No, I don’t have anything to say about Greece. I don’t like what’s going on in the Eurozone, but I’m not the person to turn to for answers. Actually, “greeking” is a term associated with those fake license plates you see in car commercials.
Fake plates in car ads have always bugged me. Why make them generic and anonymous? Why paint them to match the color of the car in the ad? Why not use real plates, or none at all?
Greeking, in this context, is the process of making car commercial license plates anonymous, inoffensive, and litigation-proof.
Advertisers don’t want state-issued plates in their commercials. If a potential customer has a hard-on against California, for instance, you’ll lose him if you show your car wearing California plates. This also explains painting plates the same color as the car in the ad. No state’s plates look like that, so it’s another layer of greeking out information that might piss someone off.
Nor will they use combinations of letters and numbers on fake plates that might match those used on real plates, because some asshole will get a lawyer and try to sue the car companies for using “his” plate without permission. And you know someone would.
So why use plates at all? According to insiders, it’s because the cars in the ads wouldn’t look right without them.
Well, now I know. Maybe fake plates won’t bug me as much from now on.
Last night a local TV News at Five reporter did a breathless piece about a “premium outlet mall” set to open alongside the freeway on the outskirts of town. The station ran it as a news story, but it really was an informercial. The best part was when the reporter excitedly read the list of tenants: Gucci! Adidas! Oakley!
Gee, that sounds like any outlet mall anywhere. Don’t know about you, but I’ve always seen outlet malls as bottom-of-the-barrel operations. Using the word “premium” to describe an outlet mall is like using “classy” to describe a Trump casino full of cigarette-smoking rubes in stained t-shirts and pajama jeans bottoms.
Speaking of infomercials, NBC Nightly News did a report on Harper Lee’s 60-year-old but just-published novel Go Tell a Watchman.
Here’s the real low down on how Go Tell a Watchman, Harper Lee’s rough draft of what became, after a top to bottom revision, To Kill a Mockingbird, came to be published. It’s not a pretty story, and I for one will not help enrich Harper Lee’s sleazy lawyer by buying the book.
Not that the rest wasn’t worth reading, you always are, but this bit won my heart,
“Using the word “premium” to describe an outlet mall is like using “classy” to describe a Trump casino full of cigarette-smoking rubes in stained t-shirts and pajama jeans bottoms.”
As to Harper Lee and her “new” book. It’s conceivable that what was meant was “new” in the sense of never having been published before. That is, of course, giving the benefit of the doubt to the the infotainment industry also called the “NEWS”.
Yeah, that’s why I introduced the NBC video clip about Harper Lee with “Speaking of informercials.” I took their repeated use of the word “new” as advertising. The whole Harper Lee story is so disturbing to me. Makes me think of people ripping copper pipes from vacant buildings, fighting over literary scraps.