I love you all.  I appreciate every submission (and want more! MORE!).  But sometimes I get submissions I choose not to use, because I don’t like them.  It’s my blog.

Sometimes I feel like the mistake was so obviously made by someone struggling with English that I don’t find it amusing… I’ve made hideous errors myself in foreign languages.  More than once!

Sometimes I don’t think the “mistake” was a mistake.  Sometimes I’m just in a bad mood and I don’t want to, jeez.

And then sometimes I find myself genuinely puzzled about the error.  I stare at it.  I try to think about what the submitter could have seen that I’m not seeing.  I try to be ONE with the error.

This picture wasn’t quite one of those.  Veronica wrote only “Gag” in her email, so I wasn’t sure what I was looking for.

It’s clearly a tagline, and I know copywriters have a bit of creative latitude in things like capitalization and punctuation.  So I looked at this one, and contemplated whether it was really a mistake.

Then I realized something.  I was HUGELY UNCOMFORTABLE.  What is it about this picture, y’all?  It’s totally unnerving!  There’s a figure in the corner that might be a baby-doll in a carseat, or it might be a crash test dummy, or it might be a dead body, it’s just sitting there floppily… there’s a poster with hivemind buzzwords… and then there’s

and I just can’t handle it any more.  What is this, Volvo?  What are you trying to do to us?  I’m so confused.

3 comments on “I feel unclean and I cannot quite express why”

1. Bobby Tables

   January 30, 2012 at 9:14 am

   It looks like the waiting room for the Volvo “re-education” center.
2. DavidS

   January 30, 2012 at 12:18 pm

   Mmm, I see a bunch of weirdness there, agreed. There’s definitely some “uncanny valley” creepiness going on with the doll. The shirt looks misshapen, and there’s a cognitive dissonance between the slogan and the sad, lifeless appearance of the CTD.
3. Verdigris

   February 1, 2012 at 3:34 am

   The lack of capital ‘F’ could be forgiven if they simply had the decency to add a period after ‘life.’ The eeriness of the image is direct result of this unterminated phrase leaking its unbound soulstuff indiscriminately into the ether, like an unbandaged arterial wound in the English language itself.