Black Friday Bonanza

I have never been a fan of the bloodsport of competitive shopping. In my mind there is something unseemly about camping for days in front of a Walmart in order to bargain hunt. I haven't got the stomach for the "every woman/man for themselves" mentality, and I certainly wouldn't go to the mattresses for a discount. (Is anybody else impressed with my "Godfather"reference?) I tried it once. This menace of zombie shopping. Not on Black Friday mind you, but on Boxing Day the day after Christmas. I was at the Southern Home as I usually am for the Christmas vacation. It was six weeks prior to Younger Son's Bar Mitzvah and I still had nothing to wear. I was seriously entertaining the idea of attending in my torn jeans and a turtleneck, when I cajoled my Other Mother (my mother was still in Toronto due to circumstances unforeseen) to trek to the stores with me in the desperate hope of finding something more suitable for the occasion. We left our homes at 6:00am so that we could a) Find a parking spot that wasn't in Tallahassee and b) enter Bloomingdales with the other crazies at 6:30. After pulling every possible item that wasn't jeans and a turtleneck off of the racks and shelves, (size matters not a whit when shopping with animals) I staked out my claim to the last available fitting room. I tried on clothes while Other Mother acted as runner. Competitive shopping is a two-person game, lest the inmates attempt to usurp your hard-won territory. After several hours of playing survival of the fittest, we left the department store with a silk skirt, a lovely top and a shrug all for a deeply discounted price. We never left Bloomies, our mission completed with one-stop shopping and neither of us having the stomach to venture deeper into the belly of the beast. Let the next morons have their shot. We both swore a blood oath "Never again".

But far be it from me to keep others from that which they love or find important. I freely acknowledge that the Jew in me doesn't fully understand the Christmas shopping mentality, so if Black Friday is your thing-have at it. I do however, want to put in a personal plug for the shopping season. Tomorrow has been labelled Small Business Saturday in the United States. I kind of love this idea. After you have muscled and bullied your way through the big box and chain megastores, try and send some of those shopping dollars to a small business in your area. How about frequenting the local pet store instead of Petsmart to find that perfect gift for Fido or Fifi? Or how about a visit to that funky bohemian clothing shop downtown, rather than Macy's? Maybe that local gourmet shop has some nifty kitchen gadgets that can't be seen at William's Sonoma? In these difficult economic times, it has been the locally owned and operated businesses that have taken huge hits. How about sending them some love and capital this holiday season? If Saturday shopping is not your thing, take Small Business Saturday and transfer it to Sunday or Monday. The sentiment is still the same.

In that vein, I would like to tell all of my Toronto-based friends about an exciting new local business finally opening for retail. The Husband and Twin Son have been making their artisan spirits for several years now and have been trying to shoehorn their way into a tightly government controlled market here in Ontario. They have finally, finally, finally been given permission to open a retail store on the site of their distillery and hope to have it up and running by December 1st, (Please note the date. They aren't ready just yet to receive the hoards that we know will be pounding on the door!!) just in time for all of those holiday parties. Please come and visit Still Waters Distillery at their new onsite retail outlet at 150 Bradwick Drive #26 in Concord. Details can be found at the website. The boys will happily set you up with their award winning vodka and some special single malts unavailable at your local LCBO. Sincere apologies to my out of town readers but e-commerce is not yet available. Hopefully soon.

Enjoy the day of bargain busting friends. Me? I will spend my time getting ready for Shabbat.

Shabbat Shalom to all who observe.

Disturbing, Disgusting, and Dumb

A few random items have caught my eye over the last few days and I must confess that each and every one elicited a response of "WTF?" I have to seriously wonder what went into the thought processes behind these campaigns. Somebody, somewhere had to realize that they would make the files of the disturbing, the disgusting, and the dumb.

Disturbing:

Clothing maker Benetton launched their new UnHate campaign yesterday with a series of creepy visuals of world leaders kissing each other. Check them out here.

Yes, that is the pope kissing an imam, Mr. Obama smooching with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Benjamin Netanyahu lip-locked with Mahmood Abbas, and Germany's Angela Merkel getting it on with Nicholas Sarkozy of France. It should be noted that the Vatican was so outraged about His Holiness puckering up, that Benetton pulled that picture from its campaign. Alessandro Benetton, executive chairman of the company launched the ads yesterday and attempted an explanation.

"While global love is still a utopia, albeit a worthy one, the invitation 'not to hate', to combat the 'culture of hatred', is an ambitious but realistic objective. At this moment in history, so full of major upheavals and equally large hopes, we have decided, through this campaign, to give widespread visibility to an ideal notion of tolerance and invite the citizens of every country to reflect on how hatred arises particularly from fear of 'the other’ and of what is unfamiliar to us."

While I can certainly appreciate the ideals of love and not hate, there is something untoward about these pictures. I am not getting the vibe of world peace that I believe that Benetton was aiming for, but rather an uncomfortable and squeamish feeling in the pit of my stomach. An age of understanding cannot be forced upon us with a kiss. There is actually a christological Judas imagery that comes to mind. In truth the photo of Angela Merkel and Sarkozy is the creepiest for me. It reduces one of the most powerful women in the world to a sexist punchline. This is just my opinion, but I certainly would be interested in others.

Disgusting: 


Just in time for American Thanksgiving, those whack jobs at PETA are at it again. In a campaign aimed squarely at children comes this little gem that is popping up on a roadside billboard near you.

Nice? Friendly? Grotesque!! And I'm a vegetarian! I have discussed PETA's over the top tactics before and how I truly believe that their mandate of animal protection gets lost in the morass when it behaves abhorrently and batshit crazy. All this ad serves to do is creep out a bunch of unsuspecting kids and probably land them on a therapist's couch trying to figure out from where their nightmares emanated. I know that it kept me up! All I could think about was some weird science experiment involving the dog Eddie from Frasier. Get with the program PETA. If you truly want to educate kids about ethical eating my advice would be to tone done the nonsense, stop trying to scare the shit out them, and stop thoroughly pissing off their parents. 

Dumb:

And now for the truly dumb. On Tuesday the United States Congress decided that pizza is a vegetable. From the Associated Press:

The final version of a spending bill released late Monday would unravel school lunch standards the Agriculture Department proposed earlier this year. These include limiting the use of potatoes on the lunch line, putting new restrictions on sodium and boosting the use of whole grains. The legislation would block or delay all of those efforts.The bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. USDA had wanted to only count a half-cup of tomato paste or more as a vegetable, and a serving of pizza has less than that.Nutritionists say the whole effort is reminiscent of the Reagan administration's much-ridiculed attempt 30 years ago to classify ketchup as a vegetable to cut costs. This time around, food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools, the salt industry and potato growers requested the changes and lobbied Congress.

A series of high-powered lobbyists from companies that produce and provide frozen pizzas and tater tots to school cafeterias managed to get the deep thinkers from the Congress to classify the two tablespoons of tomato sauce on a pizza as part of the daily requirement of vegetables that school children consume every day. And all of this whilst the United States is battling a growing obesity problem amongst the nation's young people. Jamie Oliver is out there somewhere crying into his fresh veg. Congress is sacrificing children's health and well-being in exchange for a deep-dish from Di Giorno. And we wonder why Americans have no faith in their legislative bodies.

If you have others from the files of disturbing, disgusting, and dumb please forward them to me or comment below.

P.S I've been syndicated on Blogher They liked my post entitled "What Have You Learned, Dorothy" so much that they published it. They like me!! They really really like me! Does this mean that I am now a professional writer? You decide.