6 says, “Tina’s doing an arts degree.” “Oh?” I say, as if the eyebrow ring, blond hair with a streak of black and oppressive eye makeup hadn’t tipped… - Max Barry

Marketing (or mktg, which is what you write when you’re taking lecture notes at two hundred words per minute) is the biggest industry in the world, and it’s invisible. It’s the planet’s largest religion, but the billions who worship it don’t know it. It’s vast, insidious and completely corrupt.
Marketing is like LA. It’s like a gorgeous, brainless model in LA. A gorgeous, brainless model on cocaine having sex drinking Perrier in LA. That’s the best way I know how to describe it.

The compound was like a mutant Boy Scout camp: all green tents and vehicles and barrels, smack in the middle of nowhere. He saw a troop of soldiers drilling in a field. They reminded him of high school football players with guns. Then a tank rolled past.
“Shit! What’s that?”
“That is an Abrams M1A battle tank, sir!”
Billy looked around with new respect. Now he understood why the NRA membership fees were so high.

Apparently we’re now in a state where most ads are full of people looking at us in a way that would heat us up down to our toes if it happened in real life, and we don’t think anything of it.