Eatery pulls billboard ads using Jonestown 'cult' reference

[somone]

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2011/02/eatery-pulls-billboard-ads-using-jonestown-cult-reference/1

Eatery pulls billboard ads using Jonestown 'cult' reference
By Douglas Stanglin, USA TODAY



A northern Indiana restaurant is pulling down its billboards referencing the Jonestown massacre in an ad campaign that assures diners that the eatery is "like a cult with better Kool-Aid."

The "Kool-aid" phrase on the ad for Hacienda restaurants was printed over a glass containing a mixed drink and the phrase: "To die for."

In November 1978, more than 900 members of Jim Jones People's Temple drank cyanide-laced, grape-flavored punch in a mass murder and suicide in the group's compound in Guyana.

Jeff Leslie, vice president of sales and marketing at Hacienda, acknowledges that the billboards, put up two weeks ago, were a mistake, the South Bend Tribune reports...

[1monster]

1. D'oh!

[gratuitous]

2. Still too soon

I helped with a production of Sweet Charity back in college in the late 1970s. During dress rehearsal for the "Rhythm of Life" number, the guy playing Big Daddy whipped out a packet of Grape Kool-Aid in the middle of dancing around. The director's notes were not kind to this bit of improv. There was no encore.

[zbird]

3. We have one of those billboards in our podunk town in far SW Michigan.

My 12-year-old daughter pointed it out to me and even she thought it was appalling. She had seen an episode of "Family Guy" featuring a cult and attempted mass suicide by Kool-aid.

[CBGLuthier]

4. Some folks should try cultivating a sense of humor.

If you take all this shit like mass suicide and murder seriously it will drive you mad. Personally I find religious nuts killing themselves to be one of the funniest things to ever happen.

[Louisiana1976]

5. Because they're Darwin Award winners?