Pepto(-)Bismol is a medicine for indigestion and other gastrointestinal issues which may or may not have a hyphen in its name. Even its manufacturer, Procter & Gamble, seems unsure. While the product’s domain is pepto-bismol.com, but they also control peptobismol.com. But, they redirect the latter to the hyphened version, so, hyphen it is, right? Except current labels use no hyphen, though labels from an earlier era did. If you visit the FAQ in an attempt to settle the question as I did, you’ll find over a dozen questions of varying levels of ridiculousness, but absolutely no consistency:

I count 10 “Pepto-Bismols” and 6 “Pepto Bismols” in this image. What a mess.

For this article, I’ll do what P&G can’t seem to manage, and consistently use a hyphen. Anyhow, Pepto-Bismol’s most common form is a disturbingly bright pink liquid that is both chalky and displeasingly viscous. To paraphrase something my grandmother once said, “it oughta do something good for you, because it sure tastes bad”. Heck, just look at it:

It’s awful! Pepto-Bismol is also quite the paradox, because it professes to help with nausea while it itself is simultaneously nauseating.

Recently, they’ve found a way to make it worse. Earlier this month, I saw an ad promoting Pepto-Bismol chews:

As soon as I heard of them, my horrible brain immediately brought another chewable product to mind:

I categorically refuse to do any further research. I will instead spend the rest of my time on this earth believing that Procter & Gamble are selling Pepto-flavored Gushers that release chalky pink “juice” when you bite them. Barvd!

Though Halloween has passed, today still feels like a good time to post something scary. It comes courtesy of friend-of-the-site Colin T., who encountered the picture that follows in his hotel room at a Marriott. In Colin’s own words:

• I don’t say this lightly, but I’d like someone at Marriott to be fired over this. Or at least have a formal reprimand placed in their HR file. This makes me want to never stay at another Marriott for fear they’ll come up with something worse.

With all that as preface, let’s have a look!

This was the “art” found in Colin’s room at the Auburn, Alabama Marriott TownePlace (sic) Suites, and “art” is an extremely generous word. Who would do this? Why would they do this? Just…well, what in the unholy name of wretched word clouds is that?!

It took me several minutes of staring to find the basic idea of it, which seems to be the phrase “Life is to be lived”. Alright…fine. But even if we accept that as a reasonable message for hotel art (and we really shouldn’t), what’s going on with the rest of it?

You can find three other full words, “it”, “terrific”, and “everything”. But beyond that, there’s an assortment of partial words, some of which I’ve made guesses at below:

• fantastic

• intrinsic

• -astic

• mag-

• excessive

• expressive

• expevted (?!)

• neglecting

• explorative

• everywhere

Most of those are positive words, but “excessive” and “neglecting” certainly aren’t, and “expevted” isn’t a word at all.

In addition to the poor content, the execution is also bad. Zooming in shows how sharp the letters in “life” are. Compare that against the falling “it” up top:

Those are compression artifacts on the “i” and the “t”, and they’re on the original poster itself, not caused by the photograph. You can spot plenty more on the letter jumble at the bottom:

If this is art at all, it’s bad art, poorly done. The worst of both worlds!

Finally, let us not overlook the location of this piece. As you can perhaps tell from the reflection, yes, this pile of crap is in the bathroom. In fact, it’s directly across from the location where it actually belongs, the toilet. As a result, hotel guests are forced to contemplate it while using the facilities. That’s just no way to start your day.