When Advertisers Don't Understand Slang

A banner ad was recently spotted from McDonald's that is getting wonderful attention - for the wrong reasons. The ad shows a man proclaiming "Double Cheeseburger? I'd hit it."

For those of you not rolling on the floor, "I'd hit it" is current slang for "I wanna f*ck that." Apparentlly someone in the marketing department picked up on the drooling-male-I-want-it part and didn't click to the sexual angle.

So, is it a marketing error, or is McDonald's trying to appeal to the hardcore food fetishist? Is their "I'm Loving It" campaign actually just a ploy to make hot man-on-cheeseburger action more acceptable to mainstream society? What's next - demands for sandwich marriages?

Disturbing survey of American high school students

It's older news, but still of interest ...

"... when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes "too far" in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories."

That's far more dangerous to the continuation of "the American way of life" than any terrorist threat.

Doctoral Dissertation on Traditional Forest Trolls

Camilla Asplund Ingemark will defend her doctoral dissertation on Friday at the Åbo Akademi University in Turku. The title of the dissertation is The Genre of Trolls. The Case of a Finland-Swedish Folk Belief Tradition.

You can read more here.

Grrr ...

Busily trying to get an old Compaq box set up for Linux - and eventual porting of the animatronics controller system to it.

Mandrake 10.1 suffered from hold-your-hand syndrome almost as badly as Windows ... and trying to install specific (non-Mandrake-supplied) packages was a royal pain. Might be different if I wasn't starting from the 3-CD free set instead of the massive (and more costly) enterprise edition. Mandrake also absolutely refused to work with the weird on-board video chip in the Compaq using anything but a generic driver.

Installing Gentoo right now; so far, so good ... I've wandered a bit getting it installed, but what I've seen so far I'm much happier with. The kernel is compiling right now, so I'm going to take a shower ...

I've only installed Red Hat before, many years ago (1997), so it's been interesting :)