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Are you in good hands?
Dec. 1st, 2008 09:28 amAs a result of my wilfully limited experience with American television, and especially its adverts, which are usually the visual and aural equivalent of poorly-typed email spam, there's something that's been nagging at the back of my mind for a while. That something is the Allstate Insurance man.
Who is this mysterious individual? If the adverts are to believed, he always seems to be present whenever there's a road accident, just standing some distance away and observing the events. His presence doesn't seem to be malevolent - that is, he doesn't actually cause the scenes that we're seeing - but you'd still check your mirrors twice if you noticed him at the side of the road, wouldn't you? It would be a sure sign that a truck was about to ram into you or you were stopped below a portacabin on an elderly crane.
But his earnest, calm warnings whenever these things happen point to something more suspicious. You could just think that he had an unnatural Jeremy Beadle-like amusement in watching other people being injured or crashing their cars into each other, but if he's a normal human he surely can't be in all these places at once, or tell when and where a disaster is going to happen in advance. It would seem that the natural possible conclusions are that he's either a ghost, a Time Lord, or one of another race of ancient guardians of the universe who have been sent to watch the actions of mankind and warn of the future but are forbidden to directly intervene with the course of their fate. The way that he seems also to be able to manipulate time points further to this theory.
Or it could just be an advert, I don't know. Whichever way, this line of thought has now made me picture Malcolm Somerset at the end of 6 Days a Sacrifice, looking serenely down from the cliff top at the crater once occupied by the Optimology building*, and then wandering down to ask if they had nano-explosive detonation insurance.
I have quite a lot of jetlag.
* Sorry, I just spoiled the ending
Who is this mysterious individual? If the adverts are to believed, he always seems to be present whenever there's a road accident, just standing some distance away and observing the events. His presence doesn't seem to be malevolent - that is, he doesn't actually cause the scenes that we're seeing - but you'd still check your mirrors twice if you noticed him at the side of the road, wouldn't you? It would be a sure sign that a truck was about to ram into you or you were stopped below a portacabin on an elderly crane.
But his earnest, calm warnings whenever these things happen point to something more suspicious. You could just think that he had an unnatural Jeremy Beadle-like amusement in watching other people being injured or crashing their cars into each other, but if he's a normal human he surely can't be in all these places at once, or tell when and where a disaster is going to happen in advance. It would seem that the natural possible conclusions are that he's either a ghost, a Time Lord, or one of another race of ancient guardians of the universe who have been sent to watch the actions of mankind and warn of the future but are forbidden to directly intervene with the course of their fate. The way that he seems also to be able to manipulate time points further to this theory.
Or it could just be an advert, I don't know. Whichever way, this line of thought has now made me picture Malcolm Somerset at the end of 6 Days a Sacrifice, looking serenely down from the cliff top at the crater once occupied by the Optimology building*, and then wandering down to ask if they had nano-explosive detonation insurance.
I have quite a lot of jetlag.
* Sorry, I just spoiled the ending
