Furmanifesto

Last week I heard that Gun’s n’ Roses were going on tour in North America.  The first thing I did was work the Google machine to see if Axl and Slash had finally made nice.

They haven’t.

Neither Slash, nor any other original member, will be joining W. Axl Rose for this tour.  It will merely be the lead singer performing alongside a bunch of people you’ve never heard of.

It’s not like all the former members hate each other.  In fact, getting them together in a room is actually quite easy, you only have to mention that Axl won’t be there.  This is a shame because when they were operating as the Most Dangerous Band In The World, Rose was often the only thing holding them together.

Now he’s the only thing keeping them apart.

Under most conditions it can be hard to keep a rock band together, but it’s even harder to do when they’ve achieved everything they hoped for. It’s not usually the battle to become the best that kills a band, it’s usually the divvying up of the spoils.

My favorite band break up? The Smiths. It included the now legendary firing of Bassist Andy Rourke. He received a Post-It Note on the windshield of his car, it read: “Andy – you have left The Smiths. Goodbye and good luck, Morrissey.”

What’s great about this break up is that even though it was committed in about as cowardly a fashion as the 1980′s allowed for,  Morrissey at least contacted Andy to let him know that the relationship was over.

Which brings me to Facebook.

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To work, Advertising doesn’t have to be particularly good, it just has to be motivational.  To prove just how good a real ad agency is you only need to look at the self-created advertisements on Facebook.  I thought I’d highlight a few of my recent favorites.  Here are 10 of them, just for fun:

When was the last time you added up your regrets and “not buying outer space boots” made the list?  What makes these MAG shoes unique is that you CAN’T go back in time to buy them… unlike other inferior products that do allow you to.

I can ignore that this is perhaps the most blatant sellout product on the righthand column,but what I can’t ignore is that they claim to have blended music with the wine.  How do you do that exactly? and why didn’t they blend the moon in as well?

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Attention Mark Zuckerberg, I hate the Facebook right hand column.

I don’t hate it because it’s all advertisements, on the contrary, advertisements are fascinating to me.  I don’t hate it because it’s expanding like a Gremlin in a microwave, crowding out such beloved Facebook chatskis as “Pieces of Flair” or “Mafia Wars”.  I hate it because it may be the least intelligent marketing currently at work in this solar system… and this is a planet that still employs telemarketers.

Sometimes the ads are spelled terribly or make no sense whatsoever. I’m pretty sure that these ads are being copy-written by someone who employs English as a fourth or fifth language. I submit to you the exquisitely crafted “Best Products All” that appeared on my page yesterday:

This is the “worstest” attempt at legibility that I have “even seen all” since Miss Teen South Carolina helped us locate “the Iraq.”
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