El Nino Rules! I can't believe it didn't work

A long time ago one of my friends came up with an idea for a bumper sticker. In the winter of '97 we had a lot of snow in the high country courtesy of "El Nino." If you've never heard of this phenomenon, it is related to a cyclical temperature change in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. When it hits, it creates bigger, more moisture laden storms that end up dumping more snow in the mountains, and therefore, on the slopes of the ski areas. This sticker had a skier on it and next to the skier it said "El Nino Rules!" He spent a couple of grand on the design and printing of the stickers, and to my knowledge, never came close to breaking even.

I have to wonder why it didn't work. There is no shortage of people willing to permanently deface their cars with stickers - all the "Kerry/Edwards" stickers still running about are ample evidence of that. There's no shortage of odd messages, either. I think he just missed the wave of the news coverage of El Nino, and that meant he's stuck with 10,000 ads for El Nino.

The more I see out there, the more I think he was just a stride off. Lately I've been seeing a new phenomenon around town - the amateur athlete sticker. Some of these stickers are made for people's kids who play for their school team, and I can sort of understand the sticker thing for them. Parents will go to almost any length to support/coddle/placate their kids. But the one I saw had the same logo as the jersey the man who got out of the Humvee was wearing. Yep, now people are getting stickers made of their softball teams, adding their number to the center, and plastering it right on their car.

Most of the people (I would include myself in this category) I have played softball with would be hard pressed to be called athletes. We're the kind of players that are more concerned with how much beer we can drink than with winning the game. We play for what I would call "fun," which is what recreational leagues are supposed to be about. I certainly did not feel strongly enough about the game, or derive enough of my identity from it, to advertise my team and my number everywhere I went.

There's another faction that play the game competitively. For them, it's what they spend all their time thinking about. They dread the off season, but use the down time to build their skills, or "skillz" as they might say today. They often used to play baseball in high school, or maybe college, but certainly didn't make it to the bigs. Since they never got famous playing small ball, they have invented a method to promote themselves locally. Like Al Bundy recalling the glory days of his high school football career, this is just sad. Although, if there's a ski team called "El Nino" anywhere, my friend might be back in the money!