Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Rrroll it!

I'm a Green Party member and I just had a Tim Hortons tea.

There are several things wrong with that statement. (Most irksome is the lack of an apostrophe. What the fuck? The guy's name was Horton, not Hortons. He opened a doughnut shop after retiring from the NHL, which puts him in the running for the Greatest Canadian, though I for one am glad that Tommy Douglas took that one. So his shop was once called Tim Horton's Doughnuts. Or at least it should have been. So what the fuck happened to the apostrophe? I bet they sold it to all the other signs advertising tomato's, movie's, and chicken wing's. Don't get me started on apostrophes...) But what should be really wrong about that statement is implied, rather than explicit.

I just drank my Tim Horton[']s tea out of a waxed cardboard cup. Even if I took in a travel mug, I'd have gotten that cup. Because it's "Rrroll up the Rim to Win" springtime. That means that they give you the cup regardless of your travel mug status, lest you be upset that you've not been given a chance to win stuff. So, during the spring, I often say, "Screw it," and leave the cup at home.

So I rrrolled up the rim and I lost. No big deal. It happens. The first year they had this contest, I won constantly. New coffees all the time. Since then, not so much.

But the point of this story is this.

I rrrolled up the rim and saw the following message:

PLEASE PLAY AGAIN / RÉESSAYEZ S.V.P. ©

Can someone explain to me why that phrase needs to be copyrighted?

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