I must have seen this billboard 5 or 6 times before I finally realized what they were doing…
I would catch glimpses of it as I slalomed other commuters in the breakneck race for Penn Station. Amidst the rush, all I ever really noticed of this billboard was the enormous “Remorse’ls” fudge rounds and the bright white text, “Chocolaty goodness without the guilt.” Seemed tongue-in-cheek in intention, yet just didn’t work. And to top off the ambiguity, fudge-covered remorse looks so delicious!
So when I finally left work a few minutes earlier and had some time to stop and take a picture of it for Gawking In Traffic, I noticed the real product in the bottom right corner…
“A heads-up. Starting in 2015, the new Second Avenue Subway will help relieve overcrowding on the Lexington lines. Overdue, but excellent news.”
When I hear the phrase, “Heads up…” on a subway, I tend to expect it to be followed with something like, “there’s something weird on that handle…” or, “that guy is rummaging through your bag…” or, “your leashed puppy is on the other side of the train door.”
Something with… immediate importance. “Heads up” is a need-to-know-NOW exclamation, often why it is shouted just before a poorly aimed Frisbee clocks an unsuspecting jogger in the mouth or a careening soccer ball kicked by an overzealous father takes a toddler clean off her feet.
Granted, giving someone “a heads-up” does imply you’re letting them know in advance, but I would venture to say that it is understood to have relevance to a more immediate situation. “A heads-up” 6 years in advance seems to warrant a more appropriate headline – something like, “Notice…” or, “By the way…” or possibly, “Sucks to be you now, but…”
The next time I have a 6’8” man’s underarm pressed over my head, a 5’1” woman’s excessively large, patent-leather handbag pushing my knees out the other direction, and a yellow-toothed old man reeking of alcohol breathing over my shoulder, I’ll do my best of finding comfort in this “overdue, but excellent news.”
I know most of you have seen this a million times, but the posts are slacking because I haven’t had any time to sit down and type them out all pretty. So in the meantime, this commercial always makes me happy, regardless of the fact that I’ve seen it a billionty times.
Wow. Such marvelous eloquence. The question now becomes which came first, the quote or the perfume? My guess is the quote, since the idea of being able to “fall in love all over again” seems to have been around a lot longer than that perfume could have been…
On a related note, as if finding the source of such a timeless quote in the makeup section of the mall wasn’t serendipitous enough, I found this melted puddle shortly thereafter on the platform at the train station:
I did not take this picture to say anything about the apparent misplacement of the apostrophe after “GET” instead of before “EM.” That only just occurred to me now… and that’s not worth a blog posting.
No, the reason I took this picture is because of that glorious tagline: GET ‘EM
“Hey, look! I’ve got socks for $1. You know what you should do? GET ‘EM!”
And of course every sign was the same, with a different dollar amount:
Sunglasses? GET ‘EM!
Handbags? GET ‘EM!
Mysteriously misspelled “name brand” hats? GET ‘EM!
