Something I've Noticed And A Possible Theory

If you've been Christmas shopping lately, you might have noticed a certain pattern of speech in a lot of retail windows.




It seems like a bunch of places are no longer using complete, coherent sentences and instead just throwing words like "Joy" or "Merry" or "Give" together.






My theory about this new practice goes like this: retailers shied away from saying "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Hanukkah" because they don't want to alienate anybody. But they also feel like saying "Happy Holidays" or "Seasons Greetings" is too common or pedestrian– something your local muffler shop would say– so they invent new expressions, using seasonal keywords to conjure up "SHARE DELIGHT" or "UNWRAP ENCHANTMENT" or some other new age-y nondenominational horseshit that doesn't mean anything.

This Is Too Good To Label As Just An "EADJ Mail Sack" Entry

This was brought to my attention by the nonfictional person Mig Ponce. It's an article in the April 2008 issue of Real Simple Magazine, which blows my mind that Mig actually read.


The article is about "America's Five Star Products," which scoured the best-reviewed items on the Internet. For music, they turned to the reviews on Amazon. Now take a look at that second bullet there.


"Looking For-Best of David Hasselhoff [Import]?" Now, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that could be a legitimately high-ranked CD, you might say, and you'd be right.

In honesty, what the fine folks at Real Simple Magazine had stumbled upon is this Amazon review page, which is full of hundreds of joke reviews of David Hasselhoff's terrible album. And I am proud to say that I myself had started the very first of these glowing, enthusiastic reviews back in 2001. Seriously.

What happened was I had been laid off and was working the third shift at Kinko's, which gets awfully boring at 3am, and I simply started writing joke reviews of David Hasselhoff's unbearable album to amuse myself. I made sure to sign off every review with the phrase "The song 'Hot Shot City' is particularly good."


Fast forward to today, where there are over a thousand ridiculously loving reviews of Hasselhoff's CD, all giving it five stars. And people have carried on the tradition of ending their review with "The song 'Hot Shot City' is particularly good."

Is the album that bad? Oh man, absolutely. Here's "Hot Shot City," just so you know how bad it is:



I myself haven't left a review on that Amazon page in quite a while. Amazon has since cracked down on how many fake aliases you can create to post a review, etc etc. But you are welcome to carry on this hallowed, decade-long tradition. Go ahead and leave your own, keeping this seminal album of his on top of the charts! Mig Ponce earns a special Mollusk award at the bottom of this website. ↓


The song "Hot Shot City" is particulary good.