Friday, May 23, 2008

Coming soon to a clear blue sky near you ...

Serious posts again tomorrow, but must share this new visual mayhem - flogos:

According to Paul Greenberg (May 22, 2008), an "Invasion of the Flogos" is imminent. Maybe Klingons would be preferable:

("Look, up in the sky, it's a ... logo cloud.") The things are called Flogos, and are the latest way to advertise, says their inventor. A former magician, he's developed a machine that sends foamy clouds as big as four feet across into the air, which can assume any shape the advertiser desires.

Next month the air above Walt Disney World in Orlando is due to be covered with Flogos shaped like Mickey Mouse. In the future you could follow a trail of Toyotas or Schwinns or longneck bottles of Bud to wherever they're sold. The sky's the limit, literally.

Imagine waking up on the beach one morning to find the sky filled with the kind of ads you went on vacation to escape. The Disneyfication of the world proceeds apace as a faux enchantment supplants the real kind that Nature provides.
Someone tell me this isn't true.

When I was young, I tried to think up the ugliest, most visually distracting high tech invention. I came up with the idea of genetically engineering plants so that the flower petals would display as brand logos (Esso, Kellogg's Raisin Bran, Maxwell House).

I thought if I could think up something that awful, it wouldn't really happen. Silly me.