seems quite good figures but what if only one of the one percent is highly virulent? So what germs are not killed? Please tell us what they are – I’m scared.

When I were a lad....

Whatever happened to telegraph poles? . I suddenly realised recently that they have nearly all gone. You hardly ever see more than about four wires on the very few remaining poles that you sometimes see around town. Years ago, every main road had at least one row of poles all they way along it, festooned with dozens of wires.
On occasions you would come across a large olive green van parked nearby with about a dozen men lounging around whilst one man was up the pole fiddling around with the wires. When the wind was just right, certain telegraph poles in the more exposed places would make a strange humming, singing noise as the wind blew through the wires and my cousin and I would press our ear to the pole to listen to this eerie sound.