Michael J. Fox Political Ad

Here's the ad that caused huge U.S. political and media waves. And it happens to me my first YouTube video blog embed.

Not The Greatest

I recently learned something interesting about China's advertising policy. I learned this during a meeting with a fairly large client who is making their debut in China next month. Apparently, they had to change their advertisement from stating "The World's Largest ____ Store" to "The World's ____ Store." That's because Chinese censorship policy will not allow the use of superlative hyperboles in advertising.

This got me thinking about all U.S. superlative hyperbolic claims in advertisement and branding. Superlatives are as American as apple pie. I mean let's take a quick look at a few:

Barnum & Bailey's would go from "The Greatest Show on Earth" becomes "A Show on Earth"

"Mission: Impossible" becomes "Mission: Difficult"

"CNN. The most trusted name in news." becomes "CNN. A trusted name in news."

All those claims of "the most powerful truck in its class," would have to be changed to the "a powerful truck in its class."

OK, time to get really dorky:

The legendary rock band, KISS could no longer open their show as "The hottest band in the world!" but "A hot band in the world!"

The Avengers would no longer be "Earth's Mightiest Heroes," but merely "Earth's Mighty Heroes"

Captain Marvel would no longer be "The World's Mightiest Mortal," but merely "A World's Mighty Mortal."

Anyway, I'm sure there are so many more. But this is all I can think of at this hour.

Oh yeah, one more: Muhammad Ali could no longer be "The Greatest of All Time," but perhaps "A Great One in Time." Or he would have to say, "I am not the Greatest!" What fun is that?!?

Picture's Worth a Few Words

This evening, I decided to dump a few photos from my camera phone. I found a few G-rated enough to post and write a few words about. :P

This first pic's taken last Sunday from the 2nd Annual RockIt festival which features mostly local Hong Kong bands. It's quite telling that the picture shows an audience of mostly Caucasians. Rock music's just not that big here in HK. The locals live mostly on a steady diet of Cantopop and Taiwanese pop music which are steady, sugary, sweet and cavity-inducing staples at the karaoke clubs.

The festival also costs more than the average HK person would be willing to pay for music they don't really get or appreciate. I attended to meet Josh, the lead singer of the band in this picture. He's in the yellow T. While waiting for him to finish some interviews, I hung with my friend who shot the festival for a 3 min segment for her TV station. Josh and I spoke afterwards about the short film I'm working on. He freelances for Cartoon Network here and is interested in contributing to the soundtrack and possibly time as an editor. We spoke the same geek-speek about Star Wars and Transformers, so we got along quite dork-aliciously.

This next pic was snapped the night before at the HK's infamous party-central, Lan Kwai Fong. There was a street carnival, so the normally crowded street's of LKF were even more annoyingly crowded than usual. I was planning on keeping it a low key evening, but my friend who just happens to be a beautiful model/designer convinced me to go out. No, it wasn't the allure of meeting more of her beautiful model friends that got me out. She got me out by promising to discuss the designs for my film.

Yeah, she had to twist my arm. But I'm a slave to my film which is going way to slowly for my own taste these days. Work's been crazy-hectic, but I'm trying to move the film forward however I can.

Yeah! That's two entries this month. Doest that mean my blogging slump is kinda, sorta over?

Blogworthy

It's been over a month since my last entry. It's not that there hasn't been anything blogworthy to write. It's just that life happens and it keeps you from blogging. But tonight, I had an experience that I think is worth taking a few minutes to chronicle.

Tonight I went to dinner with one of my Hong Kong celebrity friends. She introduced me to her Venture Capitalist boyfriend, a few HK film industry producers and a beautiful celebrity photographer. (The photographer looked like she belonged in front of the camera as opposed to behind it. But I digress.) This would normally be my element as I certainly have no problem conversing about film, photography, art and industry. But we spoke mostly in Cantonese and I still haven't mastered the art of industry and business conversation in Cantonese. So it wasn't nearly as good a time as I would have had if I were more fluent in Cantonese. I think I understood about 60% of the conversation.

Occasionally, I would look around the room whenever the conversation went too far beyond my Cantonese. On one such occasion, I saw someone familar in the reflection of the mirror by the neighboring table. I did one of those double takes you might see in a cartoon and said a little too loudly, "Holy shit! That's Peter Jackson!"

At first, no one at the table recognized him as they remember him being pudgy and wearing glasses from his Lord of the Rings days. But I recognized his thinner, lasik-eye-glassless new and improved self from all the King Kong publicity. One of the film producers then told me he was sitting next to Stanley Tong, a farily prolific Hong Kong director who has also directed a few Hollywood films.

Despite being a celebrity herself, my friend was wondering if she should get an autograph from Peter Jackson. But we didn't have to get up to greet anyone from that table as Stanley Tong recognized the photographer sitting to my right. He came over to our table to say, 'hi.' Apparently, they're old friends.

So there you have it. A blogworthy topic that got me out of my over one month blogless slump. No ground breaking observations or realizations. I just thought I wanted to write this down before I forget it happened.

'Til the next blogworthy moment, I bid thee adieu