moviewatcher wrote:Nice design, unambiguous message. Good luck.
However... has anyone else noticed that the people who don't seem to be able to tell the difference visually between a raisin cookie and a chocolate chip cookie are all raisin haters? I suggest their lowered mental skills in this area are due to the lack of raisins in their diet.
Discuss...
Many years ago I worked in an office that had a candy dish on the receptionist's desk. The dish was emptied several times a day by the employees, at which point it would be refilled with a random selection from many types of candy. One day I grabbed a handful of Skittles and dropped them into my shirt pocket, then went on about my day. Every few minutes I'd toss a Skittle into my mouth without thinking much about it. Eventually I hit one that was so foul that I almost spit it out in front of my coworkers. Turns out it was a stray M&M that was left in the dish from earlier in the day, and it was stealthily hiding amongst the Skittles. I actually like M&M's, but when you're expecting a Skittle and you get chocolate, it's revolting. (The totally wrong texture didn't help, either...instead of a waxy, hard-to-chew substance, the M&M cracked like an egg and flooded my mouth with creamy chocolate.)
Which brings me to my point: When you think you're putting one thing into your mouth and you get something else, it's a huge shock. You don't know what it is that you just ate, because your brain is focused on tasting one thing and then it gets something else. Yuck! And the more times you've expected chocolate and gotten raisins, the larger the aversion you would have to raisins. No wonder these people are protesting for raisins to be outlawed!
However, I do have to wonder why these raisin-haters can't distinguish the difference between a raisin and a chocolate chip. I may have been fooled by a stray M&M in a bowl of Skittles (though to be fair I never even really looked at what I was munching on), but I've never once been suckered into eating a raisin cookie thinking that it was a chocolate chip cookie; chocolate chips just do not look like raisins. Especially after having been burned countless times, apparently (as is evidenced by their rabid revulsion to raisin cookies), shouldn't some sort of self-preservation system in the brain kick in when they see a chocolate chip cookie? Shouldn't there be some intense scrutiny before they take a bite?
My theory is that these people are amongst the most extreme of chocoholics, and that their intense cacao addiction sends their brain into such a tizzy at the sight of a bespeckled cookie that it simply can't process any further visual input. While the rest of us can glance at the cookie and easily determine the not-so-secret ingredient, their sudden euphoria at scoring a fix prevents them from doing so. 0.3 seconds later, the cookie has entered their mouth...and what happens next isn't very pretty.
Of course, it's just a working theory; I haven't actually acquired the funding to conduct a double-blind study yet. Nor have I figured out how to lure this group of people into said study. I'm afraid that mentioning the word "raisin" would be a deal-breaker, and I'm worried about the ethics of not mentioning the word. I'm also quite worried about my safety.
In any case, here's hoping that this shirt will print so that these poor afflicted individuals can buy one. Perhaps seeing the slogan often enough will reprogram their synaptic responses just enough that they can avoid these unfortunate incidents. Or maybe the design will educate those around them of their plight, so that they might take pity and let them know that "hey, those are raisins." Of course, it might also lead to people putting out plates of raisin cookies in a twisted effort to get some great video for YouTube. After all, some people are just sociopaths.
