Natural Selection

[Joost Romeu]

In the spirit of advertising watching...

   When I was a NY illustrator in the '70s, for kicks, I amassed a
collection "dumb and usless grids". I specialized in charts, diagrams, and
technical illustrations and was incensed to find how illustrators had
latched on to grid as if it was an artifact dreamed up by the advertising
industry.
   ...Truth be told, fashion grids of this sort did probably indicate that
popular perception could accept such pseudo-scientific/constructivist
matrices as a way of ordering reality.

   These memories came back when I espied the following headline on the
back cover of last week's SF Chronicle TV guide:

        "The Natural Selection".
Seems a window company feels confident enough to assert
(next to a huge - labeled - portrait of Mr. D):

        "If Charles Darwin was around today, he'd soon observe that not all
vinyl window companies and products occupy the same level on the
evolutionary scale of quality and service. He'd hardly be surprised to see
a few of them go extinct.
        But __________ Windows is one specialist that, over many years, has
evolved through the natural selection of the finest possible product range
- and highest levels of service."