"Hey, Honey, we can't go on vacation because I blew all of our credit-card miles on this dress!"
This commercial is just ridiculous. First off, the credit card companies are busily slashing their customer base and their customers' credit lines. Second, you'll have to hunt a long way to find a straight guy who is going to be happy at the idea that, instead of being able to use the credit-card points to take a vacation, his wife used them to buy a very expensive dress. From his approving expression when she models the dress, he's probably a closeted drag queen and as soon as she goes off to work, he's going to try on that number.
Use the dress to polish your shoes. Shitcan this commercial.
So National Car Rental lets you choose which color of a fleet-purchased-GM-piece-of-shit you get to rent. Big Fucking Deal. That's why you should choose National, because you get to choose the color of the car you're going to rent? Do people even open the door to see if the inside smells of puke or check the trunk for bodies?
Okay, okay, I admit I'm a little late to climb on the Top Gun fighter jet, but I'm just seeing Top Gun for the first time while waiting for Mad Men to come on AMC. Was Tom Cruise kidding? Can Navy fighter pilots actually be 19-years-old, 5'2" and gay? It's hard to believe anyone actually bought this character and his weenie little voice, acting all butch n' stuff. How would I kill this character? I'd back the jet over him on the tarmac and squash him like the icky little bug he is.
Or have him eaten by a very large octopus. It's all the same to me.
(By the way, that's about a 60 gallon barrel. 60 gallons of water, which is what whiskey pretty much is, weighs about 500lbs, plus the weight of the barrel. I don't think some pasty-faced distiller's going to be walking up a beach with it over his shoulder.)
The Colbert Report has been doing this bit for the last three years. It was reasonably funny two years ago, but now, it has crossed over into total lameness. Ending the bit now would be a preemptive move, as next year, it will be so stale a gag that it totally sucks. Disconnect this one.
That seems to be the underlying pitch for Bud Light, that it has "drinkability", which seems to be beer-speak for "at least your throat won't swell shut if you drink our stuff."
Bud Light is to beer what Thunderbird is to wine. The only reasons to drink either one is because you need to get shitfaced, you don't have a lot of cash for accomplishing the task and you're too much of a pussy to just go the hard-core route and buy a plastic jug of cheap-ass vodka.
"Drinkability" is a self-selecting con; anyone stupid enough to believe that hype really should be drinking Bud Light.
1. There is nothing sexy or hip about a Buick Enclave. 2. Hiring a phony, pretentious "director" to film a car in a luxurious setting when the car is better suited to a supermarket parking lot is insulting to consumers. 3. The phony director saying he "needs Zen time with this model" is loathsome. Since when is Zen synonymous with fucking, which is the implied message? 4. Why does the phony director call himself the Robin Hood of whatever? What's that got to do with anything? 5. Why is Buick trying to sell this piece of crap to hipsters? If you were 30 and had a hot date, would he or she driving up in a car like this impress you, or would you immediately look in the back for the baby seat?
How to kill this character? Gimme the keys, I'll run him over, then throw his gasping body into the deep end.
Tornado research is not a bad thing and the Vortex 2 Project is a lot larger than the Weather Channel's piece of it. But damn, can the people at the Weather Channel not talk about it 87 times each hour?
The movies in the Terminator series have been on a long slide downhill and T-4, excuse me "Terminator Salvation" accelerates the descent. The first movie was a pretty good story. After that, each movie chipped away at having a coherent story, though T-2 was good with Linda Hamilton transitioning from terrified waitress in T-1 to guerrilla master in T-2.
T-3 had long extended action sequences that were reminiscent of a Warner Brothers cartoon, including an extremely ridiculous chase sequence in which the bad terminator, driving a large crane, chased the good terminator and John Connor. T-4 substitutes the long chase scenes of T-3 with a lot of loud explosions and sets that make the movie Sin City look real by comparison. Like every movie in the series since T-2, this one has a "good" terminator, though this one, for reasons best left unexplained (if you still want to see this steaming pile of dreck), comes to fight on the side of humanity on its own.
Script pitch: Year 2018. Good terminator helps John Connor save the young man who will become his father. The two blow up Skynet's base in San Francisco. Good terminator sacrifices himself to save Connor. Fade to credits.
The Terminator series needs to end, now. The next person to pitch a T-5 concept should be flogged with barbed wire.
Collect up all of the Terminator models and melt them down.
(We'll be dealing with the real thing by the end of this century, anyway.)
When You Hear a Male Voice Say, "Put It In Me, Scott..."
Hey, I'm all for queerie stuff on TV, but come on, a phallic sandwich and a talking male toaster oven asking a male to stick it in? Who exactly are they trying to sell this sandwich to, Log Cabin Republicans? As a self respecting lesbian, I might enjoy a sandwich like the new Quizzno's Torpedo, but do I really want to be thinking about some guy asking another guy to stick it in while I've got my mouth wrapped around it? What's next, a Taco Bell ad with a female talking piece of foil asking some woman to "Lick my delicious taco?" Well?
There should be some sort of qualifier before just anyone can cut a TV ad. This guy shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a vagina or a Volkswagen, a hymen or a Hyundai, a labia or a Lexus, a pussy or a Prius, or a cooter or a Cougar.
How would I kill this character? I'd run him over in a Volkswagen, then a Hyundai, then a Lexus, then a Prius, then finish him off with a Cougar.
Where, oh where do I start? First, the King himself is pure therapy fodder for any kiddies who watch his shiny, pedophiley face and gigantic noggin perched upon his normal adult male body, which incidentally is wearing a freakin' skirt, bobby socks and pointy Mary Janes. But with burger joints like BK to blame for kazillions of obese children, are square butts really something they should be shooting for? Didja ever see a woman with a square butt? Was she skinny? No, she was not. Butts are not square by nature. It takes a lotta lard to get a butt to turn square, unless you're a yellow kitchen sponge, and they don't exist, much less eat burgers. And besides, this ad featuring square butts shows rectangular butts, not square butts. It would be like Sesame Street characters singing 'The Circle Game' while playing with ovals. And what's with calling them butts? When I was little, butt was a bad word. I guess now a three-year-old tells his pediatrician he doesn't want a shot in his butt?
So let's review:
The King is creepy enough. Sir Mix-a-Lot's original song, "I Like Big Butts" refers to a sexual preference, and should toddlers start preferring certain types of body parts at that age? Sponge Bob Squarepants is almost as creepy as The King. Square butts are nothing to shoot for. Rectangles are not squares. 'Butt' is too mature a word for toddlers to be throwing around.
How would I kill this character? With telephone book-piercing ammunition and a couple of blasts to the butt.
If you watch the news, you've probably seen the Omnaris ad with the legion of itty biddy soldiers who muscle up a nose spray to some woman suffering from allergies or congestion or a lack of cocaine.
This is the ad:
The really stupid thing about this ad is its obvious use of imagery from the movie Patton.
Reaching back to a movie that is nearly thirty years old would seem to be to be an advertising strategy that is insane beyond belief: "Hey, let's target our advertising for our new allergy drug to people who are old enough to join AARP." At this time of year, lots of people suffer from allergies, not just people who use glucosamine pills to lubricate their joints.
May the allergy sufferer sneeze and blow all of those little bastards to Hell.
I'm almost ashamed I have GEICO car insurance. I don't mind their little British gecko, but between the cavemen and this ad, I often consider dumping GEICO just out of principle. Perhaps they should skip all this insipid advertising, fire their ad agency, lower their rates and hire a spokesperson to just say that?
I mean, come on, who wants disembodied eyes following them around? Here's my plan for killing them off. Put them in my driveway and I'll back over them until they're flattened out and blind.
Crikey! It would be absolutely wrong to want to kill an innocent little half-orphan girl, so I don't mean I want to kill the actual kid. Who I want to kill is the croc hunting, snake licking, lizard loving nature character this kid happens to play. I wasn't crazy about the kid's deddy, either. I have a strong olfactory sense and he seemed to me like he'd smell of stale B.O., reptile shit and dirty ass cheese. And after his untimely death while fucking around with a deadly stingray, for the mother to shove this kid into his spot as a nature freak with a death wish, would it be so wrong to want to get a jump on things and just off the kid? Well, not the kid, the character. Yeah that's it, kill that character. How? I'd go with a baby stingray's stinger. Just like the deddy, only littler.
Sure, Boost cell phone ads are the worst of their kind, but this one is the worst ad for any product in history. The last line, where this hirsute cretin says he likes breast milk just made me want to puke it was so gross. This makes ads for Shamwow, the Charmin Bears and those creepy GEICO eyeballs look like strokes of advertising genius.
In an age when Americans are resenting the Hell out of greedy corporate slimeballs getting obscene bonuses, hosting lavish getaways, paying for extraordinarily lavish office redecorating and purchasing mega million dollar corporate jets, why would anyone choose a travel booking company that boasts of having a hovercraft they use to deliver overage checks in lieu of stuffing them into envelopes and using 42 cent postage stamps? Whatever agency dreamed up this campaign really screwed Orbitz. I don't want to use a travel booking company that wastes money on lousy campaigns that boast of colossal corporate money squandering. I thought that creepy little gnome was a bad ad campaign, but Orbitz can jam all its executives into that hovercraft and let my Kill This Character colleague Earthbound Misfit shoot it down with one of her trusty submachine guns. Get 'em, Girl!
"Here's the good news about energy: ExxonMobil's profits for 2008 were well over forty billion dollars!"
If you have seen any of the news shows on any of the channels, then you'll recognize the Oil Slut.
The folks at "energy tomorrow dot org" have put up a spiffy web site and are pouring millions of dollars, with all of the abandon of a leaking supertanker, into a PR campaign whose main message is "drill everywhere."
What those putzim hope you never figure out is that petroleum is a commodity. When demand for oil spikes again, everyone in the oil business from the people pumping it out of the ground to the refiners will make a shitload of money and it doesn't matter where they are in the world. When you deal with commodities, even purely local action has an effect on the larger prices, which is what Wickard v. Filburn was about. If crude oil goes to $150 a barrel again, we all will be paying well over $4 for a gallon of gasoline again, and it won't matter at the pump whether the oil wells are in Oklahoma, the Gulf of Mexico, Russia or Saudi Arabia.
What the Oil Slut and the other the folks at "energy tomorrow" are fighting for is a larger share of that $150 and that is all. There is no patriotism driving their message, only greed.
Oil is a commodity that is sold on a world market. Once you understand that point, a point that the oil industry is spending millions of dollars to obscure, then you can understand that there is no difference between reducing our dependence on foreign oil and reducing our dependence on oil. Then you can understand why the words "alternative sources of energy" strike fear into the hearts of the Oil Slut and her employers.
"...is that you should put your money into Mason jars, bury them in the back yard, and shoot your fucking stockbroker in the head."
I cannot tell you how much I despise the "Edward Jones" brokerage ads, the one where the customer comes in at the crack of dawn and the broker says "in my experience, in this kind of market.."
Right. Unless the idiot sitting in that storefront office somewhere has been a stockbroker since 1932, he has no experience with a market that has dropped so much. The Dow Jones is down over 50% from its peak, a drop that has not been seen since 1932, though admitted the market has to drop a hell of a lot more to plumb those depths seen in `32.
No, they have no experience in this kind of market. They, like everyone else, are engaged in heavily whistling past the graveyard. For them to pretend otherwise is bordering on criminal fraud.
Maybe when they finally get around to inventing a phaser rifle, we'll be able to open these goddamn things without the risk of injury. Until then, about the only way to open one of these buggers is to put on a pair of heavy leather (or kevlar) gloves and then attacking the clamshell with a pair of large scissors.
The people who invented it should be condemned to an eternity in Hell, having to open clamshell packages with only a small pair of dull scissors.
it's the only snack food that openly promotes sabotaging people.
Yes, some of them are annoying, and most have it coming to them.
But really. Isn't there something really wrong with this? Chester should be...
Ah, who the fuck am I kidding? Chester should be given a medal or something. Most of the people who were sabotaged in the Cheetos commercials deserved to be stood in front of a wall and shot.
Go get them, Chester.
(By the way, can you buy Cheetos in Northern Ireland? I'll bet not.)
"He went to Jared!" In this economy, nothing says "I love you" like giving the woman you love an overpriced piece of jewelry that you could have purchased for a third of the price from a pawn shop, just because you saw some stupid commercials.
Seriously, guys. There's more to jewelry than a high price tag and "man, is that ever shiny." You might as well buy a car because its color matches your favorite shirt. She may have some preferences in that matter, so if you are so out of ideas that you have to go to Shiny McMarkup, make sure she can return it and keep the receipt.
I cannot begin to tell you how annoying it is to see the commercial about how an accountant discovered a million-dollar error because he had eaten Frosted Mini-Wheats for breakfast; the little sentient speck of cereal takes the credit for that and then the little demonic monster answers the guy's phone.
Let's gloss over the fact that a pipsqueak that size who tried to talk would be emitting sound waves up in the dog-whistle range. One of my basic rules is that I do not want to have conversations with my food. Even more disturbing, the little critter seems happy at the idea that he is palling around with a guy who just ate a heaping bowl of his relatives.
The clowns who dreamed up this commercial need some serious professional help.
Throw this little fuck outside for the birds to eat.
Mark Goldston, CEO of NetZero, a vulture and, in the words of Dickipedia, a dick.
NetZero, in case you have forgotten, is a supplier of dial-up Internet service. Goldston's pitch is that the 56 million households in the U.S could save billions of dollars a year by ditching broadband and going back to dial-up.
That compares to the amount of money that people will save if they put on really heavy clothes, heat their homes with wood fires and draw water from a hand-dug well in their back yards.
More and more websites are video and image heavy. If you try to view those with dial-up, you have to click on the link to the website and then go pour yourself a drink while the web page loads. If you want to watch any video on YouTube or anywhere else, you'll have to get a video downloader (like UltraGet) and then a video player like FLV Player. You paste the video URL into the window in UltraGet and then go have a snack while the video slowly downloads.
Remember, you've got a 56Kb/s modem, maybe. If, for example, you want to download the "Mom's Day William Tell" video:
that's about 7,750Kb. At the fastest possible speed, that's a bit over seven minutes. Most 56K modems tend to connect a tad bit slower, so you may have time to cook dinner while that one video is downloading.
The "Rick Roll" video is 8.3Mb, which will take you nearly 8 minutes to download. The "Passport to Pluto" documentary that I mentioned over at my home blog will take over 37 minutes to download.
Those numbers assume that you do not try to open another browser window while the download is going on. They assume that your youngest kid doesn't pick up an extension and start whistling into it.
Oh and while all that is going on, your phone line is tied up (and you presumably still have wired phone service).
Want to work from home and telecommute into the office by a remote link? Do research online for a project? Not with dialup.
Goldston's ad campaign is an attempt to use a bad economy as a means to rescue a dying method of connectivity. If anything, it is vulturism at its worst.
OK - I don't wear dentures so I don't know about ooziness. But I know that I wouldn't buy a product advertised by these people talking about mouth ooziness - with a name of Sea Bond - sounds like you are eating the ocean.
PS - I hope Mr. Yuckiness got paid a lot to make an ass of himself.
Thankfully, 2009 was the last New Year's where these stupid glasses with two zeros on either side of the nosebridge can be worn.
So AMF to one of the ugliest items of wearable celebratory kitsch ever mass-produced. They won't be back for 990 years, which probably is not long enough.
No, I am not going to have the "detrol discussion" with anyone.
Nor am I going to discuss fiber neuralgia or cholesterol levels or hypertension or any of that. I'm not going to change my vitamins, either. If I have a medical problem, I can go talk to my doctor without the prompting of a bloody ad on the idjit box.
Once, just once I would like to be able to watch the evening news without feeling as though I have been bombarded with a capsule reading of the Physician's Desk Reference, as given by the spokesvermin from Big Pharma. Of course, all of those ads are aimed at folks over fifty, as people much under 50 are not watching the evening news, which is why you don't see ads for snowboards.
I am sick of these fucking ads, which means that I can take the one thing that can be prescribed for it: Turning off the TV set. And before you suggest PBS's "News Hour," don't forget all all of the ads sponsor's acknowledgments at the beginning of each show.
The brave stupid weathermen who stand outside in a hurricane to show you that "damn, the wind is blowing hard!"
This happens every year. The worst offenders are the pack of lunatics on the Weather Channel. It is probably inevitable that during a hurricane, a piece of flying debris will waste one of those morons. Or maybe they'll be standing in a large puddle ("look how deep the water is here") when a power line comes down and fries the reporter.
Reporters used to have more sense. They'd set up a camera so they could get shots of trees whipping around or street signs blowing around and then the weatherman, who was safe in a nice warm and dry studio, would supply the narration.
But no, that is not good enough anymore. Now the idiots have to stand outside in the wind and rain to show that it is rainy and windy. They are living proof to the proposition that being on television makes one stupid.
Sadly, it probably will take one or more of these idiots getting his (or her) fool self seriously injured or killed in order to restore a touch of sanity to these lens-happy jackoffs. If there is an afterlife, it would only be fitting that Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin would greet them with a hard dope-slap.
UPDATE: It took about two hours for someone at the Weather Channel to find this post.
HBO's cartoon series, "The Life and Times of Tim" is just not funny, nor is it drawn well. And that Ray Romano voice is played out. Tim, the title character plays a hapless, 20-something office guy in NYC. With a formula that hackneyed, how hard would it be to make it funny? Well, it must be damned hard because it's just not at all a funny show. It's not even chuckle worthy. You could follow around virtually ANY 20-something guy in an office and he'd do the same kind of goofy stuff. So? Come on, HBO. You gave us "Six Feet Under," "Entourage" and "True Blood." Is this all you got cartoon-wise? Feh. Kill Tim.
The snow is coming down, On this old New England town, And it's been snowing all day long. I wrote this sappy Winter song, `Coz you're a jerk.
This song became "nails on a chalkboard" by the third time I saw the commercial. I have nothing against L.L. Bean, they don't make a lot of stuff in my size, but I sent them a jacket I had for 20 years to see if they'd fix it. The jacket had missing buttons and was fraying and they fixed it for no charge.
But that song! The people responsible for that ad should be beaten to death by El Kabong.
This is from one of the "rotoscope" ads that Charles Schwab is using in their "talk to Chuck" television advertising campaign, probably so the actors in the ads can deny shilling for a stock brokerage firm.
"Give us your retirement money, watch it shrink before your eyes."
I do not know what rotoscoping is supposed to do for Schwab in this ads. Come to think of it, though, getting financial advice from a `toon is probably no more insane than getting it from a stockbroker.
This is the best that Hollywood can do, now? They have run out of comic book characters, so now they have to start taking their characters from video games?
I was going to say something snarky about maybe they'll make a movie about Pac-Man, but oh, wait, they are. I guess "Tetris, the Movie" or "Pong- the Move" or "Galaxan" or "Missile Command" are not far behind. Surely "Grand Theft Auto" has been greenlighted.
No, I did not see "Doom." I like Dwane Johnson, other than the fact that he seems to be a Republican, that is, but I think movies based on video games are bottom feeders, only higher up the food chain than movies based on commercials.
This is the political silly season, so it is probably the time where making fun of fictional characters takes a back seat to making fun of real characters on all of our other blogs.
From the movie "Choke," which is being released today:
The ads for this movie (at least on basic cable) have been both pervasive and stupid. If I see too many more of them, I am going to have an urge to track down the director and choke him.
Eeuuwww. What can you say about a homoerotic ad where none of the guys are even slightly erotic? These actors just looks nasty to me. And the whole concept of having two strangers blowing bubbles in some naked guy's hotel tub is just creepy in general. Besides, who sits in a tub in a hotel? I stand on a towel just to shower in one of those germ factories.
The "WaMu" Guy. Washington Mutual pushed the envelope as hard as they could on their financial products and services.
If WaMu's brass had run their bank the way that the stuffy old bankers in their "bankers' pen" used to, WaMu might not be as large a bank as they are now, but WaMu also would not be flirting with insolvency. WaMu was heavily into a type of mortgages called "option ARMs" and those mortgages are defaulting in huge numbers.
One might even argue that the reason why WaMu isn't splashed across the front pages today is because Lehman Brothers has failed, Merrill Lynch is being sold at a near fire sale price, and AIG Insurance is teetering on the edge of collapse. The market is hammering WaMu's stock nonetheless, there just isn't the publicity about it right now.
The stuffy old guys were right. They should throw the smart-ass punk into the lion's pen.
This character should be folded, mutilated, spindled, erased, shot, stabbed, strangled, poisoned and hit with a phaser set to "deep fat fry." Not only is this character offensive in its own right, it is blasphemous. Anyone who remembers the day-to-day genius of Bill Watterson's masterful comic strip ought to be deeply offended by every mouth-breather of a moron who has a "pissing Calvin" on his truck.
In a just world, it should be legal to throw a brick through the window of every vehicle that has a "pissing Calvin" on a window. If no bricks are handy, Molotov Cocktails should be permitted as viable alternatives.
