Um, What??

As I was paging through a magazine the other day I found an ad that made me do a double take. Now normally, I'm don't pay much attention to ads in magazines or anywhere else; I'm far too easily distracted and in the case of television, well, that's what the mute button and the dvr are for.

I guess one of the reasons I stopped and looked was because I was going to tear the page out because it was one of those annoying inserts printed on cardstock, so when you try to turn pages, they sort of naturally fall to that page. I hate those things! It was about to find it's way to the recycling bin when my eyes fell on it and it was so unbelievably absurd that I had to look twice.

The advertisement was for cigarettes. Not so unusual for a magazine ad, right? What made me snort was the attention getting "headline" of the ad: "The Only Cigarette Made with 100% Organic Tobacco". Okay, sit with that for a moment. Roll that statement around in your head, look at it from every side and then do like I did and smack yourself V-8 style in the forehead and say WHAT THE HECK??

At first, given the magazine the ad was placed in, I thought it might be a Mad Magazine or Saturday Night Live type fake advertisement along the lines of "New Shimmer! It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!" (Okay, if you must know, it was in a copy of Entertainment Weekly which we mysteriously started getting a subscription of and I read cover to cover each week. I know I am weak. Don't judge me!) But after looking it over more closely and checking things out, it turns out it is legit.

So now I'm wondering: who is buying this product and the line of BS it is selling? Really? Organic cigarettes? Because when you are smoking nine bajillion carcinogenic chemicals you should really worry about whether or not the tobacco was sprayed with pesticides. This make me think of other crazy ideas like "clean coal" and "fat free cookies".

Also, has the recession hit Madison Avenue yet? Because if it would eliminate this kind of advertising, that might not be such a bad thing.