Spotted A Brass Rat in the Wild

Spotted A Brass Rat in the Wild Early this morning I got a text from my friend and former student Jeremy R. 16  with a link to a new McDonalds commercial for their new Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal, or STRAW. Its a clear send-up of Jony Ives breathless product launches, complete with pictures of prototyping sessions and fluid analyses with subtitles like real engineers, doing real engineer stuff. Jeremy instructed me to look a bit after a minute into the video. I generally listen to Jeremy, so I did. Thats when I saw it. Can you see it? zoom. enhance.   zoom. enhance. illuminati             confirmed That is, of course, an MIT class ring, or so-called  brass rat, a touchstone of MIT culture with a long and illustrious history. Theyre easily recognizable and are sometimes even used intentionally in media as a sort of wink-and-a-nod that a character attended MIT, perhaps most famously, as Matt once blogged, in the case of Tony Stark 87. This is the first rat Ive seen in a commercial, though. And it leaves me with many questions. Who is this nominal (or actual) alumnus? Did he attend MIT and decide to wear the ring in the ad? Is this deep-level nerd-in-jokes from whoever directed the ad? Is this an alumnus hacking McDonalds, or McDonalds hacking MIT? This is like the Zapruder film for reflexive corporate irony / deep-level nerd navelgazing. If you have any information (inside, or otherwise) about this ad, or other good cases of prominent-but-surreptitious ring placement, please let me know in the comments below. Post Tagged #Brass Rat