Deseretnews reports that Golden Palace bought forehead space on a woman for $10,000. We've seen forehead ads before, in commercials, in the Guardian, by the Cunning Stunts agency, on young firefox fans. All done with the same stickers used on boxers in the ring. We concluded the forehead hype had reached fever pitch, and honestly thought we'd be done with this by now.
Bot nooooo.
The super annoying Golden Palace .com are riding their wave of free press by announcing yet another inane Ebay buy. And the Deseretnews are playing right into their hands by reporting about it. Alas, despite - or perhaps thanks to - someone sending photographer Keith Johnson to the scene I can't believe it. Why not? Well look at the shot kids, its a sticker. Why, there are companies that broker in real tattoo ads out there, but this ain't one of them. Look at the image upper right, carefully now. Yes, the paper has been hoaxed folks. (much larger version of the same image)
Update 1 juli 15:30 Danish time: (read more)
Update 1 juli 15:30 Danish time: Friends at Metafilter are saying that it's indeed real and link to this video to prove it. (ActiveX and windows media req.)
However, the lack of blood or bloody tissue, redness or swelling and the fact that it's impossible to see anything in crummy wmv makes me still seriously doubt this is real. The last time GoldenPalace and tattoos were mentioned in the same breath it was a "pregvert", a temporarily tattoo that flashed Golden Palace on Elise Harp's pregnant belly. The last time a forehead ad was mentioned it was the SnoreStop sticker on Andrew Fischers forehead in that same USAToday article (which by the way, was also suspected for being a hoax of a sort but that's another story.). So, I'm paging snopes on this one.
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"And he causes all, both great and small, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark" (Rev.13:16-1)
Hallelujah!
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PermalinkThe Register has a bit on it as well, claiming that the tattoo parlor, SI Tattooing, spent 7 hours trying to talk her out of it. Seems a bit odd to me.
Also odd to me - $15K for a permanent face tattoo and advertising crappy PR happy GoldenPalace for the rest of her life - it is so incredibly low it's insane. It's obvious this stupid woman is getting taken advantage of, if this is a real tat. I'm so sick of hearing about GoldenPalace...I wish the media would just stop reporting about them already. It's old old old old hat by now. Enough with the madness!
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PermalinkRight, well I can't get that crap film to load this time around but I think I heard the number "7 hours" in there are well. In the deseretnews article they also write: "In his 24 years, he's turned away a lot of customers who want to get tattoos that can't be covered up with clothing. He and his staff spent nearly seven hours Wednesday trying to talk Smith out of it."
Right. Kay. So every article carries the same number of hours and other details.. Starts looking like a regurgitated press release to me.
It make no sense that a tat-artist would spend an entire working day wasting away money he could have made just inking a couple of dolphins on ankles trying to talk a customer out of a tattoo. The tattoo-artists that I know personally all have their own mind made up and a customer will never change it - not that they represent all inkers of the world. Either they do hands and face or they don't. They don't even discuss it, if they don't (which is by far the most common), they send you on your merry way. They might give you the name of someone who does face and hands. It's not up to the customer to nag their way to it, tat-artists make up their own minds. So I find that part of the stort strange as hell.
And like you I wish the quirky news areas of papers and TV would stop bending over backwards to become free advertising time for a poorly executed stunt in very bad taste. To top it all off, an unoriginal stunt too. Ebay must love it though as they get their name on TV for free all the time thanks to these stunts.
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PermalinkDate: Fri, 1 Jul 2005 09:26:25 -0600
From: Aaron Falk
To: Åsk Wäppling
Subject: Re: Fake tattoo-ad
I actually sat in that tattoo parlor for a couple of hours. I
watched the needle hit her forehead. I watched the artist
wipe the blood away. It's the real deal, as sad as that may
be.
Thanks for the e-mail.
Sincerely,
Aaron Falk
http://deseretnews.com
Now I don't know what to think.
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PermalinkFlip a coin. Either take the journalists word for it - though he isn't exactly working at the New York Times and we all know how Blair lied over there - or take the photographs "word" for it. If he saw running ink and blood we can assume they photographed that as well (some areas bleed a lot as any inked person knows, the face would be such a place), in which case the photo-editor is shite for picking the only photograph in which there is a darker square around the text, and shiny glare highlight+wrinkles in some letters. just like when you have one of thoe plastic temp-tats like the one sported by Mr Snorestopper.
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PermalinkI'm genuinely surprised that natural selection hasn't weeded out some of these people by now...
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Permalinkwell as you can see, she reproduced before she mangled her looks. ;P
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PermalinkWe're talking about Utah here, people. Bountiful, specifically. An isolated in-bred gene pool. This doesn't surprise me at all.
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PermalinkActually that last bit is really the crux of it all. If the media didn't give it any attention, Golden Palace would stop this stupid idiocy because they only do it knowing they're going to get free press and WOM for it. Maybe we should start a petition or at least boycott all that report this drek.
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PermalinkPardon the delay but I did receive another reply from the journalist who wrote the Deseretnews article (which seems to be the source of all articles about this interesting enough).
He did say that Kari, the lady with the new forehead, called and invited everyone to the scene. He assumes that Goldenpalace urged her to do that because you can't buy this kind of advertising for a puny 10k.
I thought that detail was interesting, that it's not Goldenpalace sending out press releases about their strange events, but the people featured. Since everyone "bought" by GP.com, from the cleavage tattoo girl to Kari, say something along the lines: "I'm delighted that the winning bid was by GoldenPalace.com. They seem to be innovative and fun." - I'm guessing they've been instructed in what to say, at least. GP*s motto is to not mess with a good thing, the first cleavage they bought was in Florida.
So far Goldenpalace ahs won all of these Ebay bids and gotten in the paper just about every time.
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