DON'T IT MAKE MY BROWN EYES BLUE

I haven't heard this but I totally believe it.

I remember reading years ago that they make baby formula light brown because people perceive it as having more vitamins that way than if it was white.

And just the other day I read about how pills and medicine packaging is very specific in using color to heighten the effects of the medicine -- and it works!

Color is complicated.

Yeah, color sure is a complicated issue. I heard about these clowns taking ordinary recycled paper, bleaching with the chemical brew that includes dioxin, and then dying it brown for the consumer market in a CBC radio opinion piece, the greater subject of which was color and marketing.

Nothing these people do surprises me anymore.

I'd love to give that a listen!

I'm fascinated by marketing. I wander through the world thinking "I am being sold something". Not in a cynical way, but in an aware way -- I like it that people are trying to please me. I notice a lot of things that business do to try to get me to behave in certain ways (and sometimes, just for kicks, I'll misbehave just to see what happens).

Reading Paco Underhill's "Why We Buy" absolutely killed me. I'd sell my soul to work for him.

What do they think, anyhow? We're going to eat more napkins because they look healthy?

There was a series on CBC radio, The Age of Persuasion by Terry O'Reilly, an advertising executive. He has now started another series of broadcasts on marketing, but i don't recall the name right now. The Age of Persuasion was broadcast on NPR, too, which might be a better way for you to find it.

EDIT: I just saw on the site i linked (DOH ! ! !) that his new show is called Under the Influence.

Good point . . . yer always thinkin', ain't ya, Roger . . .

Might be true for coffee filters too...

ewwwww.


I once had a handmedown 'gold' (gold?) coffee filter. Our friend Harvey's sometime household helper screwed it up in some way, and he was going to throw it out, so I said, oh, wait. I had it another, oh, fifteen years, and finally I killed it dead, I forget how. Those things are expensive.

Well, I just checked, not so expensive, somewhere around 8 to 10 dollars, and, as they probably say, it pays for itself.