Monday, April 07, 2008

Value-add (on-demand)

An advertisement I heard today on the radio went something like this:
"Wanna drop witty one-liners and become the life of a party? Subscribe to Vodafone Tashan Pack...." (followed by some specific service details that I don't remember particularly well because at this point my brain cells were about to perform their "goodbye cruel world" routine, lemming-style! Obviously I had to concentrate on pacifiying them. It was a very intimate moment, and I had to summon all my charm to convince them that I still loved them and that everything would be okay. I'm surely going to hell for duping my own brain cells.)

Anyway, so I guess the you-can-buy-happiness brand of consumerism, better understood (by pop-culture nutcases like me) as the 'IKEA nesting instinct', is scaling new heights - actually entering altogether new dimensions - even as I type. The phenomenon is beginning to transcend the boundary between objective and subjective effortlessly, although I'm not sure I want to be around to see the results. You can simply buy being funny now. I'll emphasize that again in all caps just to drive home what is to me a very weird transition, even by the standards of kaliyug!

WIT IS ON SALE NOW!
Jerry Seinfield and Chandler Bing can go to hell.
(A side thought: This completely convinces me that there really is no afterlife, because if there was, the ghosts of Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse, Groucho Marx, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Ambrose Bierce, Douglas Adams, et al would have haunted the shit out of the Vodafone guys!)

So apparently, humour is not the bitch of those elitist fuckers anymore who think they're oh-so-ingenious. It's just another on-demand value-add to your personality.

Go to sleep, dear Cerebrum. All's well with the world.

No comments: