Not that I have anything against Jason Lee, but I'm going to have to ask all readers of this blog to boycott his new show "My Name Is Earl". Fact of it is, someone's got to take a stand against the unholy marriage of text advertisements and speaker boxes:
Personally, I'm a fan of Jason Lee and perhaps his new show will rock enough to get me to tune in and/or Tivo it. But I seriously doubt it. Especially after having my page-flipping Sunday evening solitude so entirely disrupted when I came to this ad and turned past it only to jump at the loud sound of Jason's voice coming from straight outta nowhere and telling me "My name is Earl! Do good things and good things will happen to you! It's called Karma!" I quickly ascertained that the voice was not from inside my head but rather inside the page via a small speaker wired to a small pressure sensitive circuit board embedded in it.
Think I'm overreacting? Behold your future:
[W]hen I turned the next page Jason piped up again. "My name is Earl! Do good things and good things will happen to you. It's called Karma!" And again with the next page. And again. After the fourth "My name is Earl" I backtracked to the offending page ripped it out of the mag and then tore the guts out of it (pictured after the jump) to shut good ol' Jason the fuck up[.]
And, as Will Campbell, the intrepid periodical explorer who found the ad, notes, Lee's mechanical message is powered by three micro-cell batteries. Considering Entertainment Weekly, where the ad is running, has a circulation of about 1.6 million, we're talking almost 5 million batteries headed straight for the landfill. Maybe this show should stop worrying about karma and start thinking about Gaea.
