#221 Blow-ins in the Wind

I found something interesting when I was reading a science magazine. The magazine was Discover. I was looking at the credits page because I wanted to dash off a letter to the marketing department complaining about all the blow-ins they put in every issue. Blow-ins, or fall outs as I like to call them, are those loose subscription cards magazines add that then annoy you when you try to read the damn thing. In my last issue, I counted 6 separate blow-ins. Now if I havn’t decided to subscribe after the second blow-in, do you think I’ll be more inclined to after being totally aggravated by dealing with the other four? Not only that, but I’ve been a subscriber to this magazine for over twelve years. I think by this time I should qualify for non-blow-in status. They manage to address my issue separately, so why can’t they refrain from blowing subscription requests into the darn thing? I mean, here’s a science magazine, that advocates care for the environment. Does cutting down all those trees to make the cards and producing all that ink to print them, much less squandering the power to do so, constitute stewardship of the environment? I don’t think so. Even more bizarre, each of the cards has a place to sign your name, address, etc., along with a box to check indicating how you’re going to pay. Now understand, it’s a postcard type of card, addressed on one side, postage paid, to the magazine’s subscription headquarters. There are two little boxes to check. One of them says, “Bill me.” The other one says, “Payment enclosed.” Now maybe I didn’t catch the issue of this science magazine about how to enclose something in a two-dimensional space without folding it. But I’m sure there must be a way. It’s been on every card for the last ten years and no one has caught it. Sometimes it takes fresh eyes to see what we are all blind to. It was perfectly acceptable to say that the sun revolved around the earth until someone saw it otherwise. Eventually people said: Oh yeah, that works better. We nearly slaughtered every whale in the world to make lamp fuel until someone in Pennsylvania said, hey, how about this black junk oozing out of the ground? At some point someone else will say, I got an idea, heck with the Arabian peninsula, we got this frictionless wind turbine we can put in North Dakota.
In the meantime, I followed the credits page to the bottom till I got to the publisher and CEO information. At one time Discover Magazine was published independently, then it got swallowed up by the mega-Disney conglomerate. So I expected one of the Disney execs to be on the masthead. Nope different mast and head altogether, seems Discover has moved up in the world, all the way to the penthouse suite. The CEO’s name was Bob Guccione, Jr. Maybe he can put a new spin on this subscription card thing.
America, ya gotta love it.