August 8, 2011
I found this in the shed of my parents, while taking my son to visit his grandparents. It belonged, originally, to my grandmother. There are two distinct ways to interpret the sentence:
‘Without a cat, a home is just a house’
which was probably the intent of the author, and certainly the intent of my cat-loving grandmother and cat-loving parents. I, however, prefer the alternative, where the phrase ‘without a cat’ attaches to ‘house’ rather than the sentence as a whole. :
or, to make it explicit:
‘A home is just (a house without a cat)’
July 16, 2011
In mid July, 2011, the California Milk Processor Board launched a new advertising campaign called ‘Everything I do is wrong,’ created by the same advertising firm, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, who started the wildly…
July 16, 2011
From Summer, 2009, Burger King’s highly suggestive ad ‘The Big Seven Incher.’ This was collected by one of my students at McDaniel in the fall of 2010.
July 13, 2011
The classic PSA from ‘Keep America Beautiful’, aired starting in 1971.
This aired starting on Earth Day, 1971 on broadcast television. It’s effect in the US was profound, both on littering behavior as well…
June 10, 2011
In the days after the death of Osama bin Laden, this quote made its way around the various social networking sites:
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not
…
June 10, 2011
From from ‘Literally unbelievable’, a tumblr blog dedicated to tracking facebook posts that misunderstand stories from the satirical newspaper The Onion.
May 23, 2011
The long-running primetime animated series ‘The Simpsons’ demonstrates the fallacy in some kinds of causal reasoning:
May 23, 2011
Pat Robertson, TV evangalist, gives weightless and metabolic advice on his religious show ‘The 700 Club’:
May 15, 2011
‘Stop Weighing Yourself’! A classically poor weightloss commercial from 2004-06, Cortislim with Dr. Greg Cedymon
May 11, 2011
A response to the NARAL ad attacking John Roberts, from Progress for America (a PAC that supported the 2004 re-election of George W. Bush).
