TINGLETINGLE

I’ve always loved a good TINGLETINGLE of a commercial.

You know how sometimes you see an ad or watch a commercial, and when it ends, the punchline makes all your body go TINGLETINGLE? Nowadays it’s been overused and has seemingly culminated in heart-breaking pet commercials, but it was not always like this.

If you grow up in Yugoslavia, then your commercials are black and white children waving to the passing car with Tito inside, a calm voice reassuring you that this product is truly excellent, or another telling you to buy this and buy that as if this was not the only pâté on the market, the only toothpaste, the only shoe polish.

No wonder that later, when Austrian television has an entire show full of western commercials, our eyes are glued to the screen in wonder and inside everything goes TINGLETINGLE with each new one.

I admit I still might be writing in this way sometimes, to the punchline. Can’t help it, it’s stronger than me. No matter how with time I’ve learnt that every TINGLETINGLE necessarily means that somebody is pushing something down your throat.

Not me. Not selling anything. Any commercial you might see at the end of my posts is THEM using my original content to advertise themselves. How cheeky. Or is it me who is cheeky, using their free network to get into potentially numerous homes around the world?

Yesterday I discovered that a photo of my grinning face is being used on a Slovak (or is it Czech?) website as click-bait. When you click on me, a streaming menu or something opens. They use me to get around. Luckily streaming involves TV and films of seemingly innocent nature. This time. Who knows what is happening somewhere else. The fun fact is that my t-shirt is saying SHUT UP BITCH.

A comma is missing. And it’s signed now… From Iggy Pop concert eight years ago. Photo: Zedd

If anybody knows how – image search the photo, crash their site and nobody needs to know, va bene? 😀

But what spurred this post are memories of certain ads that are stuck in my mind, possibly because I copied them into my scrapbook where I kept only the best lines, quotes, passages from literature and the like that I encountered.

Here are just three that I can still recall without checking. Except in the first case, where the name of the product is the key, I don’t even know any more which brand was being advertised.

• The ad for “Time Out New York” magazine: “Welcome to New York. Now get out.”

• “I don’t see the point of getting engaged.
  I don’t see the point of getting
  I don’t see the point
  I don’t see
  I do.”

• A magazine advertisement showing a couple sitting on the bed watching TV. The text goes on for a while and rounds up something like this:
  “…so it’s good to know that young people are listening to your channel to decide which music to buy.
  Even if they are not always watching.”

And here is a quotation that I’ve just read (Twitter is useful this way):

As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind — every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder.
—John Glenn

Let’s have ourselves a merry little TINGLETINGLE!

Decorations on my way to the station.

Photo: a © signature mmm production