Long Term Memories

Sunday, February 26, 2006

From the mid 60s - memory of a car leasing commercial

There were only a few channels back then and advertisers could more easily get their message before the viewers. One such message was an advertisement for Executive Auto Leasing. The ad was produced with minimal cost. It was simply a dialogue between two men dressed in biz attire standing in their front yard near a car. They advertised on Washington Senator baseball games and since the team was pretty poor, they probably got a good deal on the buy. It went like this:

Man #1 - Joe, could you give me a ride today.

Man #2 - Sure. I'd be glad to

Man #1 - Say, is that a new car?

Man #2 - Yes. I'm leasing it from Executive.

#1 - You're renting it?

#2 - No I'm leasing it.

#1 - Isn't that rather expensive?

#2 - No. Not when you consider the cost of maintenance, upkeep and repair - and they had the exact make and model I wanted.

#1 - The exact model?

#2 - That's right. So where do you want to go?

#1 - (said deeply and forcefully while facing the camera straight on) Take me to Executive Auto Leasing.

Irwin (who was probably only 11 or so at the time) and I starting making fun of the commercial - imitating it constantly (except that instead of saying "Isn't that rather expensive.", he sometimes said, "Isn't that rather the same?" and we would have to start over or improvise.

Irwin told me a few years after we began imitating it that he just realized that 'maintenance', 'upkeep' and 'repair' were all the same thing.

We also did imitations of a jello commercial and a commercial for national beer.

The jello jingle was something like this,

Hey hey its national jello week
Tell everybody you know
And don't let the week go by
Without (spelling out) J E L L O

The beer commercial was something like this:

Oh National Beer, National Beer
You'll like the taste of National Beer.
And while I'm a singing, I'm proud to say
Its brewed on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. ¶ 7:45 AM

Thursday, February 23, 2006

College Memory from 1971

I remembered this because at work a problem came up involving Tulsa, Oklahoma.

At the University of Wisconsin in the Atmospheric and Space Science Dept. there was a very bright post-doc student named Bob Schlesinger. Bob was so smart and knew so much about his field that during presentations he would not only point out mistakes and weaknesses in people's thesis or dissertation or presentation but sometimes would tell them what mistakes they were about to make. Inevitably the presenter didn't get it until after they continued for a while a realized what Bob was talking about. It was really stunning to witness this.

No one could stump Bob. I realized that I could never be able to stump him in his field. One day I had an idea. During a meeting I asked, "Say Bob, did you ever realize that 'Tulsa' spelled backwards is 'a slut'.

Bob responded, "yes, I've noticed that several times."

Its is 34 years later and Bob is still at the University of Wisconsin. He made Associate Professor
recently. His relative lack of success despite his smarts is due to a lack of interpersonnal skills. ¶ 6:59 PM