c'est tout ce que j'aime

I was having my usual early Friday dinner at McDonald's (wow, that's even more depressing in writing...), and at one point found myself staring at the Big 'n' Tasty box in front of me. For those of you unfamiliar with the burger, it comes in a box that is covered with the McDonald's slogan "I'm lovin' it" translated into about 10 different languages. Though I'm not much of a linguist, and didn't even attempt to sound out the Arabic and Cyrillic translations (I'm illiterate), I noticed that most of the slogans were pretty short, and probably as "catchy" as the English version. And then I noticed the French translation. "C'est tout ce que j'aime." My two years of high school French tells me that that's five syllables, and for all the beauty that is attributed to the French language, "c'est tout ce que j'aime" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

I wanted to find some sort of image of all of the "I'm lovin' it" translations for this post. That didn't work, but my searching did result in me finding some other interesting stuff...

Hehe...

This is pretty sad...
I also checked out the McDonald's website and found some very bizarre stuff. Under "Havin' Fun," they have some interesting ethnic items to click on, including "365 Black" and "i am asian," which I guess are both blatant attempts at proving how much McDonald's loves diversity...

I also checked out the "Get Shoppin'" section (I hate their abusive overuse of the apostrophe, by the way...), and soon realized that I don't recall ever seeing anyone (besides on-duty McD employees) wearing McDonald's apparel. Not that the company hasn't done their part to come up with trendy stuff though. On the merchandise page, a group of 7 very enthusiastic-looking teens and twenty-somethings sport t-shirts and jerseys with sassy sayings like "Are you Mac enough?" and "I don't share." The picture had a strange effect on me, in that it had about the opposite effect of most ads. Advertisements usually "work" on me, at least to a small extent, or subconsciously (i.e. they usually succeed in planting the seed of "life would be just a little better if I had one of those"). But this ad, instead of making me want to join the fun group of McDonald's-clad friends, left me wondering, "Who are these people?!" The scenario just seemed so far-removed from reality that it was too hard to even imagine. But I don't know, maybe somewhere McDonald's attire has become all the rage, and people can't help but have the time of their lives while wearing it.

So after all this McDonald's research, I think I'll be passing on the Big 'n' Tasty for a while... maybe forever...