Anamorphic Advertisement

As you know, this is the only day of the year when the Internet's normal traffic of pornography and pictures of cats is displaced, with 99.74% of traffic consisting of emails, skypes, RSS feeds, faxes, telexes, video-conferences, digitised smells and so forth, along with tweets, tumbls and copious other Web 2.0 nonsense words, all expressing trite seasonal greetings.

As I'm never one to go with convention, I would, tonight, instead like to talk to you briefly on the subject of fat people in advertisements. This was brought on by a Paddy Power ad showing a gentleman of extremely ample carriage pretending to breast-feed a baby. Now, quite apart from the obvious issues, like fitting the fat person in the frame (please note that as society has gotten fatter, so too have video formats gotten wider-aspect. Coincidence? I think not!), the big question is how long will the government tolerate this?

You see, ads showing the excessive consumption of alcohol are now banned, and for quite some time, just implying the existence of cigarettes in any sort of advertisement has attracted the death penalty. This is even effecting normal media; when was the last time you saw anyone drinking a lot in American TV? When was the last time you saw anyone non-evil (people like the editor in The Devil Wears Prada are still allowed to smoke) smoking? Sex and the City, that's when. And even then, it was a bit marginal, especially in the later episodes.

However, there are still plenty of fat people in the media. And once the government has dealt with the drinkers and the smokers, they are next. Recall that the reason behind the bans is that advertisements were perceived to be glorifying smoking and drinking. Soon, you won't be able to show someone eating to excess, and the next step will be to entirely ban the depiction of fat people (and also those frighteningly skinny people one sees in fashion adverts, who have somehow managed to escape earlier culls). The result; EVERYONE IN THE WORLD WILL BE HEALTHY. Or, you know, people will continue eating, drinking and smoking themselves to death. Whatever. It keeps Dail committees busy, and that's the important thing. As a side benefit, Mary Harney will no longer be able to appear on television.

Also, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year, and all that. Hopefully few of you will have read past all that rubbish, so you won't notice I've gone back on my original resolution.