Dear friends at Discovery Channel and the New York City Transit Authority:
Thank you. No, really. Thank you and the horse you rode in on.
Consider this: It's a Monday, a grey cold Monday. Beautiful uptown Astoria is blanketed by a thick grey cloud cover that makes the whole neighborhood look silvery, but not sparkly. It's a matte silver; the whole neighborhood looks like a living photograph. It's getting colder out, but it's not frigid yet. It would be a lovely day to stay in bed for another hour, and then get dressed up in one's woolens and walk around and just look at bridges, at railroad trestles, at the dried kudzu-like tangle of what were lush grape clusters in August -- this is a big neighborhood for homemade wine -- at everything that makes this neighborhood such a wallflower, one that doesn't boast the showy charms of the Upper East Side or the flash of Soho or the hipness of the East Village or Williamsburg, but that looks ordinary until you look closely; then you see that matte softness seeping out of every painted surface, and you realize there's something more here, something you can't put your finger on, and then the wind picks up and you remember a stormy day over the summer, when, right before the rain started, a gust of warm wind ruffled a wall full of ivy, creating a longitudinal wave that looked just like a waterfall.
But no, you cannot spend the morning contemplating beauty, for it is time to go to work. So you head to the subway, realize you've forgotten your ATM card, turn around and head for home, tear your flat apart only to realize that the ATM card is in your pocket, you swear, you head back to the subway, you realize that in your haste to look for your ATM card you've left your subway pass at home, you swear again, you decide that if you go back home you will be much too late for work so you suck it up and buy a $20 pay-per-ride pass, you get on the subway, you sit down.
As you pull out your reading material, you realize you are in one of those spiffy full-car-ad cars, in which the advertiser pays for all of the ad space on one side of the car; all of the ceiling ads and all of the wall ads are of a common theme. Why, it's the Discovery Channel, hawking their new show POMPEII: The Last Day, airing 1/30/05! And just look at the ads they chose with which to hawk, to a captive, underground-bound audience, no less!
HOW DO YOU BREATHE WHEN THE AIR IS ON FIRE?
HOW DO YOU ESCAPE A BOILING MUDSLIDE?
HOW DO YOU OUTRUN AN ERUPTION THAT'S FASTER THAN THIS TRAIN?
WHERE DO YOU GO WHEN NOWHERE IS SAFE?
If you are not reduced to thumbsucking status yet, feel free to check out the wall advert, not five feet in front of you: www.thelastdayiscoming.com.
No, really, the horse you rode in on, too.
I do, however, salute the puckish mind in ad sales at the NYCTA who sold the other side of the car to Budweiser, who reminds us that Fresh Beer Tastes Better. Now that, dear friends, is synergy.