One of the more annoy
dang.
OK, over here
Yo! Here?
Why, of all the f
There we go.
My apologies for that above mess to all you long-time regular readers catching up on the news in its conventional ink-and-paper format while enjoying your conventional breakfast cereal of Old Thresherman multi-grain high-fibre chaff, for long-time regularity.
We live in changing times, and just as many digital readers have already pounded back their third can of Synaptic Frazzle high-energy digital breakfast drink while waiting for some advertisement superimposed over the column to vamoose from the screen of their laptop, or iPod, or iPad, or whatever.
It’s getting to be that we content providers can’t get a word in edgewise. No, not “getting to be.” We can’t at all, literally, or edgewise.
Over here.
Or here.
Peekaboo, I see you.
Are these ads not becoming somewhat annoying? You go to the Internet in search of vital information, you click to the appropriate web site and within seconds it materializes: a three-quarter-screen overlay of some cartoon spokesreptile for $0 cell phones, the ad obscuring your view just enough to hold your attention for goodness knows how long, but not so large as to raise fears that you’ve lost the original background web site on emergency first-aid procedures in the event of human choking.
You scroll down, the ad follows. Upward, it tracks likewise. You cannot deke out superimposed ad. Forget any little X in the top left-hand corner that you might mouse-click to make the sub-screen vanish.
In the new Internet backwards world, X either takes you directly to the advertiser’s main page, or drops down a choice of alternative prompts such as the useless “Remind me later” or the brain-twisting “No, do not immediately refrain later on from not telling me more right away.” It’s like being married.
So you sit and gawk. Chances are, the ad fades away on its own.
Or not.
It could be like that spinning disc that lurks inside your computer and occasionally makes a cameo screen appearance in all its pretty twirling colors and locks up your keyboard. Pretty colored spinning disc disappears eventually. Most of the time, anyway.
By way of technological comparison, let’s all stare intently for the next 134 or 87 seconds at this 15th letter of the alphabet:
O
Do not DARE try to tell me that was 87 or 134 seconds.
Analog or digital, you readers spent maybe one-tenth of second staring at the capital O.
Don’t lie. You jumped ahead, even though I informed you, human being to human being, exactly how long to wait, which is far more courtesy than any swirling circle or Internet advertiser ever extends.
Most puzzling is the apparent delusion that block-out ads somehow increase sales and foster customer loyalty for XYZ Company. My guess is that the actual consumer response is along the lines of: “I hate you, XYZ Company, and forever will from this day forward, with a loathing most vile from deep within my guts.”
Some of us are old enough to have had grandfathers who remembered sandwich-board advertising.
An ad man would stroll city streets with two plywood boards slung over his shoulders. Front and back were painted the focus messages “Eat at Joe’s” and “Home of the 10-cent Pork Fat Platter.” Had the sandwich board man blocked the sidewalk, juking left and right to keep potential customers from their appointed rounds, he would have been punched smartly in the nose, and restaranteur Joe would have gone broke, wiped out with nothing left but a shoulder-strapped oak barrel to cover his naked body.
It was a simpler time, a gentle, civil era of wooden garments.
In conclusion, enough of the superimposed ads, already.
(You can stop gawking at the O now, Murray. There you go.)
Smoking on school grounds in Saskatchewan is illegal as of this weekend, and further restrictions are on the way, in cars with children as passengers and in hallways of apartment buildings. Health officials say the laws will protect the most innocent and vulnerable from the evils of second-hand smoke in all its forms.
Turning to other news in our overnight round-up, the Prairies woke up Friday to a thick atmospheric haze that blanketed the entire province.
According to Environment Canada, the smoke wafted in from two provinces away, second-hand from British Columbia.