daily prompt

Ad Vice

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Lies, damn lies, and ad sales: If one fact yields 20 further facts and you know them all, you are very smart.

* * * *
Our newspaper’s weekly circulation was a closely guarded exaggeration. The circulation manager knew the number, the editorial department knew it, and the advertising manager knew it. The newspaper’s circulation was about 2000 copies per week. And now you know it, too.

The pliability of the words “circulation,” “copies,” “newspaper,” and “week” was tested with each and every ad sales phone call. This is because if we told an advertiser the (correct) 2000-per-week number, that advertiser might have asked us to pay them for the honor of placing their ads in our publication; thus, our ad sales manager gave them a number ten times larger. More often than not, they were told that over 20,000 pairs of eyes “saw” any given issue of the newspaper. Actually, in a laudable effort at a specificity that would grant our numbers a sheen of legitimacy, they were given a figure of “21,000 readers.”
Read More

I’m No Expert

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Do you have a star or an asteroid named for you? Me neither. Nor have I discovered anything new on this planet of ours or in this universe or even so much as published a book that is “soon to be a major” anything.

Thinking on this sometimes leaves me feeling a little empty inside, so thanks for depressing me today, me.

There are many ways of achieving the immortality, or really, a slightly more famous mortality, that I desire. One of them, a Twitter bot named VanityScience, made its debut in 2014 and is still going.
Read More

No Cheating

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I wanted the ultimate magic kit when I was a kid, but as with so many things in life, disappointment lay in the fact that the magic kits grew more complex, more “magical,” only with higher prices.

Each of them included a “magic wand,” which was just a wooden dowel painted black, or, in the more expensive kits, painted black with a white tip, because a white tip equals classy. The photo of the kid on the magic box with the white tipped wand often showed the kid in tails and with a top hat. (I am sure that because of kids like me, or because of just me, the toy companies needed to add the disclaimer, “Hat and tails not in package.”)
Read More