Dough, dough...

 

After turning myself into a gnome back in October of 2006 I moved on to popular advertising icons like the Pillsbury Doughboy in a post called Half-baked fears. I said (and I love quoting myself from 20 years ago):

Our television is full of demonic icons conjured up by ad executives to prey upon our fears in order to sell products. Pop N' Fresh, the Pillsbury Dough Boy for instance. What is he other than a terrorist with a chef's hat. There he is with his pasty face, blackhole eyes and bloated body, leering at you while you try and open an explosive pipe bomb of biscuit dough. What's not to be afraid of?

That was pretty good if I do say so myself (even though we live in a time of real fears of worse things than talking bags of dough...wait a minute that is one of things we have to fear now). But here is my 2026 self as the dough man.

This dough creature is a bit less jovial than he was 20 years ago. I almost wish I'd asked ChatGPT to make this dough man out of dried out dough, but it would be a bit too close to home. 

I also talked about the Jolly Green Giant as a remnant of the Jack and the Beanstalk giant who ate people from our childhood stories. But I didn't create an image of me as the Jolly Green Giant...until now...Ho, Ho, Ho.

In the first version of me as Green Giant, ChatGPT gave me a green body and regular color face.  I still find AI extremely literal so you need to learn how to talk to them.  I resisted asking it to make me a more muscular Green Giant. But at least it didn't go with a dough boy body.

And while I am at it I decided to throw Mr. Clean into the mix.

I appreciate the muscles in this one. Cleaning all of those toilets builds the bicepts. And although I have a full head of hair, this shows I could pull off the bald look pretty well. Though the thing that always baffled me about Mr. Clean was why a genie would waste it's powers helping you clean your bathroom. If I had three wishes, making my toilet spotless wouldn't be one of them.

I also never went down the creepy Burger King King route until now.

There are so many other advertising icons to go, but that's a whole other post.