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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 03/29/91 -- Vol. 9, No. 39
MEETINGS UPCOMING:
Unless otherwise stated, all meetings are on Wednesdays at noon.
LZ meetings are in LZ 2R-158. MT meetings are in the cafeteria.
_D_A_T_E _T_O_P_I_C
04/03 LZ: Book Swap
04/24 LZ: NIGHT OF DELUSION by Keith Laumer (The Nature of Reality)
05/15 LZ: THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS by C.S. Lewis (Getting to Hell)
06/05 LZ: UBIK by Phillip K. Dick (Death and Hell)
06/26 LZ: ALTERNATE WORLDS by Robert Adams ("What If Things Were Different?")
_D_A_T_E _E_X_T_E_R_N_A_L _M_E_E_T_I_N_G_S/_C_O_N_V_E_N_T_I_O_N_S/_E_T_C.
04/10 **HUGO NOMINATION DEADLINE**
04/13 SFABC: Science Fiction Association of Bergen County: TBA
(phone 201-933-2724 for details) (Saturday)
04/20 NJSFS: New Jersey Science Fiction Society: TBA
(phone 201-432-5965 for details) (Saturday)
HO Chair: John Jetzt HO 1E-525 834-1563 hocpa!jetzt
LZ Chair: Rob Mitchell LZ 1B-306 576-6106 mtuxo!jrrt
MT Chair: Mark Leeper MT 3D-441 957-5619 mtgzy!leeper
HO Librarian: Tim Schroeder HO 3B-301 949-4488 hotsc!tps
LZ Librarian: Lance Larsen LZ 3L-312 576-3346 mtunq!lfl
MT Librarian: Evelyn Leeper MT 1F-329 957-2070 mtgzy!ecl
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 1F-329 957-2070 mtgzy!ecl
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
1. I think in my next life I want to go into advertising. That has
got to be a pretty good life. Yes, I know that advertising people
are under a lot of pressure supposedly, but, heck, you've got to
look at what they are under so much pressure to do. Ads have got
to be easy to write, judging from the results. You have to be a
real dufus not to recognize the kinds of formulae they have going.
Suppose you have to come up with an ad campaign for an upscale,
over-priced car. Well, you look at the music your customer listens
to. People who spend a lot of money on a low-performance, flashy-
looking American car listen to Frank Sinatra. Somehow Sinatra
represents integrity to people who don't look beneath the surface.
THE MT VOID Page 2
(Never mind how he got the part in _F_r_o_m _H_e_r_e _t_o _E_t_e_r_n_i_t_y--any
similarity between Sinatra and the Italian singed in _T_h_e _G_o_d_f_a_t_h_e_r
is purely coincidental. Anyway, that's what the film said.) So
you get a popular Sinatra song and you change the words so it says
something very nothing about the car and get Old Blue Eyes to sing
it. Something like:
My kind of car ... this Lincoln is ...
My kind of car ... this Lincoln is ...
Room to stretch out ... this Lincoln is ...
An engine with clout ... this Lincoln is ...
Quality in and out ....
Well, you get the idea. In twenty minutes I wrote an ad campaign.
Now watch someone steal it and get a $100-million account.
Actually, it is the cheaper radio local advertising that is the
real easy stuff to do. There are basically three ads you can do.
For a raceway, by far the most popular is "Sunday, Sunday." You
have a loud, over-bearing voice giving a message which is mostly
the word "Sunday":
"_S_u_n_d_a_y! _S_u_n_d_a_y! At Lickety-Split Raceway
_S_u_n_d_a_y! _S_u_n_d_a_y! _S_u_n_d_a_y! See Mad Dog Lieberman
and his funny-car customized monster trucks
roll over ANYONE who gets in his way.
_S_u_n_d_a_y! _S_u_n_d_a_y! One day only at Lickety-Split Raceway.
_S_u_n_d_a_y! _S_u_n_d_a_y! _S_u_n_d_a_y!"
Now if you have a sale you need to do ad copy for the classic, "The
Enlightened Traffic Cop." Everyone does "The Enlightened Traffic
Cop" if they want to push somebody's local sale. It is the Hamlet
of local radio advertising.
(sound of a siren)
Cop (angrily): Where's the fire, buddy?
Friendly Driver: Sorry, officer, I was just in a hurry to get
to Pennysucker's Storewide National Pre-Inventory Christmas
Sale. Fabulous bargains all over the store. Blah, blah,
blah! Blah! Blah! ....
Cop (now friendly as well as enlightened): Gee! Thanks for
telling me. I've got to get to Pennysucker's--just follow me!
(sound of siren receding in distance)
I tell ya, that one knocks 'em dead every time, which is about
eight times a year for eight different stores.
Now the one that I heard today was an ad for a store withing
walking distance from my house. It started, "Spring is coming.
Time to put away the snow shovel and those heavy galoshes. Think
spring. You need...." We get the same sort of ad every year at
this time. What we haven't been getting is winters. Nobody has
needed galoshes or a snow shovel for three years around where I
live. It's been four years since we've had a galosh sort of
winter. But what reason is that to throw out a perfectly good
THE MT VOID Page 3
piece of ad copy? It's spring so we gotta run the "winter's
ending" regardless.
2. This was found posted on rec.arts.startrek:
Subject: Klingon Cloaking Device Invented, and USA Has IT!!! (News
Report)
Article from 03/20/91 edition of Newark Star-Ledger:
"*** INVISIBLE WARJET -- A team of scientists and engineers in
Whippany, N.J., has designed a revolutionary custom supercomputer
that will allow pilots to fly undetected in a plane that could the
the United States' next-generation fighter aircraft. AT&T Bell
Laboratories' "Core Processor," or CP, is the heart of the aviation
electronics system of the YF23 Advanced Tactical Fighter being
developed by the Northrop Corp. and McDonnell Douglas. "This is the
Klingon cloaking device of the future," Paul Metz, Northrop's chief
test pilot, said of the Stealth fighter plane that is designed to
see but not be seen, alluding to a camouflaging instrument known to
"Star Trek" fans. The processor, a 300-pound, television-sized
black box, can perform 11 billion operations a second. The device
took 3 1/2 years to create."
Mark Leeper
MT 3D-441 957-5619
...mtgzy!leeper
Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive;
easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
-- Henry Peter, Lord Brougham
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