A n d r e w s G u m W o r l d

IMAGE: Brisbane Times

Friday morning’s Brisbane Times features a review of Cartier’s newest scent, “Roadster” (pictured above), a cologne targeted at both men and women.

The scent was created by Mathilde Laurent, who left Guerlain to become Cartier’s bespoke perfumer in 2005.

The review notes that in her work at Cartier, Laurent’s goal has been to make perfume “worthy of Cartier’s clientele and not for the sake of publicity.”

As the review goes on to note (again, emphasis ours):

Roadster, her first non-bespoke fragrance for Cartier, bears the symbols of a watch of the same name, down to its cap that mimics the crown of the Cartier timepiece.

Marketing aside, Laurent has mingled a mint of awesome proportions with earthy vetiver, warm resins and soft vanilla. Her mint isn’t strident like toothpaste or hygienic like chewing gum but sultry and sophisticated. Think antebellum American plantation, not ante-room waiting for the dentist.

IMAGE: Nate Robertson blog.

Nate Robertson (that’s him in a pic from his own blog, chewing gum) has appeared in these pages before as part of the Gum Time tradition that inspires Detroit Tigers rallies (earlier, we included a great shot from Flickr of the animated score board from a Tigers game featuring the rally-worthy, gum-chewing efforts of Mr. Robertson).

As he notes, his blog got its title from this activity:

Along the way, it seems I also am becoming known for chewing huge wads of bubblegum to start Tiger rallies. That’s where the name for this blog comes in.

And, later he indicates that his interests are:

 Going after a World Series title and chewing as much bubble gum as I can fit into my mouth to help start Tiger rallies.

Which is why, of course, that today’s news from Major League Baseball is a bit disconcerting to gum connoisseurs and that is, sadly, that the tradition is coming to an end. As an article today notes:

Robertson’s superstition to throw wads of gum into his mouth became a Detroit phenomenon in 2006 during the summer and then during the Tigers’ run to the World Series. Eventually, it grew a little too big, and he lost his taste for constantly chewing gum in the late innings.

You can read all the details here.

PHOTOS (from Flickr and from the left):  Wall of gum, originally uploaded by Mr. Bowman;
Bottom bracket, originally uploaded by Brett L.; Pigs with lipstick, originally uploaded by megpi.

The Huffington Post and one of its columnists, Dan Dorfman, wrote yesterday about the current stock market rally, which has got its own slangy nickname that we’re awfully fond of here at AndrewsGumWorld, and that is “chewing gum rally.”

While it’s nice to be hopeful about the stock market in times like these, Dorfman quotes one online investment advisor, Mark Leibovit, who urges caution. Here’s what Dorfman wrote yesterday online (with a metphor from Leibovit that leaps from chewing gum to baling wire and, yes, lipsticked pigs):

Still, there are a lot of non-believers, among them crack online investment adviser Mark Leibovit of VRTrader.com, headquartered in Sedona, Ariz. “The market is being held together with chewing gum and baling wire,” he says. “It’s a chewing gum rally that has little chance of sticking. It’s like trying to put lipstick on a pig; that just doesn’t work.”

PHOTO: The Straits Times

While Jackie Chan’s recent comments on political control of the Chinese have gained him a certain level of notoriety (see this Opinion piece from the New York Times for an in-depth review of those comments), he also took on the gum chewing policies of Singapore in the same speech, as reported in The Straits Times this past weekend.

The newspaper noted that Chan suggested the following about gum and Singaporeans during the speech:

…he also lashed out at Singaporeans’ lack of social graces, The New Paper reported on Saturday. “Sometimes, I wonder why I can’t eat chewing gum in Singapore. Then, I think it’s actually right not to eat chewing gum,” he was reported as having said.

“If I let you eat chewing gum, those people will leave them on tables and chairs. They have no self-respect at all.”

Перестройка. Строим капитализм [Perestroika. Building Capitalism], originally uploaded by itzinush.

 Yesterday’s The Times in London reported on the production of a new series of radio sci-fi comedies based on the late Douglas Adams’ stories and produced by Dirk Maggs. The new series, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, promises to be of high quality, the article notes, and to make this point, they invoked Beatles chewing gum:

During the height of Beatlemania you could buy Beatles chewing gum. It cost twice as much as competing brands, but it was worth it. Not only did you get an exclusive colour picture of the Fabs, but the colours were brighter, the taste better and more varied. Or so we thought. As with their music, the impression was given that Beatles gum was a superior product. Care had been taken.

The producer Dirk Maggs is the radio comedy equivalent of Beatles gum.

IMAGE: New York Times

 Yesterday’s New York Times featured Dentyne’s new campaign designed at re-launching its Dentyne Ice brand and takes on, perhaps, an even larger issue than fresh breath — whether the Internet (which AndrewsGumWorld can only assume you’re using to read this) and technology are driving us further apart. It’s a worthy question, perhaps, and certainly an interesting one to tackle in a gum advertising campaign, but so Dentyne has. (Incidentally, Dentyne has also launched down a  companion website, makefacetime.com, that shuts down after three minutes — you can even edit the clock that counts down your time to look like an egg timer, alarm clock or odometer and more — to make sure that we get back to our lives)

Here are some details from the Times article:

BORED subway riders and air travelers in major American cities might have noticed — right around the time they were itching to get back on an Internet connection — a series of ads encouraging them to “power down, log off, unplug … make face time.”

The brand with the temerity to tell us to disconnect from our totally wired lives? Dentyne chewing gum.

The campaign, called “Make face time,” was created by McCann Erickson for Dentyne, a brand owned by Cadbury, the No. 2 gum maker in the United States after Wrigley. The ads feature happy people embracing and kissing — their breath presumably freshened by Dentyne — as an alternative to pounding their BlackBerrys or sending electronic messages to their Facebook friends.

…people under 20 are the most avid gum chewers, the industry says, and the Dentyne campaign touches on the explosion in digital tools that help those young people connect, share and network. But it also seeks to make customers stop and question whether all that online communication is really making them closer.

“Everyone loves technology and everyone uses it,” said Josette Barenholtz, the marketing director for Dentyne. “What’s meaningful is being reminded that being face to face can’t be substituted.”

That strategy could be a gamble, as the ads focus on exactly the people who are most passionate about these digital tools.