Everybody does. The Raven spent close to an hour yesterday paying bills in a little ritual we like to call, "clearing all the piled up papers off the dining room table." During these fricksome, high-quality experiences, I have been noticing a proliferation of ads on the backs of the payment envelopes. I stick a check in the credit card envelope, flip it over to seal it and whammo!—"Buy this jewelry on credit!" And they're just getting started with me. The damned thing is a flap or something that I have to remove. So I tear it off and... another ad. Now you're committed because they engaged you kinesthetically into interacting with them. Somebody out there is very, very clever.

Which brings us to our main topic of guerilla warfare for your eyes. This sense of "guerilla" seems to be in dispute. Chuck Wilson of Sea 3 Consulting completely misses the boat, as do a lot of people who think that the word means "low cost," and you can't blame them. They're thinking patriots vs. redcoats here and they want to snipe on the cheap.

I created much of the flyers, product brochures, and web sites for the company.  Why?  Because it cost much less for me to do than to hire an advertising firm.  Its amazing what you can do for very little money.

The band Barenaked Ladies got tired of eager teens stealing their music on Napster. They also had a new album to promote. The trick: they flooded the Net with MP3 files under the name of their new hot single. Vast numbers were downloaded by eager fans -- who discovered that the file contained a sales pitch for the album instead of the song. Fans started emailing the ad to other fans, generating massive awareness for the new album. Cost: a little studio time.

Dishonest? All advertising is lies, so why should people like Gary Ruskin of Commerical Alert get all huffy? "It's deceptive," he says. "People will be fooled into thinking this is honest buzz." As opposed to the other kind? C'mon.

So today's Technology Review is running a feature harbinging the death of the TV commerical. The big idea here is product placement, which got so silly in the Bond film Octopussy you just started laughing at it. If that's what we're facing, hey, I surrender already. I promise I won't mute the commercials anymore. Now what about this:

Best-selling writers, like Steven King or Tom Clancy, embed references to specific brands into their fictions to give them a sense of verisimilitude.

If product placement moves to replace standard commerical advertising, the ramifications are depressing. Currently, product placement is just celebrity endorsement (think Sarah Jessica Parker typing her Sex and the City column on an Apple Powerbook). But what about comparison ads? Appeals to authority? Scientific research? Fear? Keeping up with the Joneses? Anti-advertising? We may be facing not only placement, but the whole range of ad techniques worked into scripts and storylines.

The West Wing portrayed Republican Ainsley's sense of displacement in a Democratic administration by having her try to unsuccessfully order Fresca from a White House eatery that serves only Sprite.

Yukon Gold

Canada takes the lead again by moving seriously close to legalizing marijuana. The link is pretty sparse in content, but the letters to the editor offer the local perspective. What's more telling is the perspective of the CBC columnist Martin O'Malley, whose comments on the subject would probably get his American equivalent fired on the spot. Can you imagine George Will running something like this?

The best pot I ever smoked came from a cabernet sauvignon vineyard in California, outside my cottage in the Napa Valley. It was minty-green and very mild. I liked to sit on my patio in the early-evening light, sipping red wine from the same vineyard as the pot. Somehow the wine and cannabis complemented each other in a slow, thoughtful way.

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