When Good Grapefruit Has Bad Marketing

September 24, 2015January 28, 2021 / Ally Bean / 35 Comments

To your left you will see a photo of half a grapefruit, on a pretty white bread & butter plate, plus the label off the sturdy red mesh bag it came in.

This grapefruit, purchased at the local K. Roger, is not as humongous as many of the grapefruits available, nor is it as intensely pink in color as most of the individually sold grapefruits.

It was tasty. Easy to section. Juicy, but not overly so. With just the right amount of sweetness.

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But here’s the weird thing about this grapefruit. Just like Proust’s madeleines, this grapefruit stimulated long-lost memories from my childhood.

It reminded me of being an elementary school-age girl. Sitting at home in my parents’ warm kitchen while eating breakfast at the old, slightly wobbly, wooden drop-leaf table. Listening to the local AM radio “Quickie Quiz” show. Wondering what I’d be doing at recess later in the morning.

So considering the effect that this grapefruit had on me, I’m left wondering what marketing genius came up with the idea to name this product:

NOT your MOTHER’S Grapefruit.

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Putting aside the stupid inconsistent capitalization of the letters of the product’s name, if there was ever a fruit whose essence reminded me positively of my past, it would be these grapefruits.

And considering that grapefruits are pretty much the same old fruit now that they were 40 years ago, I’m irritated with the somewhat passive aggressive marketing message that I’ll be an old fuddy duddy if I don’t buy these particular grapefruits.

I understand that times change, but I gotta wonder how it could be that bad-mouthing grapefruit is the key to more sales. Does that even make sense?

I’ve Read 23 Out Of 35, But I Don’t Know About This Book List

July 24, 2015May 6, 2021 / Ally Bean / 45 Comments

Earlier this week Time magazine published 35 Books Everyone Should Read in Their Lifetime. I’ve added the list to the bottom of this post. The list, compiled from responses by Reddit users, attempts to answer the question:

“what is a book that everyone needs to read at least once in their life?”

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WHAT IMMEDIATELY STRUCK ME about the list is that out of the 33 authors, only 3 are women: L.M. Montgomery [Anne of Green Gables]; Harper Lee [To Kill A Mockingbird]; and Margaret Atwood [The Handmaid’s Tale].

Considering that the first two books are about children for children, and that the last one is about a society in which women are slaves, this list doesn’t lend credence to the idea that in 2015 we are living in a post-feminist society.

You with me here?

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I THINK THAT WE can all agree, to use the article’s words, that: “Books have the profound capacity to stay with us for the rest of our lives.”

This is good + positive.

But by accepting this premise I think that it becomes even more important to turn a critical eye toward all the possible books that one can put on a list such as this. If one is going to have these books with him or herself forever, one must be discerning.

N’est-ce pas?

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TO MAKE THE LIST more balanced, I’d suggest that we include &/or replace on it, at a minimum, the following books written by women:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
My Antonia by Willa Cather
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

There must be more. Suggestions?

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Time’s List of 35 Books Everyone Should Read in Their Lifetime

{ bolded ones I’ve read – asterisked ones I’ve never heard of before }

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
The Forever War* by Joe Haldeman
Cosmos by Carl Sagan
Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street by Herman Melville
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Kafka on the Shore* by Haruki Murakami
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Animal Farm by George Orwell
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?* by Philip K. Dick
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
1984 by George Orwell

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WordPress Reader: So This Is What It Has Come To?

July 21, 2015August 29, 2018 / Ally Bean / 25 Comments

Opus the Penguin reacts.

LIKE SO MANY OTHER WP BLOGGERS, for the last week or so I’ve fussed around with my Reader* account. WordPress changed the thing and now it’s pretty whacked.

I’ve blogged hither and yon forever, so while I understand why people are upset about the change to Reader, I’ve shrugged it off. There are other ways to follow blogs.

For instance, now I’m using feedly.com to keep track of everyone until WordPress gets this latest kerfuffle under control.

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Bill the Cat opines.

BUT GETTING TO MY POINT HERE, as the above screen shot shows you, what I’ve found to be curious + hilarious about my current Reader account is that it tells me that I’m now following -11 blogs.

This, I’m sure, is a first for me.

Apparently Reader has taken it upon itself to carry out peremptory measures to make sure that I will not read the next 11 blogs that I think that I want to follow here in WordPress.

I’m becoming concerned about Reader. It’s getting uppity.

Truthfully, I have to wonder if when the computers rise up and take over the world, we’ll all look back on this moment and realize that Reader was a leader in the revolution against the human race.

Be forewarned, people. 😉

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* For those of you outside of the WP system, Reader is a way to follow WP blogs. It’s a free feature that involves minimal effort on my part to have access to a current feed of all the WP blogs that I choose to follow. In theory, it’s useful. However, in practice…

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{ It’s back! Images from Bloom County. More here. }

I Will Not Let One Tulip Get Me Down

January 28, 2015January 28, 2015 / Ally Bean / 33 Comments

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I bought a bouquet of 20 tulips at Kroger because I like how graceful tulips look in a vase and because a bit of cheerful color in mid-winter is a good thing. I put 17 of the tulips in a large vase and set it on our kitchen table.

Upbeat.

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Three of the tulips wouldn’t fit into the large vase so I put them in a smaller crystal bud vase and set the bud vase, on a saucer, on top of the chest of drawers in our bedroom. I liked how the 3 tulips looked reflected in the mirror on the wall above the chest of drawers.

Artsy.

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HOWEVER, a few hours later when I walked back into the bedroom I noticed that 1 tulip had given up. Cracked under the weight of blooming.

Sure it was still a bit of cheerful color, but it was not working with the other tulips to create a tiny uplifting bouquet. And I had the distinct impression that the Universe was messing with me via these 3 tulips.

But you know what? I didn’t care, so I left the tiny bouquet just as it was as a reminder that we all do what we can to make each day special & unique. In our own way. Regardless of what other people may want us to do.

N’est-ce pas?

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