Blog Update!
For those of you not following me on Facebook, as of the Summer of 2019 I've moved to Central WA, to a tiny mountain town of less than 1,000 people.

I will be covering my exploits here in the Cascades, as I try to further reduce my impact on the environment. With the same attitude, just at a higher altitude!

Thursday, May 8, 2008

A flotilla of foam

Ooooh! A floaty star!A while back I reported about the whole idea of Moonvertising, where advertisers project corporate logos onto the moon. Fortunately, it was just an advertising joke - a scheme to get people interested in a third-rate, tasteless beer.

Well, lo and behold, someone else has stepped up to the plate to ensure corporate advertising infiltrates our airspace. Now, I realize that we already get slightly bombarded by blimps and plane contrails exposing the virtues of such fine products as Goodyear and its ilk, but this just grinds my crackers.

Picture the Manhattan skyline filled with Nike swooshes. Or the golden arches of McDonald's gently drifting over Los Angeles.

A special-effects entrepreneur from Alabama has come up with a way to fill the sky with foamy clouds as big as 4 feet across and shaped like corporate logos - Flogos, as he calls them.

Picture me writing my Congressperson complaining about the intrusiveness of Flogos in my appreciation of the heavens. Now, while they are touted as "green and 100% environmentally safe" it doesn't diminish the environmentally unfriendly aspect of "clouding" (ha!) the sky with stupid logos and other dumb crap I'd rather not see.

It's bad enough that we have to bear witness to the myriad of billboards out there, but now when I'm lying in the grass with my kids enjoying the sky, there will be no creative "what do you see in the clouds". Instead, we'll be bombarded by visions of Mickey Mouse, Apple, Nike, McDonald's and other corporate schtick.

Am I the only one annoyed at this? What's next? I giant set of floaty tits to scare the kids?

26 comments:

Robj98168 said...

Floaty Tits??? I just hope they get a handle on this before the politicians embrace this form of advertising. I am Rob Johnson and I approved of this message.

Anonymous said...

OMG what's next?! It's hard enough keeping commercials away from my kids..without them floating through the sky. How tacky!

Sam said...

Maybe the fact that I'm going blind won't be such a bad thing after all.

Ashley // Our Little Apartment said...

Haha. No way.
That's so stupid it's kinda funny.

Chile said...

So, I hope everyone who reads this will send them an email telling them what an unwelcome idea this is. Unbelievable what people come up with to make a buck.

Oh wait, it's made from soap. Maybe it's not a bad thing. It could scrub the atmosphere clean. Ugh.

maryann said...

That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of. Who wants to see floating advertisements? If these idiots spent half the time trying to come up solutions to real problems we might have a lot more renewable, reusable, fixable products on the market instead of this crap.

Anonymous said...

floaty tits? my kid would *love* that - maybe it would distract him from mine for a minute (he's still nursing)

seriously, though, it makes me glad we're in a rural area that's unlikely to be bombarded by any such horrors...

DC said...

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."

--Albert Einstein

Jennifer said...

GREEN and EVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY? What are they made of... the off gasses of congress instead of chemical soaps?

UGH!!!

I would REFUSE on pricipal to buy anything advertised in this way... and would write to the companies to tell them this.

Much like I already take any paper slipped under my windsheild wipers or tucked into my door handle... and tell the companies in question exactly WHY I won't be buying crap or services.

(The kicker was an all natural yoga and wellness center... they LITTERED the parking lot at Whole Foods with their advertising squares. Sometimes you just feel a company SHOULD have known better._

jayedee said...

merciful heavens!
television move outta the way!
there's a new kid in town!
geesh!
nothing i can say will be remotely nice....so i'll just go away quietly
(unless one of those horrors shows up in my little corner of the world)

Cave-Woman said...

If ever there were an opportunity to mount a protest, this is it.

No advertising in the heavens, please. It's just tacky.

C said...

This just royally pisses me off!

Maeve said...

It's just another urban fad, which will sprout up everywhere seemingly overnight and then just as suddenly go away again. With only a few people clinging on, ala those stupid noisy advertising ground balloons, or sky-writing planes. (I've not seen one of those in years)

Wendy said...

It took me a long time to realize what was missing as we drove down I-95 once we crossed the border into Maine. It was billboards. There are no billboards. Can you imagine? I didn't realize how obtrusive they were until I went south for a visit to family.

I'd have a problem with flogos blocking out my sky. I need the sun and clear skies to dry my laundry :).

Tara said...

And I thought it was bad that ATMs and gas pumps are trying to sell me crap. UGH. This makes me sick.

May said...

That is the sickest thing I've seen in.. ever. NO THANK YOU!

TheNormalMiddle said...

Flogos? The name itself is tacky enough for me.

Jenn said...

I saw this on SFGate this morning and was going to blog about it - how utterly ridiculous. I can't wait to see the floating penises that will soon fill the sky. Ugh.

Echoing other poster sentiments, I'd love to see a ban on billboards. Spain did it. So can we.

Jenn said...

I wonder how those things would withstand a good squirt from my garden hose...

The sites says they "travel slow" -

"They can travel 20-30 miles and go as high as 20,000 thousand feet. They travel slow so they are very visible for a long time."

They say on the site they are 100% environmentally friendly and introducing color tints in 2009... here come the boobies...

Really - it's just litter in the sky. Just because a paper bag is biodegradable doesn't mean we need a bunch of them flying around the valley floor at Yosemite.

Allie said...

Wow! That's awful!

Anonymous said...

Is this for real? Wow...just when you think it couldn't get much worse. Well, I can see protests from sunbathers and laundry-line dryers, especially in areas where a cloudless day is a long-awaited phenomenon! Sheesh!

Anonymous said...

Is there nothing sacred?? It just continues to get harder and harder to shield kids (and ourselves) from marketing hype.

Anonymous said...

I blame Michael Crichton. In a recent book, he included a global scheme to patent entire fish species,then genetically modify them to phosphoresce in certain patterns (in the case of the book, glowing in the shape of company logos). I thought it was absurd, but now I think maybe it's only a matter of time before someone tries it.

Anonymous said...

Here the company contact info. I'm sending an email today telling them that I will never patronize any business that launches one of these for my viewing pleasure. If I ever see one, the business being advertised will get a note from me too.

Flogos - A Division of Snowmasters
11054 County Road 71
Lexington, AL 35648
sales@flogos.net

Crunchy Domestic Goddess said...

yay commercialism!! :oP

thx for the contact info, thatsmykid.

Anonymous said...

Visions of "Bladerunner" dancing through my head... (Now, it's been a while since I've seen "Bladerunner," but I seem to recall that the world of the movie was submerged in advertising.