Monthly Archives: November 2011

How to sell your snowblower in New Brunswick

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
4

.

“After many reminders constant nagging much encouragement from my lovely wife to get the snowblower sold, I finally got off my butt and posted an ad on Kijiji.”

And that’s when some pretty amazing things started happening in the life of a Canadian man named Weh-Ming Cho. Cho lives in Moncton, New Brunswick (that’s in the pink part up there, about an hour’s drive from the 8-mile Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island).

Last Wednesday morning, he posted an online ad on Kijiji to sell his snowblower during the first snowfall of the season. By Thursday evening, his ad had attracted a whopping 130,000 views, as Cho wrote on his blog, The Blognostifier.

He was bombarded with emails about his ad (over 1,400 so far) — some from as far away as Sydney, Australia — but most of them, he says, were not from potential snowblower buyers, but from people writing to simply say how much they loved his ad. Continue reading →

Vintage ads we’ll never see again

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
gay-cruise

This gallery contains 5 photos.

In these old vintage print ads, consumers learned that “babies who start drinking sodas have a higher chance of ‘fitting in’ during those awkard pre-teen years” and that parents should “start babies on a strict regimen of cola and other sugary carbonated beverages right now for a lifetime of guaranteed happiness!” Continue reading →

Universal cholesterol screening for little kids?

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
8

November 11, 2011 was a happy day for Big Pharma. That’s the day when The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute issued new guidelines recommending that every child’s first cholesterol check should occur before the kid hits puberty, between the age of 9-11.  As the Wall Street Journal reported at the time, the guidelines also come amid broad concern about growing numbers of children who are overweight or obese (as about 17% of the little darlings are, triple the level from three decades ago).

These children, say those who wrote these guidelines, are thus potentially on course for diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and other serious health problems as adults.

With all due respect to the very smart doctors who came up with what amounts to a resounding high-five victory for marketing-based medicine, I feel compelled to ask:

“What were you thinking?”

Even though the new guidelines contain a mandatory cautionary note (“Drugs? What drugs?”) the corporate pharmaceutical windfall that’s implicit in them is worth celebrating if you happen to own stock in Big Pharma.   Continue reading →