Have you ever watched a show where the plot focuses on an ad campaign run by one of the show’s characters? This has happened to me a couple of times with my soaps. All My Children characters run a business and occasionally the pretend company’s advertising coincides with the real deal. Right now is one of those times. Recently on All My Children they’ve been mentioning the Campbell’s Go Red For Women movement, along with the mention of the color red and heart disease. Turns out this one’s for real!

February is American Heart Month. The leading cause of death in American men and women is heart disease. To promote public awareness about this killer disease Campbell’s is running the Go Red For Movement. Along with offering valuable facts about heart disease and a personal risk assessment tool, the Campbell’s Go Red For Women website  features three dresses created by designer Lisa Perry that the public can vote on. The dress that receives the most votes by January 30 is the one Toni Braxton will wear at the Women’s Day Red Dress Awards being held to kick off American Heart month. For each vote cast on the Campbell’s Go Red For Women website Campbell’s will donate $1 toward the funding of public awareness campaigns to educate people about this deadly disease.

Please take a moment to vote because it’s so important and could help so many people.

I saw an Adidas basketball sneaker commercial earlier today and was trying to remember what brands I have seen put commercials on television. I remember when Nike were THE sneaker and they always had commercials on telling us to “just do it”. They’re still around but I don’t see them on tv as much. Other brands I remember being popular over the years include Converse, LA Gear, Reebok, Nike, New Balance and Puma to name a few. And everyone remembers Keds. My oldest son is twelve now and is into World Industries sneakers. (Actually he calls them board shoes.) Tony Hawk makes sneakers. There actually was a time when a sneaker was a sneaker, and most of them would now be considered cross trainers but back then they were just considered sneakers. Now each brand has a bunch of different styles for each sport. I didn’t even know until today that Adidas golf shoes existed. What’s your favorite sneaker to wear?

Today I’m reviewing the blog Anime Fans Online, a 451Press blog about the culture that surrounds anime and manga. The blog is authored by Jason.

Anime Fans Online is on white, blue and gray two column theme. It took me forty clicks to get from the top of the home page to the bottom. The sidebar is very neat and tidy. Categories and archives are clearly marked and easy to find. Anime Fans Online displays a brief About blurb, but it doesn’t share any info on the author Jason.  Obviously Jason is a fan of anime because he’s started this blog, but who is he?

Posts are original content and are well thought out. Many of the posts review a show, movie, episode or dvd. Reviews often includes a brief summary as well as his opinion on what he’s watched.  The blog also touches on news withing the anime industry. The blog is loaded with pictures, which complement the reviews nicely.

If you’re interested in anime or want to learn more about it, this would be a good place for you to start. If you check it out please tell Jason that valmg sent you.

We frequently hear of news on celebrities on the radio, and we see that news on the internet, in newspapers and on television. I found myself thinking this morning about people on other career paths that have to interact with these celebrities in order to make a living. Let’s take a Hollywood real estate agent for example. I can’t imagine what they must go through. They have to deal with a star if they’re working with them on the purchase or sale of a house, which probably isn’t always easy. And what about someone with their head on straight looking to buy a house, not necessarily even a celeb. Their real estate agent had better do a good job of preparing them for a future of press and flashbulbs, and newsvans parked out in front. The more I thought about it the more I knew that that could never be the career for me.

Nascar Angels is a show where they pick a deserving person each week who needs their car fixed. the mission of the show, now in its second season, is to help people, fix cars and promote car care awareness. The show is hosted by my favorite Nascar driver of all time Rusty Wallace, along with cohost Shannon Wiseman. It was recently announced that the Universal Technical Institute has signed on as a major sponsor of the TV show. UTI wants to include another focus, introducing viewers to careers in automotive technology.

I have noticed lately that both Moen and Delta are the only fixture companies that I’ve seen place commercials on television. Is this like a Ford Chevy battle between the faucets? They’re both pretty big names. I envisioned my own fixture commercial today and here’s what happened. A Moen hand sprayer was in one corner of a boxing ring and a Delta sprayer was in the other. Just as they were getting ready to start duking it out the announcer, WWE style, said an upstart contender was entering the ring and then the screen showed a Hansgrohe faucet. When Moen and Delta couldn’t spell Hansgrohe, they jumped over the ropes and out of the ring.

It’s come out that the masseuse that found Heath Ledger’s unresponsive body called MaryKate Olsen not once, but twice, before calling 911 from Ledger’s cell phone for help. My mind is totally boggled trying to figure out what the reasoning for this could be. It really doesn’t matter what their relationship had been in the past or was at the time, it just doesn’t make sense. It was reported in the news today stated that a period of twenty six minutes lapsed between the first call to MaryKate and the 911 call. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened had 911 been called earlier. More will be known if the tissue and toxicology can come up with a tight time frame for the actual death.

Lately I have been seeing celebrities doing advertisements on television pushing different products. The ones I’m seeing frequently have a common message - they all seem to be different forms of insurance or health products targeted at seniors. All of these companies seem to be offering a low life insurance rate or health supplies. Now I’m wondering why well known celebrities have taken to selling stuff like this. Do they all need the money that badly?

Are you wondering who will be running ads in this year’s Super Bowl? I was watching the news on a New York ABC affiliate and Bill Weir was doing a piece on the concept of a Presidential candidate running a Superbowl ad. He quoted ads for this year’s Bowl as costing $100,000 per second. Wow! He discussed how that type of money could buy hundreds of television ads in major markets, and how ads could be tailored to meet different demographics. But, he did point out a fact that I didn’t know. You may or may not remember in the 2006 Superbowl, the company Godaddy ran an ad where a woman in a courtroom lost part of her shirt. Well, apparently Godaddy spent half of their annual advertising budget on that one ad spot. Godaddy announced that at one week later their global market share was up 56%. Weir closed with the thought that if a candidate backed a sports team, it should be the winner. I’d never thought about a candidate in a political race advertising in the Superbowl before, but I sure would be curious to see what one would come up with if they did.

I took my son to the Verizon store a couple of days ago. We put our name into the computer to be put onto the list of people waiting for a rep and browsed the store. Over near what I call the tv phones (by that I mean cell phones that you can watch tv on), they had a huge tv phone display with a working tv in it hanging from one of the walls. I found two things very interesting about the trip to this store. This giant tv phone was one of them. My son wanted to know if you could really buy a phone with a tv like that for your home, and when we got up to the sales desk he did ask the rep that question. It was then that I noticed the second interesting thing about the store. I looked across the counter onto the sales desk and that’s when I noticed that the Verizon store used cisco telephones inside the store. Now why wouldn’t they use Verizon business phones in the store?