http://www.madcowculture.com/madcow-00021.html Sat, 25 Mar 2000 15:21:18 Dot Coming to Market By Mad Cow Culture The dot com companies are getting out of hand. No I don't mean spending $3 billion on a 30-second Super Bowl television spot. Or auctioning Pamela Anderson's chest implants for a tidy $1million-a piece. This is all part of the grunt and roar of capitalism. What I'm referring to is a new advertising craze: putting dot com names on cows. Drive through the countryside of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Nebraska, and elsewhere and you'll find cows with names like eatme.com, steermyway.com, butcherblock.com and many others. Perhaps the most egregious was found outside of Des Moines---buggermebadly.com for a plumbing supply company. I can understand the mischief associated with advertising but these cow ads border on bad taste-and would likely offend the most hardy in Times Square. For example, what are we to say about the tag-munchonmenasty-found on a Holstein outside of Topeka, Kansas. Or thevealdeal.com plastered on a schoolyard of calves, tethered to their veal pens, waiting for Mother's Day. What appears to have generated the most to date is the ad-udderlyuseless.com-for a taxidermist. On this subject we can learn from Canada. Genevieve Ste.-Marie, director of the National Museum of Science and Technology, issued an order to the Central Experiment Farm to stop the practice of giving cows human-female names like Elsie and Bessie. "Some people are sensitive to finding their names on animals. Ms. Ste.-Marie asks how a person would feel if she found her name on an old and ugly cow. Apparently, names such as Clover, Rhubarb, and Buttercup are still okay. Borderline cases such as Daisy will be decided on a cow-by-cow basis. Definitely out of the question are hag, crone, and bitch. These names, Ms. Ste.-Marie remarks, will "put you out to Canadian pasture for a long time." When informed of this development Darryl Carroll of Cows Are Coming to Market, the advertising firm that places dot com advertising on cows, said he thought the whole thing ridiculous. "Genevieve should read Language in Thought and Action by S.I. Hayakawa. He writes about confusing the symbol with the thing symbolized. And his book is full of Bessies. Anyhow, I thought the expression "you old cow" was a compliment. Darryl Carroll is enthusiastic about his business. "There are 100 million cows in this country, all waiting to be dot comed. Farmers love it. People seem to like it, though there has been a local meat boycott in Amarillo,Texas by a group calling itself the Church of Beef without Bull. But I see this as an opportunity. I've offered to do advertising work for them." Carroll is not content with cows. In his opinion there's a whole zoo population waiting to be tattooed. He has just begun to think about the millions of cats and dogs who should earn their keep. "We've been supporting these little blighters for too long," he adds. [...snip...]
