Kids read the darndest things

McDonald's* is putting Beanie Babies in Happy Meals again. This is an extremely odd event to me (it brings back memories of the mad Beanie Baby craze, which my family took some part in and which I tried to explain to my ignorant 8-year-old sister) but for this post I'm just making a short comment on the tag of the one my sister got, a hamster named Fluffball. The inside poem reads:

Running on my hamster wheel
Such fun it almost makes me squeal
But what would make a good thing better ?
A friend so we could run together !

What a brilliant piece of marketing. I'd like to meet the writer of this, though I'm not sure whether I'd want to shake their hand or slap them. Most marketing aimed at kids demonstrates a disgusting lack of subtlety (because "subtlety" is only valuable to marketing when it aids the inherent economic motive, and kids generally are too innocent to recognize the crassness of advertising), but this is elegantly sinister. What would make this toy better? Another toy!

Advertising/marketing is one of my push-button issues. I despise it and am liable to get very, very angry over it, or rather, its position as the definer of mass culture and its lack of loyalty to any ethic beyond economics. Someday I'll write a lengthy manifesto on the market culture and a proposal for an alternative, ethical culture . . . but that's a long way off, I think. It's just such a vast issue, and I don't have enough of a grasp on it to even begin to write what I want to write on it.

In that spirit, though, how about a run down of upcoming posts? This is as much to incite me to get them done as anything else.

• "Flow in Mirror's Edge", on the failure of the game's mechanics to recreate the sensation of parkour/free running
• "Freedom in Mirror's Edge", on the ethical contradictions embedded within the mechanics, narrative, and themes of the game
• "Freedom of information in Children of Earth", on how Torchwood almost finally did something right
• "With Keven Spacey as the voice of Gerty", on the association of actors with characters
• And a few posts wrapping-up my summer D&D
  

*How sad is it that McDonald's is in Firefox's spell check dictionary?