Recently, I found myself in the subterranean pedestrian passages of Crystal City, a place I don’t wander too often. There, you will find dozens of advertisements for tech firms and government contractors, including these:

The ads, for an outfit called White Oak Technologies Inc., seem to be intended to recruit software engineers. They depict a fellow whose name seems to be Jeremiah, who likes to dress up in traditional ninja garb and play alone in the woods with his sword. White Oak Technologies seems to think this will convince software engineers to work for them based on the following logic:

(a) Jeremiah is a crazy weekend ninja, THUS
(b) Jeremiah must be a interesting dude, THUS
(c) Jeremiah must have an interesting job, AND
(d) Jeremiah works at White Oak Technologies Inc., THUS
(e) All jobs at White Oak Technologies Inc., must be interesting, THUS
(f) You should work at White Oak Technologies Inc.

For some reason, that’s not what I get from this. (NB: I am not a software engineer.) Rather, I submit the follow logic:

(a) Jeremiah is a crazy weekend ninja, AND
(b) Crazy weekend ninjaism results from an unfulfilling work life, THUS
(c) Jeremiah has an unfulfilling work life, AND
(d) Jeremiah works at White Oak Technologies Inc., THUS
(e) All jobs at White Oak Technologies Inc., must be unfulfilling, THUS
(f) You should not work at White Oak Technologies Inc.

Or another possibility:

(a) Jeremiah is a crazy weekend ninja, AND
(b) Crazy weekend ninjas own swords, THUS
(c) Jeremiah owns a sword, AND
(d) People who own swords are liable to bring them into work, AND
(e) Jeremiah works at White Oak Technologies Inc., THUS
(f) Jeremiah is liable to bring his sword into White Oak Technologies Inc., THUS
(g) You should not work White Oak Technologies Inc.

And then there’s this:

(a) Jeremiah is a crazy weekend ninja, AND
(b) Many nerds love ninjas, AND
(c) Many software engineers are nerds, THUS
(d) Many software engineers love ninjas, THUS
(e) Many software engineers will love Jeremiah, AND
(d) Jeremiah works at White Oak Technologies Inc., THUS
(f) You should work at White Oak Technologies Inc.

Has anyone else noticed smirk-inspiring ads for the new drug AcipHex? On the commercials, the name is pronounced, “Ass Effex.” Do the drug companies make up homophonic names for new pills on purpose? AcipHex will certainly stick with me more than Reglan or Nexium.

You know the fifty-color fliers and postcards good neighbors leave on your windshield? The ones inviting you to those exclusive afterhours parties and special events? The ones that would make Luther Campbell nod in approval?

While I’m not sure who actually responds to this spam and goes to these things, I do know that they constitute an annoyance. How many of these cards have I tossed into the backseat of my car? Too many!

It’s not a shock that people have complained. Southwest residents have been up in arms over them for a while. They’ve started calling them “Booty Cards.” Kinda perfect.

And they got Councilmember Tommy Wells‘ attention. After months of effort, Wells—along with the D.C. attorney general’s office—has been able to at least banish one company from distributing them. Wells, in a press release, calls this a “partial victory” for Southwest residents—and D.C. citizens in general.

Although he considered them pornographic, Wells knew he couldn’t fight them on indecency issues. Instead, his office went after the company over the trash they produce. A smart move!

-”This is just one battle in a much larger effort,” explains Wells’ Chief of Staff Charles Allen.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re reading this blog post, we want to see you tomorrow night.

You’re invited to celebrate the Best of the Nation’s Capitol at Washington City Paper’s Best Of D.C. Ballot Party at Lounge 201.

Here’s what you get: Free drinks, free hors d’oeuvre, free conversation with other people who you may or may not like but you can at least make fun of. Plus: An opportunity to cast your votes for the best places and people in the DC Metro Area. Votes for the Best Of D.C. will be tallied on March 27th and the results will be showcased in the City Paper Best Of Issue, hitting newsstands April 18th! Best Of categories include Food and Drink, Arts and Entertainment, Goods and Services, and People and Places.

Categories, shmategories–just come and have a beer and exercise your right to vote.

Best Of D.C. Ballot Party
THIS THURSDAY! March 20th, 6-9p.m.
Lounge 201, 201 Massachusetts Ave. NE (at 2nd and D Street NE–one block from Union Station)

Free drinks!
Free food!
Free balloting!

or vote early online and have more time for the free drinks and food.

Questions? Email aaustin [at] washcp.com.
See you there.

This morning, staffers at the Washington Post are meeting with Publisher and CEO Bo Jones.  The get-together is being called an “expanded staff meeting,” and agenda item No. 1 is a rumored round of early retirement offers. Several well-placed Post sources say that Jones is likely to announce that the buyouts are on their way, the better to bring the Post’s newsroom in line with ever-shrinking ad revenues.

Details at this point are scarce. In recent weeks, Posties have pressed their managers for particulars on what’s to come, but with little success. Queries sent yesterday to Managing Editor Phil Bennett and to Washington Post Co. spokesperson Rima Calderon fetched no response.

This would be the third round of early retirement offers that the Post has carried out in the ’00s. The first came in 2003 and reduced the payroll by 54 staffers; the second, in 2006, netted about 70. Combined with attrition and a shitcanning here and there, the reductions have put the total Post newsroom staff at about 800.

Word around the newsroom is that another 60 must go. With an enormous pension fund, buyouts appear to be the staff-reduction tool of choice, yet again. The advantages of early retirement offers are several, including the important PR distinction that the Post isn’t doing layoffs.  Also, the buyouts tend to be very generous–the last one essentially gave departing folks two years’ salary for no work–and so no one ends up carping about a stingy employer.

But early retirement offers are a blunt tool that leaves upper management powerless to mold their staffs. They’re offered to the paper’s senior people without regard to talent or productivity. Really good reporters and editors who have great prospects with other employers have the most incentive to leap; lame reporters and editors, not so much.

The thought process behind this newish Gap ad is sadly transparent. The designers were obviously going for some sort of twee look of blithe ignorance. Isn’t that what’s popular with all the hipsters these days? Standing by a bus stop with your toes pointed in, pigeon style, maybe slouching a little. You definitely wouldn’t want to smile. Maybe just look confused?

I’ve been battling a nasty cold for the last several days and during that time I’ve done a little TV-watching. (I’m not an anti-tube snob, I just usually avoid it entirely in order to prevent any time-destroying Law & Order jags.) I don’t know if it’s me getting older, but the women in ads for anti-aging magical potions sure seem to be getting younger. I started to wonder if I, still sub-30 for a few more moments, was within the target audience for wrinkle-diminishing serums and tightening creams. If so, would my peers fall for it? Recently, a friend who’s four years younger than me confessed that some of her friends already swear by several serums and creams meant for their mothers. I can’t believe they actually think it will stave off the inevitable. Can it? Joking! I can’t imagine how all the peels and acids would help preserve young skin in the long run. When I was a toddler, I stayed during the day with an Egyptian woman and her children. After wash-ups the mom would dab our cheeks with plain old Vaseline. I don’t think you need to get much more complex than that.

From Agent Steinz via Hogs Haven, I give you the latest product of the Eastern Motors marketing machine, the production of which was chronicled right here on City Desk:

The billboards advertising dead bodies are gone at the Metro Center station, replaced with spots for West Virginia, where the only thing without a pulse is the economy.

The advertising campaign “West Virginia is Calling” has plastered posters touting the state next door as a vacationland escape from city living.

I’ve only been to West Virginia once, a year or so back, but the posters at Metro Center bring back as different, more stereotypical, remembrance of the “wild and wonderful” state.

I had been living in the South for a couple years when I traveled to McDowell County to report a story about a high school that had won a string of 10 state basketball championships before the mines closed and took the school with them.

After a three-hour drive from Southwest Virginia, a photographer a year shy of retirement and I arrived in a depressed former coal town. First thing, we ran into a middle-aged guy leaning on his pickup, waiting for his wife to get out of the health clinic. I asked about the team. He said he wasn’t living there when the Blue Demons packed the school gym with fans.

Aside from the three of us, the streets were empty. Having grown up in an economically depressed manufacturing town in Michigan, I knew where to find locals who’d be willing to reminisce. “Where’s the bar,” I asked.

The man smiled. “Why you want a drink? I’ve got some of the local brew,” he said, at least as I remember it.

Before I could respond, the man reached deep behind the Chevy’s bench seat and came out with a Mason jar filled with clear liquid. He unscrewed the top and handed it to me and smiled. Two years in the South, and here, before noon, finally it was—a Yankee’s chance to imbibe the local brew, a chance to pencil off the square marked moonshine. I was already formulating the story for friends back home.

My experience with odd liquors up to that point has been limited to Everclear as a teenager in Canada, soju doped up with bear gallbladder in Korea, and some clear liquor in a bottle filled with snakes while on vacation in Vietnam.

Needless to say, I wasn’t expecting much pleasure from the Mason jar. But I’ve got manners. Like in church, when a man offers you the cup, you drink from it, regardless of the looks of the guy who lipped it before you.

I leaned the jar back to my lips expecting a turpentine sensation going down. But the liquid hit the lips lightly and rolled back easy, not like water, but not like fire either. I’ve always had a hard time calling liquor “smooth,” but that’s the word for stuff in that jar.

At Metro Center, the posters show people gambling, rafting, riding horses, enjoying all those things you can’t do in the city. And all that’s all fine. But don’t forget the fine local brew.

Big news from today’s taping of the next generation of Eastern Motors Commercials, at least for those who don’t mind the misuse of “big” and “news”:

Out: Sean Taylor, Carlos Rogers, Brendan Haywood
In: Chief Zee

The new spots, which will feature Skins Jason Campbell, Antwaan Randle El, Santana Moss, and fresh Raven Willis McGahee lip-synching the used car chain’s fabulous jingle and mingling with a $400,000 Lamborghini and equally costly Rolls-Royce, were filmed at a desolate former Hyattsville outlet of the Easterns Automotive Group chain. (For the confused: the car company’s corporate name is Easterns; the dealerships are called Eastern.)

Easterns says Clinton Portis, who took over for LaVar Arrington as the lead lip-syncher last season, is still part of the commercial family, but was out of town and unavailable for the shoot. Anybody suggesting that Portis’s no-show was linked to his fear of being dogged about the Michael Vick situation would surely be barking up the wrong tree.

Chief Zee, the durable Skins mascot best known for the beatdown he took from Philly fans during a Monday Night Football game at Veterans Stadium, was brought in instead of another active Redskin after Easterns was told by the marketing arm of the NFL Players Association that it had could not have more than five NFL players under contract without paying a $250,000 licensing fee.

Moss and Randle El danced around while the theme song played as if it was their favorite track. But the Chief, wearing his standard red-velvet-looking ensemble topped off by a feathered headdress that’s gotta come damn close to violating hate-crime statutes, needed cue cards to get through the “Your job’s your credit!” portions of the taping.

The used car chain Eastern Motors has long had the greatest local commercials. But things haven’t turned out so well for the local superstars who have appeared in those fabulous ads to lip-synch long to the fabulous jingle: “At Eastern Motors/Your job’s your credit.”

Original spokesmodels LaVar Arrington and Laveranues Coles both left Redskins Park angry and wounded. Now Eastern’s current crop of endorsers has hit its own rough patch: Brendan Haywood left town and took the name plate off his locker immediately after the Wizards final playoff game. His days of playing for Eddie Jordan are probably done. Sean Taylor didn’t show up for the Redskins’ recent minicamp, and Joe Gibbs confessed he didn’t even know how to get in touch with the player.

And, ahem, Clinton Portis recently gave perhaps the dumbest-ass interview in Skins history. Talking to an Eastern Virginia TV station during the Redskins Beach Blitz, Portis basically said that whatever Michael Vick wants to do with his dogs—including putting them in fight-to-the-death brawls with other dogs for gambling purposes—is fine with Portis and should be fine with everybody.

Appearing in all those commercials obviously got Portis very comfortable in front of the camera. Or maybe he’s just another casualty of the Eastern Motors Curse.

The trend of big, glossy city mags targeted at the super-super-rich is among the more hilarious trends in publishing. With nary a nod to journalism, the mags plug a different product in every inset box, every graph, every nook of “editorial” content. A good example is the March ‘07 edition of DC, which is published by Modern Luxury LLC. One feature: “Liberty Belle: Express your fashion freedom with heavenly looks from Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Jacobs and Stella McCartney.” What you get in this piece is a series of photos of models in haute fashions. They are dressed in the types of outfits that have never, even been seen on a D.C. street.

The best moment in this issue, however, comes in the Publisher’s Note. Now, notes from publishers and editors traditionally boast about the editorial content of a publication and thank readers for their devotion. Not in DC. In his note, Peter Abrahams speaks about buying a home and settling in. Then comes the plug: “[T]he house was finally ours and time to make it our home. We’d learned from our mistake of not calling in the pros before and quickly hired an interior designer, someone as quick and nimble as Lori Graham, the decorator whose home/office we feature this month.”

Flip to that feature and find, among other insanely priced items, “side tables and white chairs from Sixteen Fifty Nine. Round mirror by Powell and Bonnell, carpet and throw pillows all from Timothy Paul Carpets + Textiles….”

Just who are the people who are supposed to dig this mag? Do you know any of them?

Daybreak, an ABC drama starring Taye Diggs, was axed from the network’s lineup in early December, but the series still lives on—deep under G Street NW.

In the Metro tunnel between the Gallery Place and Metro Center stations, an ad for Daybreak remains as a reminder of Diggs’ struggle to transition from movies to television. Hung inside of a lighted box, the ad is one of only two “tunnel ads” in the entire system.

Because swapping out tunnel ads is more complicated than, for instance, ripping a poster off of a bus shelter, the Daybreak ad will remain up until late February. Cathy Asato, spokesperson for Metro, says that in order to switch out tunnel ads, “track rights” are required. “It means you can have access to the tracks to take down ads and install new ones,” she says.

Because working on the tracks is dangerous, Metro prefers that old ads be removed and new ones be put up at the same time. So the Daybreak ad will remain up until ABC’s ad space expires. It’s slated to be replaced by a Microsoft advertisement.

“It’s a little unfortunate Daybreak was canceled,” says Asato, but she adds that having the ad up is still beneficial for ABC. “They still have their corporate name out there, which is bringing recognition to the corporation.”

Boise State’s spectacular victory over Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl Monday night was more than an instant classic, a rebuke of the BCS system, and a reaffirmation of hope and beauty. It was also the first real test of how ingrained George Mason University has become in the sports lexicon.

Since this March, just about every little team (or player) that could—or even might—has invoked comparisons to the Patriots’ incredible run to the Final Four. When Trinidad and Tobago tied Sweden in this summer’s World Cup, they were branded the George Mason of the soccer tournament. Kentucky Derby longshot Platinum Couple’s owners decided to race him on the reasoning that “if George Mason can do it, why can’t we?”

Well, because there’s a difference between a longshot and an underdog. That’s why even though George Mason could do it, Platinum Couple, Trinidad and Tobago, and all the other Mason wannabes couldn’t. But Boise State could. Like George Mason, the Broncos were articulate, good-humored overachievers with a killer instinct, led by an imaginative, gutsy, and principled coach (who sent a senior player back to Boise for violating curfew).

Commentators have rightly compared Boise State’s achievement with George Mason’s; some have even said that it trumps what Mason accomplished. College football now has its very own George Mason with which to compare future gatecrashers. But will the Broncos transcend their sport? Will Boise State eventually replace George Mason as the touchstone of choice when describing an athletics upstart?

No, thanks largely to a friendly gesture of goodwill (and serendipitously brilliant marketing strategy) from George Mason. Last week, the university took out a full-page ad in Boise State’s hometown newspaper, the Idaho Statesman, congratulating the Broncos on their season and wishing them luck in the big game. The ad, signed “From one Cinderella to another,” ran on Saturday, Dec. 30. Just about every media story that covered the game mentioned this ad, and Fox ran a short segment on it during the game. And each time someone brought up the ad, it subtly reinforced the fact that as sports Cinderellas go, the Patriots were the vanguard.

It all started about two weeks ago during the build-up to the Fiesta Bowl, when George Mason president Alan G. Merten noticed the media describing Boise State with the same kind of words as they had used during the Patriots’ Final Four run this spring. Merten, who has a heightened sensitivity for ascendant schools, decided to get in touch with Boise State President Bob Kustra to give his regards. The two presidents had a nice chat, and after a few moments of reflection, Merten called George Mason vice-president of university relations Christine LaPaille and suggested she put in ad in “the local paper in Boise.”

LaPaille designed the ad, got the thumbs-up from Merten, and a few days and several thousand dollars later, Fairfax had a sister city in Idaho.

Statesman advertising director Travis Quast was surprised to take an ad from George Mason. “It’s not unusual for schools to wish one another well, but it usually comes out of your own conference,” he says. “I think it was a very classy move for a university that went through the same grand thing of being a Cinderella.”

Merten had no idea that a spur of the moment gesture from one non-BCS school to another would generate so much attention. Since the game, he’s received dozens of calls and e-mails from people from Idaho to Iraq. “Yes, it was a great marketing success, but when I picked up the phone to call the president of Boise State, it was the farthest thing from my mind,” says Merten. “Did I sit down and think, how can we get our name referenced on Fox? Of course not.”

In fact, Merten didn’t even know Fox was going to run a piece on the ad until he was at home, about to turn on the television and received a phone call from his son-in-law in New York. “They just showed your ad on TV,” his son-in-law reported.

“Then I watched the rest of the game,” Merten says. “What a game.”