BorderEevilIII
11-24-2004, 10:30 AM
from SF Chronicle
ScentStories Up Your Nose
It plugs into the wall and plays "scent CDs" and features Shania Twain, somehow. Hail, Satan
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
The Rule of Gluttony goes like this: When a given society's needs become so ridiculously oversatisfied and oversatiated and just plain obscenely stuffed like a Bush daughter on Bud Light, it begins to invent utterly useless landfill crap no one really needs and that actually turns out to be dangerous to its health.
Enter the new Febreze ScentStories thing, an adorably insidious 40-buck appliance you actually plug into your wall and stick on a side table next to the fake flowers and the cat-shaped fringe lamp and then insert any number of $6 CD-like disks each containing five preprogrammed synthetic scents that, at the push of a button, will then "play" in sequence, just like a music CD -- only, you know, not.
Yay. Rejoice. Weep with a renewed sense of hope for humankind, because if there's one thing we in America desperately need, it's another goddamn appliance to do something a simple candle will do 10 times better for a fraction of the cost and a sliver of the insidiousness and none of the noxious petrochemical landfill.
You know Febreze. You have seen the ads, even if you haven't. Febreze is that frightening Procter & Gamble air freshener whose commercials feature perky sexually denuded khaki-pantsed housewives and cutesy overweight dads running around the house with a can or three of the heavily scented aerosol and spraying huge fogs of it into every room in some ecstatic fit of orgiastic bliss, and then immediately inhaling the misty cloud as deeply as possible into their happily toxified American lungs and smiling like they just discovered heroin and Cheez-Whiz and anal sex, all at once.
What happened? What vile marketing decision was made, and by whom, that said we must now progress from static mute little tabletop chemical-bomb air fresheners to more sinister, electronically activated Glade plug-in thingies with silly little built-in fans to full-fledged toaster-size appliances that require huge amounts of plastic and massive marketing campaigns and full AC power and interchangeable chemical-soaked disks?
This is the marketing strategy: each disc is apparently designed to somehow lift you out of your sanitized tract-home suburban kids-'n'-dogs-'n'-minivans dystopia and transport you straight to the Misty Mountains or the sultry Bahamas or the Brazilian rain forest or whatever, and, according to the Prozacian pastels-'n'-blue-sky ScentStories Web site, it all has something to do with Shania Twain, somehow, inexplicably, because there she is, her photo splashed on the pages for no apparent reason whatsoever and smelling very much like mediocrity and commercial bloat and fast saccharine death, and if her hollow endorsement's not a surefire sign of the apocalypse, baby, nothing is.
Complete Link To Story HERE (http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/)
ScentStories Up Your Nose
It plugs into the wall and plays "scent CDs" and features Shania Twain, somehow. Hail, Satan
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
The Rule of Gluttony goes like this: When a given society's needs become so ridiculously oversatisfied and oversatiated and just plain obscenely stuffed like a Bush daughter on Bud Light, it begins to invent utterly useless landfill crap no one really needs and that actually turns out to be dangerous to its health.
Enter the new Febreze ScentStories thing, an adorably insidious 40-buck appliance you actually plug into your wall and stick on a side table next to the fake flowers and the cat-shaped fringe lamp and then insert any number of $6 CD-like disks each containing five preprogrammed synthetic scents that, at the push of a button, will then "play" in sequence, just like a music CD -- only, you know, not.
Yay. Rejoice. Weep with a renewed sense of hope for humankind, because if there's one thing we in America desperately need, it's another goddamn appliance to do something a simple candle will do 10 times better for a fraction of the cost and a sliver of the insidiousness and none of the noxious petrochemical landfill.
You know Febreze. You have seen the ads, even if you haven't. Febreze is that frightening Procter & Gamble air freshener whose commercials feature perky sexually denuded khaki-pantsed housewives and cutesy overweight dads running around the house with a can or three of the heavily scented aerosol and spraying huge fogs of it into every room in some ecstatic fit of orgiastic bliss, and then immediately inhaling the misty cloud as deeply as possible into their happily toxified American lungs and smiling like they just discovered heroin and Cheez-Whiz and anal sex, all at once.
What happened? What vile marketing decision was made, and by whom, that said we must now progress from static mute little tabletop chemical-bomb air fresheners to more sinister, electronically activated Glade plug-in thingies with silly little built-in fans to full-fledged toaster-size appliances that require huge amounts of plastic and massive marketing campaigns and full AC power and interchangeable chemical-soaked disks?
This is the marketing strategy: each disc is apparently designed to somehow lift you out of your sanitized tract-home suburban kids-'n'-dogs-'n'-minivans dystopia and transport you straight to the Misty Mountains or the sultry Bahamas or the Brazilian rain forest or whatever, and, according to the Prozacian pastels-'n'-blue-sky ScentStories Web site, it all has something to do with Shania Twain, somehow, inexplicably, because there she is, her photo splashed on the pages for no apparent reason whatsoever and smelling very much like mediocrity and commercial bloat and fast saccharine death, and if her hollow endorsement's not a surefire sign of the apocalypse, baby, nothing is.
Complete Link To Story HERE (http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/)