Not the Answer to Rachel's problem

Rachel wakes up with back pain. So she gulps down two Tylenol. A few hours later, she spots some hard benches, assumes that they will result in back pain, and so gulps down two more. A few hours later, it's been a few hours, and Rachel, being a creature of habit, gulps down two Tylenol just for the heck of it.

That night, she is the object of a one-person intervention by her husband, who forces her to watch an Aleve commercial on the family's big screen HDTV. "Hey honey, nobody wants to force you to give up your pill habit...but maybe if you switch to Aleve, you'll be down to a bottle a month...wanna give it a try?'

Now Rachel gets up in the morning with her ever-present friend, back pain, and gulps down two Aleve which last "all day long." Aleve's pain-numbing medicine is so much more advanced than that of Tylenol that it will keep her in drug-induced non-agony until she turns in that night. Yay. Of course, it's only a matter of time before Rachel starts popping two pre-emptive tablets before she turns off the light- why wake up with pain, after all.

I just wonder- before Rachel's kidneys and liver finally surrender to the nonstop chemical barrage they are receiving from this poor woman's constant intake of pain medication, Rachel might consider actually picking up a phone and MAKING AN APPOINTMENT WITH HER DOCTOR. Because I'm pretty sure that over the counter drugs like Tylenol and Aleve aren't really designed to deal with medical conditions which produce long-term pain. When I was in a car accident seven years ago, I suffered a back injury which required me to ingest a daily dose of Oxyprozin to deaden the pain while I completed physical therapy. Today I deal with back pain with exercise and only take drugs to deal with EXTREME pain- the kind that prevents me from getting on with life. They aren't part of my daily diet, and I kind of suspect they aren't supposed to be.

There's something very wrong with ads for over the counter drugs (or any drugs, for that matter) which suggest that it's perfectly ok to include allegedly powerful painkillers along with your coffee, orange juice and toast routine. Especially since your body doesn't want a lot of this stuff in it's system, and will let you know this, in very nasty ways, sooner or later.

How do they get away with this?

Ok, I've given Hyundai a hard time with their ads in the past. "Hyundai Uncensored" is nothing more than blatant false advertising- either the "hidden video" is heavily edited or (much more likely, in my opinion) it's not hidden at all, boiling the entire campaign down to "let's lie to our customers."

Hyundai isn't exactly LYING in these "Lease a Hyundai Sonata for only $199 a month" ads, but they come pretty damned close- too close to just let slide. Check out the fine print- there's just a LITTLE money due at signing, hardly worth mentioning (which I guess is why it's not mentioned by the thrilled-to-death narrator.) Because this is a Full Service Site, I won't make you burn out your eyes trying to find the figure I'm referring to. It's $2399.

That's Two Thousand, Three Hundred and Ninety-Nine Dollars. Due at lease signing. Before you can drive off with your "$199 a month" awesome deal.

There's a little something there concerning taxes and tags too, but that's to be expected if you've ever bought a car. Let's stay with that Due at Signing figure. Exactly how much IS $2399, anyway? Well, my trusty calculator tells me that it's the equivalent of another ENTIRE YEAR OF LEASE PAYMENTS.

So what is this great deal, really? Quite simply: You can lease a Hyundai Sonata for $199 a month, for three years. You just have to pay for four years.

Great deal, huh? Oh, and don't forget to bring it back without a scratch, and under 12,000 miles per year on the odometer. Other than that, enjoy the car you are essentially renting for $9563 for three years (paying for four.)

But before you head off to take advantage of this Great Deal, just ask yourself: ARE YOU A FREAKING MORON?????

Well, if you believe that the "Hyundai Uncensored" commercials are legit, you probably are. But heck, if you believe those commercials, you're probably driving around in one of these stunningly overpriced imports already. Enjoy!

Town of the Living Dead

Here's a delightfully cutesy ad for yet another phone-gaming-texting-video hybrid monstrosity featuring an entire town of drugged zombies who are simply incapable of taking a step or developing a thought which does not involve gazing fondly at a screen and pushing buttons.

Here's a guy who can't play his keyboard unless he's got his little security blanket positioned where he can read it- or maybe he's just not willing to do anything that doesn't involve using the thing he convinced himself he needed last month. Here's another guy who isn't about to be drawn into a conversation with the driver of the car he's in- to hell with that, he's too busy playing some clueless, braincell-sucking game. Here's another guy on a bus who figures that he might as well take a photo of two total strangers, because what the hell, his overpriced little toy does that, too.

Best of all- here's a guy with flowers who is having a hard time finding the object of his affections because he's relying on his phone to guide him to the very SPOT she's standing. Never mind that all he has to do is LOOK UP- how could he bear to to that, what with this wicked cool electronic thingee? And of course, his potential Better Half is doing exactly the same thing. These guys are one dead battery way from never meeting up at all- and seriously, would this really be a bad thing?

Sometimes I feel like I live in this town. More than once (more than a thousand times, actually) I've taken long walks through local parks and down local streets, passing people whose necks seem permanently bent down and their brains focused on the Really Important Thing that's happening on that little screen in their hand. I've seen small children practically beg for attention from their parents (usually in vain,) and I've seen older kids apparently resolved to the fact that it's not worth the bother. More and more of these older kids have their own nifty little time vampires to keep them happy in their social retardation, so it's All Good, I guess.

Still, I don't regret the fact that this junk didn't exist when I was younger. I guess I'm just weird in some ways.

Here at Dr Pepper, we've got money to burn!

I just gotta say, this is a lot of work in service of not a whole hell of a lot- basically, we get a big production number just to hear the most predictable play on words imaginable.

I just wish I could have been in the boardroom where it was decided that yes, it makes perfect sense to invest a huge amount of time and money to bring a sad reminder of the 1970s back to the stage to utter a bad pun. "Look, we'll get Doctor Love, and we'll get KISS on stage, and we'll have him say something like, I don't know, a KISS of flavor or something like that! Get it? KISS of flavor? DOCTOR Love? Trust me, it will be GREAT!" I mean, how out of it were the guys who signed off on the production costs for this lump of Not Very Much At All?

Then again, this is an ad for Dr. Pepper, a soda popular only with people who think that soft drinks should taste like cough syrup. So maybe this works with the target audience. For the rest of us, we are left shaking our heads and wondering why every corporation in the US isn't as willing to part with it's money for so little return. Think how fast we could wipe out unemployment among 70s rockers!

"Famous" being a relative term, of course

Once upon a time, this kid would have contorted himself for a few minutes to the sole amusement of this one guy ("Show me something cool? What the hell? Who are you, anyway? Looks to me like this kid just walked into the kitchen looking for a glass of milk- why does he have to perform on demand because this guy has a phone, anyway?) A good laugh would have been had by the two guys, and life would have gone on as normal, with no else the "wiser."

Once upon a time, you could trip and fall and know that at the very worst, you'd suffer momentary, swiftly-forgotten embarrassment if there happened to be a few people around. Hey, these things happen. Your face turns red, there are a few giggles, and the moment passes.

It's not Cisco's fault that those days are gone, but The Human Network would like to claim at least a LITTLE of the "credit." Now, every stupid thing you do in a moment of God Please Don't Make Me So Desperate I Pick Up a Book boredom can be captured for the "entertainment" of the entire planet. Every little dance, every bad joke, every alcohol-induced moment of foolishness or frightful honesty can be captured by any jackass with a cell phone and broadcast around the world in roughly fifteen seconds. That moment may be forgotten- God knows that 99.999% of it is utterly forgettable- but it's been cached and filed and is available to anyone with internet access and a search engine.

Remember this the next time someone holding an electronic device asks you to "just do something." And hope that when it happens, you aren't drunk or otherwise have your usual defenses down (or does this generation even have defenses against invasions of privacy anymore? Does the word Privacy even hold any meaning these days?) Know that what you choose to do is going to be fodder for internet-addicted strangers all over the world before you have a chance to rethink your actions ("rethink" implying that there was a thought process at work in the first place), let alone sober up.

These Days, thanks to Cisco, anyone can be Famous. And that's a good thing- umm, why, exactly?

The 99ers? Let them eat cake- somewhere else

Is it especially evil of me to want this police officer to club these two bleating jackanapes senseless with his nightclub before hauling them off to the local Bastille to await the National Razor? I mean, wouldn't that just be a public service to the poor job-hunting, "just stepped in to rest my aching feet and read the want ads before standing in line for another three hours at the unemployment office" population?

Who the HELL wants to listen to this self-congratulatory, "hey listen up everybody I've got money to play with in the stock market" BS? My guess is that the outsourced father of three wondering where the next mortgage payment is coming from wouldn't mind being deprived of a conversation consisting of buzzwords like "market trends," "double bottom patterns" and (groan) "gap reversals."

I know ScotTrade has a product to sell, and the right to market it as best it can. But that doesn't mean I have to like the flood of "make money by pushing it around and not by actually producing anything or providing any value to society" commercials, does it?

I hope not. Because right now, all I really want is to see the torsos of these two grinning WASPS deprived of their empty heads, and those empty heads gracing pikes on the city walls. Instead, what we are all going to get is an extension of tax cuts which primarily serve to put more money in the pockets of people like these guys. The lovers of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity will just have to wait.

Our Favorite Smirking, Eyeless Weirdo is back!

The look on the face of the guy in the first few seconds of this commercial says it all- he's just sitting outside the cafe, minding his own damned business, and the look he gives us so is clearly "oh jesus, THIS shmuck again!" makes me wonder if State Farm doesn't realize it's milked it's Wandering Sack of Smarm campaign dry and is just kidding with us now.

The rest of the commercial is more of the same- our favorite Eyeless Smirking Wonder strolls pointlessly through some hip coffee shop, barely avoiding collisions with customers and employees alike, all the time spewing some focus group-approved bs about how State Farm, and ONLY State Farm, can guide you to the Promised Land of Savings. It concludes with this overpaid sack of doorknobs settling down at a table and being handed a cup of coffee he didn't even order, for which the waitress gets barely an acknowledging nod. He didn't even have to conjure it up by bleating the magic State Farm jingle!

I'll note that the guy's coffee is delivered in a To-Go cup; is that a subtle hint, or what? Hey buddy, you found your way in- now PLEASE, find your way out, and stop lecturing us about the awesomeness of State Farm, ok?

But when you do walk out, don't expect to find Exasperated Black Guy still sitting outside- he saw you coming, gulped down the last of his joe, and took off, rather than risk listening to any more of your pointless banter. Can't say as I blame him.