'Bred Crumbs

Do advertisers never run their spew by actual humans before crapping it onto the world? The other day, a once valuable search tool that has transformed into an increasingly annoying marketing firm intruded on another site with this banner ad:

The first sentence fragment actually suggests some meaning, but then – what the hell are you talking about? Does this mean something to anyone? Is it just a badly worded math problem? Or did some genius say, "Let's do a campaign in Engrish"?

Then again, if I want to search the Web for gibberish, I know where to go.

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Speaking of search engines: there was a really good phony one on the season-or-series finale of John Doe last night. Doe is not a great show, but it's not bad, and it does one thing better than any other show: fake computer screens. The browser windows of the mildly hunky hero's preferred fictional search engine could have come from almost any real-life sub-Google searcher. Navigation, input text box, thumbnails in the image search results – all looked genuine. The font faces and sizes were normal, not the giant decorative things that glare from other TV shows' monitors. And Doe used a computer like the ones in the real world, not one of the omnipresent product-placed Macs that deluded art directors use to fill all the other offices in TV land.

Contrast this to, say, a classic faux-interface gaffe on Smallville last season. At the end of one episode, Chloe had gathered info about Clark that invaded his privacy, and she faced a dilemma that was depicted on her computer screen laughably literally:

Don't know whether the genesis of this was specifically manipulative writing or clueless/careless graphic design, but wow, that's one cruel version of Word she's got there. Apparently, you can't

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Note: all portrayals of input buttons in this entry are intentionally impotent.

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Not that I could have done anything about it, but I wish I had realized, before America was transformed into a bringer of war, that one of the side effects would be that folk music would be inflicted on me.

Entering the train station heading home this evening, I heard them before I saw them, a crowd of two or three dozen. (I don't know; I was taking the long way around them to the turnstiles, trying desperately not to make eye, or further ear, contact.) They sang an endless song whose simplicity and repetition must grate on even young children, with a song leader reciting each chorus' one line before the choir picked it up like litter and recycled it for the duration of the chorus, when a new prompt would occur. And more prominent than the voices, from a distance, an actual tambourine jingled in warning, like a rattlesnake.

I've heard a tambourine only once before in real life that I can remember. Oddly enough, it was in a pub in West Hollywood a few years ago. Amid pretty male hitting upon pretty male, amid the charmingly incongrous men's-club paneled wainscotting and pool tables, in view of the second-floor booth where the DJ played things you don't hear in paneled-wainscotted men's clubs, a young man staked out a space on a small platform across from the bar, and, using the dance soundtrack as a foundation, stared into space and made his own kind of music with a tambourine. He was awarded many style points.

No style points were awarded today, not that the earnest peace-singers at the train station would care, being better people than me. Even so: if A Mighty Wind has somehow caused anyone to think folk music's a good idea, then Christopher Guest and crew have a lot of apologizing to do.

The encounter was nearly as traumatizing as being ambushed by the Yale Whiffenpoofers in a restaurant on Bourbon Street. Remind me to tell you some time.

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