Adverts, indignation and a little problem.

I had a bit of a laugh today when my wife pointed out this status from a Facebook friend of ours. I find it terribly amusing and not just a little bit ironic.

I will never again in my life drink a Red Bull. It is one thing to have fun with ads, but completely unacceptable to depict the Jesus, whom a large number of us on this planet consider to be the Son of God in such a manner.

Seems a bit like a Muslim sentiment no? Isn’t that amusing.

The indignation comes from a Red Bull advert. It seems the poor guy had his sensibilities insulted when he read this article on South Africa’s News 24 site: http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Jesus-ad-doesnt-fly-with-Catholics-20120313 and then watched the horrifyingly offensive video.

The Red Bull energy drink’s “Jesus walks on water” campaign should be cancelled, the SA Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC) said on Tuesday.

“We question the timing of the release of the advert – which seems to be part of an international campaign,” spokesperson Cardinal Wilfred Napier said in a statement.

“While the Red Bull adverts are characterised by their cleverness, we believe that Red Bull South Africa have overstepped a mark.”

Napier said the SACBC welcomed the halting of the campaign, but asked Red Bull SA to cancel it completely.

…

And now… for the horror video. Are, you, ready, for… RED BULL JESUS!

Well torture my ass and condemn me to hell. The horror. Red Bull Jesus.

Haha that’s pretty funny – I love it! I think the advert is great. Of course, I may be biased. Red Bull is, after all, the greatest drink the world has ever beheld.

You see, here is the problem. I asked ANOTHER Christian what he thought of the advert. And THAT Christian loved it. Both Christians talk to Jesus. Christian B reckons Jesus doesn’t have a problem with the ad. Christian A is royally pissed off.

So my question is… which one of them is lying? I mean, before approving it or decrying it… surely they bothered to get the opinion of the figment person deity on who’s behalf they are doing it right? Yea… right.

The religious will never cease to amuse me. Brain. Fail.

Pop-ups and Freethought Blogs

Feel the awesome Freethought Blogs

Freethought blogs, I love them all. Ok, almost all of them… or something and some more than others, but you get the idea. I read many of them very often and of course it’s where PZ is found now and god (heh) knows I enjoy his writing. And let me say this right from the start, I don’t have  a problem with advertising as such. I realise hosting servers costs money; I have… a couple of my own and I realise the hardware and bandwidth one needs to run high traffic sites like freethoughtblogs.com is substantial.

While I hate banner advertising, I can live with it. I don’t want to live with it, but I can and will because I realise that those banner adverts are paying for hosting and distributing the content I like to read. But pop-ups? I freaking despise pop-ups and the evil little bastards that have found its way onto freethoughtblogs.com drives me freaking mental. Chrome doesn’t block them. Why? Because the sneaky advertising agency makes them load on a click. So only when you click on the page does the damn thing load. Mental, it drives me that.

Anyway, it seems the script that creates the pop-up adverts on freethoughtblogs.com are served from a single domain at the moment: c5.zedo.com (I have no doubt that this domain changes regularly and I might put a little script together that polls freethoughtblogs.com to check for changes).

To block it I have added the following to my hosts file:

127.0.0.1    c5.zedo.com

It seems to be working for now – at least until they change the domain the script is loaded from (or if my shoddy early morning testing missed something…).

To the awesome people at freethoughtblogs.com, I’m sorry, but pop-ups are a gigantic pain in arse of epic proportions. Use ugly banners and bland AdWords and spurious DoubleClick and stuff but please, are the pop-ups really necessary?

Everybody else should really go around and have a look at the quality blogs hosted at freethoughtblogs.com, you won’t be disappointed. Except, perhaps, by the pop-ups.