Junk mail jobs

I guess there are printing companies that have gone out of business around the country, though with one exception I'm hard-pressed to think of any, but there must be some printing companies out there still doing good business, because day after day my letter-box is full of advertising material, all of it in colour, and some of it quite substantial. 

The printers probably don't in the least bit care that most of the junk mail that arrives in our house goes straight in the recycling bin. My wife glances through some of it, when she can be bothered, but for the most part it comes in one door of the house and goes out the other. I guess advertisers wouldn't feel so happy about this, but if they continue to use such an antiquated and costly system of advertising then I suppose that's their lookout. 

But the printing companies must be rubbing their hands with glee. Not for them any scruples about the fact that all this paper and ink is mostly tossed in the rubbish, or that it's hardly useful for anything else (I've occasionally used it as internal wrapping paper in a parcel). For them it's all income, regular and well-paid. 

Yes, we could put up a sign saying, No Junk Mail, but what would be the point? It wouldn't stop the endless flow of stuff being delivered around the neighbourhood. I suppose there's a certain economic on-flow from it all: the people who deliver the junk mail, for a pittance; the paper and ink suppliers, the marketing teams who put the things together, and of course the printers, as I've already mentioned. Each of these would fall over without junk mail. So you might say the true value of junk mail isn't advertising but keeping people in jobs. 

Getting sidetracked

While I was thinking about the matter of wholesale printing just now, I though how strange it is that while books are increasingly appearing in digital form, junk mail is just increasing, full stop. I guess there's a digital equivalent of junk mail - it appears in borders and columns and banners on our web pages, for starters, and is surprisingly easy to ignore.  But the curious thing I can't quite get my head around is why junk mail on paper should be increasing.  Is it because the long-established form of advertising is at a crisis point, and when crises arrive, the lemmings often start heading off in the wrong direction - like over the cliff.  The equivalent in junk mail terms is that instead of there being less junk mail there's more than ever.

At a tangent, for a moment, it must be pointed out that lemmings are much maligned in terms of being a species that jumps over cliffs.  Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I had the thought that it was a myth that lemmings commit mass suicide, and a bit of quick checking on the Net confirms that, on the whole, it is.  Many lemmings live too far away from the sea, for one thing, to go hiving off committing hari-kari as a group.  Those that do live near water are perfectly capable of surviving in it - they're very good swimmers, apparently.  The reason they swarm to a region that's not their home area, is because food becomes scarce when there's a large increase in the population; the tribe splits and numbers of them go somewhere else to live.  Makes sense.

Seemingly the Walt Disney 'documentary' White Wilderness in which lemmings were seen diving off cliffs, and which may be an important source of much misinformation about lemmings, was faked.  White Wilderness was one of the Disney True-Life Adventure series, which, rather than showing reality, often misdirected viewers by mocking up scenes that had more effect than the real thing would have.  (We see the same thing in reality TV these days.) The trivia section of imdb.com on this film, states: This picture was filmed in Alberta, Canada, which is not a native habitat for lemmings. They were imported from Manitoba for use in the film, and were purchased from Inuit children by the filmmakers. The Arctic rodents were placed on a snow-covered turntable and filmed from various angles to produce a "migration" sequence; afterwords, the helpless creatures were transported to a cliff overlooking a river and herded into the water. The entire sequence was faked using a handful of lemmings deceptively photographed to create the illusion of a large herd of migrating creatures. 

Now I don't know who wrote this, so it can't necessarily be taken as gospel, but you can find more information about it on the Wikipedia article,where there's some background to the discovery that something underhanded had taken place in the filming.  Further information about it can be found on the Wikipedia article on Lemmings, in which we learn that Disney and co weren't the only ones perpetuating the myth of lemming mass suicide.

This is all a bit of a sidetrack from printing and junk mail, but like so many of my blog posts, one thing leads to another and often the 'another' is a bit more interesting.  How many other nature documentaries are faked in some way?  How often is the urbane voice of David Attenborough telling us something that in fact isn't what we're seeing at all?  (See the paragraph about Attenborough towards the end of this article.)  I watched a nature film not long ago in which the narrator (it wasn't DA, for a change) insisted that some particular thing happened because evolution had decided that it should; and if it isn't evolution doing some mythical decision-making, then it's the species itself deciding that life as it is isn't good for the long haul and somehow making its physical features change. The fact that this isn't science at all but speculation is never mentioned: we all know that Evolution is the answer to everything so just throw it in whenever you want it to be the convenient explanation.

See, I'm getting sidetracked again...onto a hobby horse.

Photo courtesy of Sunday Mercury Net, where there's an interesting and positive article about lemmings.

Diet pills

The only time I come across a crowd called ConsumerPriceWatch.net is in relation to diet pills. You’d think with a name like that they’d be more general in their interest – or perhaps would be giving more focus to the consumer than the diet pill. But their subtitle is Source of Unbiased Diet Pill Reviews for Consumers!
Notice the exclamation mark.
Currently you’ll find they’re ‘reviewing’ Relacore. Interestingly enough, they actually don’t give it a rave review. I don’t know whether there are other Relacore reviews on the Net – I haven’t looked because diet pills don’t greatly excite me as a subject – but I suspect, if there are, they’re a little more positive than this!
Actually, having said that, I thought I’d check a little further, and in doing so find another site with a very similar name to ConsumerPriceWatch.net: consumerdietreview.com. plainly reviewing diet pills is big business (though not necessarily for the makers of the pills in question).
The scariest thing is just how many weight loss pills there are out there. The first of these two sites lists dozens. And the scarier thing is that none of them really seem to work. At least not for long. As soon as people go back to normal eating, the pills might as well not have done anything.
In the end these things may have a use in bringing weight down far enough to get the person back on their feet in terms of exercise and healthier eating. It’s the discipline required to go beyond that that’s the measure.
One of the scariest things I’ve seen on TV recently – sorry to keep using the word ‘scary’ – was in yet another one of the endless round of obesity programmes we’re being inflicted with. A grandfather had his stomach stapled, after he and his family had spent years eating junk food. He was pretty much at death’s door, couldn’t get himself around, and was in a vile state.
The scary thing was that when he got home, his family – teenagers and older kids – were all still eating junk food, and one of the teenage mothers was giving her baby pure unadulterated junk food.