Coca Cola – Dave's Gone By

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #91 (2/9/2014): SodaStream and ScarJo

click above to listen (audio file)

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #91 (2/9/2014): SodaStream and ScarJo

aired Feb. 8, 2014 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: http://youtu.be/rxtEvftNrTU

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of February 8th, 2014.

So many times in my Rabbinical Reflections, I am forced to take celebrities over my metaphorical knee and spank them for their misdeeds and maladjustments. Justin Bieber, Charlie Sheen, Ryan Dunn, Lance Armstrong – the list is an embarrassment of Richie Riches. I am delighted, therefore, to offer something different this week: a Hollywood star with a good head on her shoulders. She also has good shoulders and a great rack. But I come to praise Scarlett Johansson – not for the bubbles on her chest, but for the bubbles in her glass. She is the spokesperson for SodaStream, a company that helps you carbonate your own water, so you can make your own soft drinks.

Half-Jewish on her mother’s side – which makes her all-Jewish to me – Scarlett Johannson is one of the most glamorous actresses in Hollywood. She’s so hot, Woody Allen actually looked away from a 10-year-old to make her his muse. And she’s so in-demand, she can pick and choose what she wishes to advertise or promote. Her latest choice? Seltzer. What could be more Jewish than that? Only, it isn’t called “seltzer” anymore. It’s called “sparkling water” or, if you’re a lower tax bracket, “soda.” Back in the day, we used to call it “two cents plain,” but now nothing’s plain when you’re trying to sell it, and the only thing you can buy for two cents these days is one penny.

Anyhoo, in 1991, Peter Wiseburgh, a nice Jewish boy from Israel, bought SodaStream from Cadbury-Schweppes and made it the biggest purveyor of shpritz in the world. You don’t want to pay two dollars for a liter of Coca Cola? You don’t want all the caffeine and sugar of Pepsi? Can’t bring yourself to try that Mexican pineapple soda because, well, it’s Mexican pineapple soda? You buy a machine that looks like a mixer, then you get these canisters of carbon dioxide. In goes the glass of water, in goes the syrup, mix it up and voila – in three minutes you have a glass of soda … that would have taken you ten seconds to pour from a Coke can, but nevertheless. With Sodastream, you can control the level of carbonation and the amount of goo. Plus, you’re not opening a giant cola bottle that in three days goes flatter than Debra Messing in a sports bra.

So there is much to recommend in the home-made soda idea and the Sodastream company, which has factories all over the world, including three in Israel. And ay, there’s the rub. Two of the factories are in parts of Israel that the Arabs don’t think belong to Israel. Granted, the Arabs don’t think any of Israel belongs to Israel, but in this case, they’re specifically talking about the so-called “occupied territories” – land that Israel won, fair and square, in wars fought decades ago. I know I sound like a broken record – and for you kids out there, a record is a round vinyl thing with a hole in it that your grandparents used to play music on. Look it up. Anyhoo, I’ve said time and again that the Palestinians have millions of other miles they can live on, so if they feel oppressed in a Jewish state, they can get themselves a two-hump U-haul and move.

Still, they bitch and moan about Israel occupying land – it’s not “occupied,” shitheads, it’s annexed. And if you want Israel to bulldoze homes and let go of it, you damn well better give us peace in return. And maybe a few of those 70 virgins you’re always talking about, just to sweeten the deal.

One organization taking up the misguided cause against Israel is something called Oxfam. No, that’s not Gabourey Sidibe’s parents, it’s a non-profit initially formed to fight the war against poverty all over the world. Somehow, alas, the honorable mandate to feed the hungry morphed into a more vague “human-rightsy” sort of a thing, which slid into a political agenda and has now warped into anti-Israel propaganda. Oxfam wants people to boycott Sodastream because the factories are making beverages on land where the Palestinians should rightfully be making bombs. Defenders of Sodastream say the hundreds of Arabs who work at the company are well-treated, make a decent wage and have a life they could never aspire to beforehand.

So where does Scarlet Johansson belong in all this? Well, in my bedroom, if life were fair – but no, the actress was caught up in the controversy because she was an ambassador for Oxfam. I say “was” because last week she handed in her resignation. Why? Because ScarJo is also the spokeswoman for Sodastream. She even did a sexy commercial for them that debuted during the Super Bowl! She’s wearing a bathrobe and sucking on a straw. You don’t have to be Freud to know what’s really going on…she’s thirsty! For soda!

When the Oxfammished begged her to drop the company, Scarlet Johansson dropped them, citing, quote, “a fundamental difference of opinion,” unquote. That’s legalspeak for: “I’m Jewish, you’re idiots, the West Bank is part of Israel, Israel is a Jewish homeland, Sodastream are the good guys, and in the interest of international peace, I really should tweet more homemade nude photos on the internet.” Okay, I added that last part, but you know what I’m saying.

Ironically, the Scarlett Johansson Sodastream ad was nearly censored from the Super Bowl. Not by Oxfam or for any political reason, but because she mentioned Coke and Pepsi, and CBS crapped itself worrying that those monster advertisers would pull out if they heard their product being disparaged by the actress who played Natasha in “The Avengers.” The ad stayed, but the line was cut. I guess we know who has the real political power in this country…

But Scarlett Johansson, for being a mensch and standing your ground – that ground being the holy sand of Eretz Yisroel — I toast you holding a glass brimming with Sodastream. Mmmmmm good. Actually, it’s Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, don’t tell anybody.

Thank you ScarJo. This has been RebSolSol coming to you from TempSoBi, Great Neck, NeeYo.

–> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=27843

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #31 (12/4/2011): Coca Cola

click above to listen (audio file)

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #31 (12/4/2011): Coca Cola

Aired Dec. 3, 2011 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: Coca Cola

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of December 4th, 2011.

You know what the easiest job in the world is? No, not ranting on the radio, I don’t get paid for that. The easiest job in the world is selling Coca Cola. It’s been around for a hundred years, everybody drinks it, every grocery stocks it… You go into a shack in Malawi and say, “Barack Obama,” they look at you like you’re from another planet, but you say “Coca Cola” – oh, they start dancing around, they’re laughing, they want you to marry their cousin.

Selling Coca Cola is as easy as saying, “Hi, you wanna buy some Coca Cola?” Yes, you have Pepsi as a competitor, and those 99-cent, two-liter generic brands that SAY they’re cola, but we all know, it’s just Rustoleum with corn syrup. Financially, Coke might have a great year, or it might have an almost-great year, but really, it’s like asking the Sultan of Brunei at his roulette game, “Did you lose $3,000 or $30,000?” Either way, he’s not losing any sleep. Unless he drinks Coca Cola, in which case the caffeine will keep him up if the harem girls won’t.

So okay. Here is how you sell Coca Cola. You concoct it, you mix it, you put it in the bottle, you ship it from the factory, and you cash the checks. The beverage itself may have a secret formula, but everybody knows Coke’s formula for success – Step One: give people what they want and what they have always wanted. Step Two: Repeat step one.

Now, we all remember years ago when the marketing geniuses at Coke felt they had to justify their inflated salaries by doing something new. To be fair, it can’t be much fun promoting an item when you know deep down the marketing strategy you’ve used for the past ten years you could really use for the next fifty. And in the advertising and PR world, nobody gets a bonus for thinking inside the box. Unfortunately, in the real world, you know who thinks outside the box? Homeless people. They sleep in a box, then they go outside it to think. And you know what some of them are thinking? They’re thinking, “Shit, I used to be an executive at Coca Cola, until I invented New Coke.”

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? It’s one of the oldest sayings in the world, and if you think you know better, if you think you’re gonna prove the world wrong, get ready if you fail to fall on your tush into a cardboard box. Twenty-six years ago New Coke hit the market like a bottle of cancer, and it’s been an industry laughing stock – and object lesson – ever since.

So you’d figure the Coke folks would learn from their mistake. Red label, white letters, brown fizz, rule the world. But no, in the news this week was a story about Coca Cola using a special design for the holidays. Instead of a red background, they went with a white background and red letters, plus those cute little polar bears. All well and good, except the public took one look and said, “Wait a minute… is this regular Coke or Diet Coke?” Somehow the scientific gurus in the Coca Cola utility research kitchen missed the fact that white cans equals low-calorie equals tastes like battery acid. So people started bitching and writing to the company and returning the cans demanding the old stuff.

Weirder still – even people who were not confusing the regular with the diet, even when they knew it was the same stuff, some of them complained the cola tastes different in the silver can. Don’t ask me if it’s psychological or maybe the old red cans still have traces of cocaine in them, all I know is that it’s been another PR nightmare for Coke. They’ve had to go back and reinstate the red cans, and somebody in R&D is getting a lump of coal for their Christmas bonus.

Now, I don’t have a problem with innovation, but it seems all the innovations these days are negative ones. Ooh, let’s take a ten-ounce bag of potato chips and put only eight ounces of chips in it while charging the same price. American ingenuity at its finest. Or all these HDTV 3D television sets. You can watch a Pixar movie; it looks like you’ve jumped into their universe. However, almost everything else you watch is in one-D, low definition, so your fifty-inch Samsung has all the visual beauty of a hallway security monitor. And don’t get me started on airplanes charging you extra for a sandwich, more inches of legroom and a place to stow your luggage. America is innovating us out of house and home.

Again, it’s not as if the Coca Cola people started sneaking Ex-Lax into the formula. They wouldn’t have to, but even so. And it’s not as if they did something racist or dangerous or mean-spirited. They just wanted Coke to be part of the seasonal onslaught of merry merchandising. Skeptical people might say they had nothing to lose from the design disaster. If it worked, if it worked. When it didn’t, look at all the free, and not especially damaging, publicity they got. Maybe it was all part of some master plan to keep Coke in the news.

I’m not that cynical, I’ll grant them an honest mistake, but either way, if they want to sell their product, save money and have the simplest marketing plan imaginable, all they have to do is hire me. I work cheap and I work smart. I will sit there at my desk and ask the different departments the only questions that matter: “Does Coca Cola still taste disgustingly sweet yet refreshingly corrosive?” “On Thanksgiving, can you fry a turkey or a moose in it?” “Is it still a dentist’s best friend?” “Can it still remove the paint from a 1987 Ford Taurus?” Yes? Great – sign my paycheck, we’re good for a decade. Oh, and pour me another Dr. Brown’s Crème Soda – regular, not diet, extra foam, and don’t be Jewish with the ice cubes.

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches.

—> https://youtu.be/WCiD285AVRE

–> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=29469

Dave’s Gone By #369 (12/3/2011): MAGIC GARDENS & STEAMY BATHS

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Here is the 369th episode of the long-running radio show/podcast, Dave’s Gone By, which aired on UNC Radio, Dec. 3, 2011. Info: davesgoneby.com.

Host: Dave Lefkowitz
Guests: singer Carole Demas and writer Bruce Jay Friedman

Featuring: Dave chats with actress Carole Demas and author Bruce Jay Friedman. Plus: Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflection on Coca Cola, Bob Dylan – Sooner & Later (Don DeVito tribute), Inside Broadway (news & Judd Woldin tribute), Saturday Segue (rock birthdays).

Note: Bruce Jay Friedman passed June 3, 2020 at age 90.

00:00:01 DAVE GOES IN
00:13:30 GUEST: Carole Demas
00:54:30 GUEST: Bruce Jay Friedman
01:49:30 Sponsors
01:57:30 Bob Dylan – Sooner & Later: Don DeVito
02:27:00 Weather
02:31:00 INSIDE BROADWAY (news (02:31:30), Judd Woldin)
02:39:30 SATURDAY SEGUE – Rock Birthdays
03:01:30 Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflection #31: Coca Cola
03:10:00 Friends
03:19:00 DAVE GOES OUT

Dec. 3, 2011 Playlist: “The Magic Garden” (08:00) & “See Ya” (Carole Demas & Paula Janis on “The Magic Garden”; 03:21:00). “Summer Nights” (Carole Demas & Barry Bostwick in Grease 1972 original Broadway cast; 00:51:30). “In the Garden” (Van Morrison; 09:30:00). “Bruces” (Monty Python; 01:45:00). “Going, Going, Gone” (01:58:30), “You’re a Big Girl Now” (02:07:00), “Black Diamond Bay” (02:11:30) & “Shelter from the Storm” (live) (02:21:00; Bob Dylan). “Finale” (02:36:30; Raisin 1973 Broadway cast). “Jenny Jenny” (02:40:00; Little Richard). “City Girl” (02:42:00; Joan Armatrading). “Goodbye to Romance” (02:46:00; Black Sabbath). “This is a Rebel Song” (Sinead O’Connor; 02:51:30). “Barcarolle” (02:54:30; Tom Waits).