Yin and Yang: The Bad News, the Good News

Uncool: 4.2 million toys coated in a chemical that, should a child do something childlike, like put one in their mouth, "converts into the toxic 'date rape' drug GHB," have been recalled.

Cool: A teenage boy in Australia jumped on the tracks and saved a stranger from being hit by a train.

Uncool: Both the iPhone and iPod earphones contain harmful chemicals in such concentrations that they violate California state law.

Cool: NASA recently published recordings made from Cassini's jaunt around the solar system, described as "eerie whistling, epic whooshing and warbling echoes." Here's what it sounds like near Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons.

Uncool: Our National Security Agency has pretty much copied the entire internet and all e-mails as well.

Cool: If you buy $3150 worth of pudding, you can fly free to Europe 31 times.

Netflix: Subjecting You To Repulsive Imagery For Profit Since 2004!

I'm shrinking this ad down a bit so you don't have to look at it full-scale (click on it if you want to see the whole thing), but I've been wanting to blog and object to it for awhile now.

It's a Netflix ad I see all over the internet -- this time on a Yahoo news page. In the lower right-hand corner are two disgustingly ugly old men, and I don't mean that in an "ew, old people are ugly" way, I mean scientifically disgusting to look at. The old man on the right is bordering on "horror movie" scary.

I want to know who designed and approved these ads, and what kind of creepy, manipulative psychology was behind them. Clearly, the image is so repulsive, your immediate instinct is to look away, and therefore be forced to look at the rest of the ad.

Why don't you put a picture of maggot-covered gangrene in an ad, Netflix? Or a nice little montage of bodies in the street after a car bombing? Our primal self-preservation instinct will immediately make us look away from those images.

Or -- here's a crazy idea -- why don't you just extol the virtues of your product instead? Kthxbye.

(EDIT: Someone at "Hacking Netflix" doesn't like them, either.)