Grade-A Bullplop

While waiting for the wretched printer to choke out my job, I clicked on a link to Laura Penny's Your Call is Important to Us: the Truth About Bullshit. The first chapter is available as a PDF download, and it's actually pretty good. The first couple of pages are largely execration, but get through them and some pretty good ideas begin to surface. It called to mind Judith Williamson's Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertisements, which was one of the most difficult books I've ever read and one of the most rewarding.

BTW, there's a 1970s ad Williamson discusses as a flop (a car posed in a tony section of London, hoping to reflect some class, but the car's just too...incongruous); I saw a very similar ad the other day (for a minivan this time. A minivan — !) in New Scientist. I wish we were as good as identifying verbal nonsense as visual. (FWIW, I have no principled objection to minivans. There are several arguments for minivans. I just don't think aesthetics is one of them. Unless you're an Aerostar fetishist or something.)