I am a fickle consumer who makes choices largely from research and empiricism rather than from custom or the spur of advertisement, but one cannot help being made an interpreter of advertising given its incessant bowwow. For example, here is a current advertisement that makes me think of retching. The product is a specialized light fixture intended to attract and kill flying insects within the home. Fine. Why would anyone automate the attraction of bugs to their food preparation surface, intending to collect their wizened husks next to the blender? STEM Light Trap TV Spot, Never Bugged

A feature of other recent commercials for the ready‐to‐drink cocktail brand On The Rocks has me amazed with an uncanny bit of legerdemain. The concluding seconds of each ad show the product being poured from its bottle into a large coupe. What fascinates me is how the 350 milliliters of content in the bottle appears to be inexhaustible; the duration of the pour creates an illusion of abundance, reminiscent of a magic trick one might see at an eight‐year‐old’s birthday party, but quite effective at conveying its message. It appears to me that the person doing the pouring has a practiced hand at drawing out the action to create the effect, rather than post-production shenanigans having looped the shot to extend its length. Clever stuff.

An exception to my rule of custom has its origins long ago, when a work colleague directed me to White King Water Softener as a wonder of science for use as a coffee pot cleaner and, gosh, was it ever. It was also, sadly, the product of a company that went out of business in 1987 and sold the label, itself gone. I have been nursing my last box for nearly twenty years now; I soak our coffee pot with it infrequently and use it for no other purpose, and have no idea what I will substitute for it when the last of it is spent, which will be soon enough. Made by the L.A. Soap Co. — a family business founded in 1860, the year Abraham Lincoln was elected president — the White King brand was a sponsor of the Chandu the Magician radio serial program in the 1930s, to which Stan Lee listened and would later use as inspiration for the Marvel Comics character Doctor Strange, which he developed with Steve Ditko.¹ The Los Angeles Times reported in 1987 that the company succumbed to competition and poor management. My reluctance to play out my supply of the product is purely nostalgic: it almost incontestably long ago chemically destabilized and is simply akin to dust. I made less of a fuss over the disposal of my father’s remains.

Laundry starch - Gilbert S. Graves, manufacturer, Buffalo, N.Y., ca. 1880. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2004666588/.