Welcome to rivative's first monthly series: STUPID-MAGIC! We here at rivative.net are confident that this entirely useless collection of ephemerata (?) will pique your curiosity on a daily basis.

So how did STUPID-MAGIC! come about? Our main editor Tony Leonardo is the adman behind the madness. Here is what he says:

Let's see, where do I begin? I could start at the beginning and discuss my lifelong obsession with collecting things from beer cans to matchbox cars. I am a pack rat by nature. But I am not a particularly endomorphic pack rat. The pathos of overweight Americans amuses me so when I discovered in 1997 that strange people were secretly peppering New York City subway cars with homemade slips of paper touting diet breakthroughs I was curiously delighted and eager, in some way, to further the entertainment value.

But perhaps more important to me was the value I derived from securing new ads. The ads became coinage to me and taking the subway to work became a potentially exciting adventure. Would I find new ads to collect? How many? I felt that someday these unique ads would be late 20th century antiques and worth some scratch.

I've always been fond of street communication. Whether it be a talkative homeless guy, a good wall honored with graffitti, or the corner preacher-man handing out Bible tracts (I have a good collection of those for next month) it is always, to me, something new and interesting. These slips of paper bedecked the boughs of subway advertisements like little presents and I could not resist Christmas in July.

It's been three years since the first outbreak, which if I recall, belonged to the "Diet-Magic! Lose 30 lbs in 30 days!" series, a nationwide phenomenon. I have spotted the tell-tale yellow and red hung on telephone poles in Atlanta and outside of Dover, New Hampshire. Spurred by the popularity and presumed effectiveness of Diet-Magic! -- for truly everyone in New York City who rode the subway had seen the ads -- other imitation ads began appearing. This spawned a cottage industry of dieting wonders and soon various programs were competing for straphangers with all sorts of pitches. The "Look Good, Feel Good" (and its one-upper cousin "Look Great, Feel Great") became another popular series. For a good three months in the latter end of 1998 these ads were ubiquitous and I did my best to get as many as I could.

To this date I have collected 75 unique Diet Ads and the pot grows every day. I have soldiered on as a lonely man, maybe even a crazy man, but I feel like some sort of weird cultural anthropoligist. Who makes these homemade ads? Do they get enough business? Are they all just selling phen-phen? Do the police bust them for illegal advertising? Are they the above-ground signs emerging from one large, underground chain of workers like the Guatemalan "Blind Keychain" ring?

I dare not discover the truth now, for the science of Anthropology, which I know very little of, seems so much more fun when the subject matter is dead and gone and then you have to trace answers through the yo-yo diets of time. I figure when I turn 40 I can start calling up some of these numbers to get some answers. Heck, maybe I'll be fat so I will have an excuse.

I have selected here 30 of the best ads from my collection and have provided links to the others making this the most deinfitive collection of uselesss ephemerata ever assembled for your amusement. Well, probably not the most useless collection ever, knowing what slop television foists on the unaware viewer every day.

Enjoy STUPID-MAGIC!

-- Tony Leonardo
July 29, 2000

 

KEY

The two arrows on the page will go to the previous and next Diet Ad, but the next button on the "ad of the day" won't activate until September.

The "RELATED ADVERTS" link will get you to a page of ads from the same genus. Species? Philum? You know what I mean. The text tells you the quirky idiosynchrasies and delighful differences in the Diet Ad you are beholding.

The number-ball in the upper left corner corresponds to the specially designated and ultra-meaningful cardinal number given to each individual Diet Ad.


--If you are so inclined, copy the Diet Ad image and plaster them as a tiled desktop image. You will surely impress your friends and be the envy of your enemies.

-- If you have some Diet Ads of your own you would like to submit, please contact submission@rivative.net

-- You may have noticed that the way this has been set up means that new windows keep popping up all over the place. This will hopefully be a temporary problem. Nobody here at rivative.net knows much about html coding. We apologize profusely.