"Yes! I want to go to the bathroom!"

So who else remembers that great line from the film Crazy People? It featured Dudley Moore as an off-the-rails, burnt-or-burning-out ad exec who is chucked into a psychiatric hospital and then winds up (with the assistance of some of his fellow patients, one of them played by Darryl Hannah) doing something absolutely unthinkable: basing print and TV ad campaigns on the truth.

There are some hilarious fake ads in the film. “Buy Volvo! It’s boxy, but it’s good!”, one urges. Or: “Porsche! It’s a little too small for you to get laid inside. But you’ll get laid as soon as you get out!”  And at the end of the film, there’s also this wildly un-PC fake Sony commercial that explains why Eastern electronics are so superior to Western ones.

But the ad from the movie that sticks most in my mind is a Metamucil ad. It says straightforwardly that if you don’t take Metamucil so that you can move your bowels regularly, you’ll get cancer and die. The next thing you see is a shot of a pharmacy being mobbed (and cleaned out of Metamucil) by middle-aged-and-older people frantically waving promotional coupons that say, “Yes! I want to go to the bathroom!”

For some reason, that was the line that flickered immediately through my mind when I ran into this (and thanks to Mark Evanier for the link: )

The Imodium Bathroom Finder

…Brought to you by a company that specializes in OTC antidiarrheal preparations. This would seem at first glimpse like a really useful online resource.

However, alas, there’s a catch. It appears that if you are anywhere but in the continental US, you are (so to speak: forgive me if the idiom suggests itself…) s**t out of luck. I guess the rest of us are all just going to have to hold it in. 

Tags: Crazy+People, Imodium, Immodium, bathroom, toilet, finder, USA, bathroom, Dudley+Moore, Darryl+Hannah, diarrhea, diarrhoea, Metamucil

Advertising versus reality

This German website, when you click one or another spot on the main image, shows you both the inside and the outside of a package of food — that is, the difference between the “artist’s impression” / “serving suggestion” of a package, and what the contents really look like when you open the package and/or prepare them.

Some really frightening contrasts here and there. This one, for example. Normally I really like Zurcher geschnetzletes. It’s a Swiss dish, native to Zurich: the second word in the name comes from a word meaning to cut something into strips or thin slices. It normally involves strips of veal in a cream sauce with mushrooms (morels if you’re lucky), and it’s served with spaetzli (or other noodles) or rösti. But after seeing this stuff — ewwwww. I think I’m off the ‘schnetzli for a while.

Tags: food, ready+meal, ready+cooked, advertising, inside, outside, Zurich, geschnetzletes, veal, cream, morel, Zurcher