the ALLDERBLOB

This is it. The Allderblob starts a new thang in cyberspace. Or rather, a new name for what many are doing out here anyway. Look at kunstler.com or at mnftiu.cc for example. Not logging, but lobbing. As in throwing clumps of earth at stray targets. That’s this lobsite. And there’s another metaphor in waiting: the lobsite would be the precision instrument that allows for the aiming of those clumps of earth to be lobbed.

There’s a myth about lobs, that they are easy pitches, intended to make it easy for the batter. But lobs can be deceiving. Their nature is to come at you from unanticipated directions. Maybe, like the stick the zen master whacks intransigent pupils with, the lob will knock some enlightenment your way.

Allder is German of course, it means “all the” as in “all the lobs” [all the time? shurely you jest–ed.]. It’s also my name, in part–Jacob Allderdice.

At the right are some “pages” which is geekspeak, apparently, for pieces of screen with words on them. If I can figure out how to do it, I will change the category to “lobs.” Go ahead. Try and hit them out of the park.

Below is the first entry to the Allderblob, which constitutes a letter to the editor of the Toronto Star. Note the cc list.

Today’s lob is about car advertisements, which the author considers a dangerous incitement to violence. They should be banned, just as cigarette and firearm advertisements are.

Toronto Star
Letters to the Editor

March 9, 2005

Re: “20% admit they fall asleep while driving” by Kevin Mcgran

Nice: four million drivers a year fall asleep at the wheel in Canada. Almost half of these pass out within an hour of getting on the road, well within the average GTA car commute. Talk about the “end of
suburbia.”

Am I the only one who sees in this figure yet another reason to discourage car dependency among our citizenry?

To point out that drivers asleep at the wheel pose an immediate danger to themselves, to their passengers, and to other innocent road users including pedestrians and cyclists, is to state the obvious. But will we ever read this in a Star editorial? Not likely.

Instead, we get the usual: the overwhelming attitude of the media is “cars are great; cars give us freedom; cars drive the economy; cars make us cool.” The Saturday Star devotes two whole sections to
“Wheels” (by which it means “motors,” because you’ll never read about anything without one in those pages).

Imagine the outcry if the Saturday Star had sections labeled “Tobacco” or “Firearms” each week.

Like cars, tobacco and firearms are facts of life in Canada: “necessary evils,” as the cliché has it. Like cars, they are responsible every day for deaths and hospitalizations. Like cars, they are regulated and licensed in recognition of their inherent danger.

So why is the car celebrated? Why is advertising it even tolerated?

Today’s story was buried on page A20, following two full-colour car advertisements: one full-page and one centre-fold. Imagine if you opened the pages of the Star to a full page advertisement for a handgun. Imagine a centrefold cigarette advertisement.

Well it wasn’t so long ago that both were considered “normal,” a legitimate source of advertising income.

It’s time to take our nation’s sick addiction to the automobile seriously, just like we did with cigarettes. It’s time to “uncool the car.”

Please join with me in calling on government, at the very highest level, to ban outright the advertisement or promotion of automobiles in print or broadcast media, just as was done for tobacco.

Jacob Allderdice

cc
Prime Minister Paul Martin
Jack Layton, MP, Toronto-Danforth
Marilyn Churley, MPP, Toronto-Danforth
Paula Fletcher, Toronto Ward 30 councillor
David Miller, Mayor of Toronto

(339 words)

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 17th, 2005 at 12:31 pm and is filed under unlikely versions of reality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.