I was watching The Tonight Show With Jay Leno last night (I love Jay, think that he is one of the funniest and funniest looking men alive) and Ellen Degeneres was on. Her and Jay have studios literally right next door to one another (notice how I'm on a first name basis with both stars, that's just how I roll I guess).So Ellen was relaying this story which was obviously planned cause they had the prop right there for the story. The prop was a pair of Ellen boxer-shorts.
The boxer-shorts -seen above- are priced on the Ellen shopping site at $24.95. Ellen's story went something like this:Ellen: You know Jay (American twang in toe) I got an email askin' me to drop the price of these little babies for a day.Jay: (Big jaw in toe) *chuckles to himself*Ellen: So, Jay I did it. I announced on my show that for one day the shorts were going to sell at $10.Jay: Well you know Ellen, that sounds really nice of you... what's the problem with all this?Ellen: (Shyly giggling to herself) Well Jay, normally the boxers cost us about $13.Jay: OK so you made a bit of a mistake on that one right?Ellen: Well yea, normally we sell about 10 to 15 pairs a day. On that day, we sold over 6000. I lost about $25,000 in one day. (Not sure about Ellen's maths on that one so don't question me)Now my big issue with this whole story is that yes, it is funny that Ellen lost $25,000 and it is funny that the sales can jump by about 400% from a simple word spoken by Ellen but how is it possible that this is the type of funny story that the rich and famous tell. As far as I can imagine this is a mild kind of story along the monetary genre.Seriously $25,000 is a boat load of cash that Ellen just smiled and kissed g'bye. Wow, what a thrill it must be to know that you can walk away from that much money with a smile and a funny story.Now just imagine what would happen if Ellen told the American people to get rid of Bush or vote against the grain. Imagine if you will, if Harpo -sorry- Oprah and Ellen and Jay and Bono and Robbie Williams and Madge and Mr's Penn, Pitt and Vaughn(hahaha) and Miss's Aniston, Jolie (hahaha) and Tyra all got together and propagated a particular party, product, ideal, moral, ethic or line of thought. The whole of the American population would follow and the rest of the world would probably join in too. Think about it. The power of the media, the power of celebrity.
Whoever controls the media controls the mind
James Douglas Morrison, aka "Jim Morrison"
As you can see in my post "The power of Degeneres" the picture of the boxer shorts has been removed. This is not me and my bad skills but a removal from the actual Ellen clothing site. Apparently my post has made some waves, not the 6000 sales of the cheap version of the boxers (HA! As if Shutterview could make such a large impact, lets only hope one day soon).