Freaky Mail Day

[fenchurch]

Today, I received a first: State Farm mailed me an ad... in Chinese. I don't read or speak Chinese and I don't even have a vaguely Chinese looking name. I guess it could be argued that my first name is a form of Chinese money (my in-laws brought some back for me from one of their many visits to China) and my last name might possibly sound like it could be Chinese, or at least from somewhere in Asia... but this is printed material, so I'm not sure where the correlation might be. It also seems like a great big waste of money to be cold-mailing out Chinese language ads to the population at large, in hopes of hitting the relatively small number of households that would be able to understand it. Color me flumoxed.

Also included in today's mail call... the My Twinn catalogue. I have no clue how I got on their mailing list, since we have no children and, other than action figures, I really can't stand dolls. Even worse, I happen to think these "My Twin" dolls are incredibly creepy... I mean, have you seen these things? Essentially, the company sells dolls that are designed to look exactly like the child they're intended for and, no offense to anyone who loves these them or may have bought one for a child, I think the results are quite shudder-worthy. It's the stuff of nightmares.

And to further add to the creepiness factor... the company sells matching Mother-Daugher-Doll outfits.


This is the one on the back of the catalogue.

rackham's first comment when he saw it was "Oh, look... it's like a woman gave birth to a toy, then bought a toy for her toy."

And then there's this one:

It just weirds me out a little that they're all there in matching pajamas and that they've given the doll a cereal bowl of her own. It's a freakin' DOLL!! And the girl certainly looks old enough to be moving beyond "let's give tea to my doll" stage.

Or maybe it's just that I don't get the whole "doll" thing in the first place.

Comments

[saifai.livejournal.com]

Won't get arguments from me. Aside from Barbies, all dolls freak me out. These are just worse.

Actually knew a lady from church who used to dress her kids up to match her. Wasn't quite sure whether it was cute or creepy. Come to think of it, my sister-in-law occassionally does this.

o.0

[wildrider.livejournal.com]

State Farm did do a blanket "appeal to the Asian demographic" thing a while back, but it did generally go to Asian customers/potential customers in predominantly Asian neighborhoods (also black and Latino, BTW). (Sorry, that's my day job. I used to actually pay attention to what the company did... ;) )

[irfikos.livejournal.com]

i once received a packet of information addressed to me by name thanking me for my interest in becoming a jesuit priest. and a lot of other mailings about priesthood followed.

i don't recall wanting to be a priest since i was a kid. and then when i found i couldn't be a priest just cuz i was a girl, i refused to be confirmed and left the church.

so i have no idea where any of that came from. weird.

[fenchurche.livejournal.com]

That could be it... but our neighborhood is a pretty thorough mixed bag as far as ethnicities go. Who knows? But if nothing else, I got a bit of a puzzled laugh out of it.