I've got your "Man Card" right here, Miller

Actually, Strike One was your decision to hang around with these pathetic, judgmental beer whores. I mean, you seem to be able to find attractive girls on your own; why do you want to be with these dicks in the first place?

Strike Two was that weird squeaky noise you made when you tried to get one of your male "friends" to hit the restroom with you. No, it's not that going to the restroom in groups is a "girl thing," though I do have to question why any guy would express nervousness at going to a public facility by themselves. I assume that the joke is that girls go to the restroom to talk privately about the guys they are with and men, being men, simply don't do stuff like this. Fine. Regardless, that ain't Strike Two. Strike two is that high-pitched sound, which had no business coming out of anyone, male or female.

If you swing and miss at Strike Three, it won't be because you ordered the "wrong" Light Beer. Because (and we all know that this is the inevitable punchline the good people at Miller Lite missed,) guys who order Light Beer are the LAST MEN ON EARTH who have the right to question the masculinity of ANYONE. Hey, guys? What the hell do any of you know about Man Cards and the Proper Behavior of Males? I don't care if you HAVE managed to find hot girlfriends (lots of girls like to hang out with gay guys...not making accusations, just sayin'....) If you are drinking Light Beer, and worse, if you are sneering at another guy's choice of Light Beer, you really need to keep your cake holes shut when it comes to defining what it means to be a male.

And while I've got your attention, guys? Here are other activities that disqualify you from judging masculinity: Spending more than an hour a week fiddling with your fantasy football, basketball, hockey or baseball team. Spending more than ten minutes a day staring at your cellphone and running your finger along it's screen. Using that cell phone to find things whose locations are already well known to you. Driving a car which starts with the push of a button instead of the turn of a key. Gaming.

Here are some activities which actually confirm your status as a Man, in case you are interested: Changing your kid's diaper without dropping him to take a phone call. Doing your part to provide a home and security for your family. Treating your loved ones and the other people around you as if they are valuable and not annoying, smelly little appendages who mysteriously showed up in your house one day. Having respect for your friends and not questioning their sexuality because of what crappy, watered-down "beer" they choose to drink. Not driving a mud-splattered SUV, not going unshaven or with your shirt hanging out, not pumping a bottle of Round Up on every weed in your driveway on the weekends, and not drinking Miller Lite. Sorry it's not so easy.

Glad I could help.

Because there's STILL not enough noise out there!

There seem to be two messages being delivered to the viewer here: First, Seniors are really, really out of it, finding technology and contracts and what-not really confusing- no, bewildering- what with the miles of paperwork and special disconnection fees (hey, come on- you guys are seniors- how many times do you think you are going to want to switch carriers anyway? Sorry, couldn't resist.) At least this is a step up from those "my mom was so intimidated by the idea of cell phones until I got her one that was roughly the size of a World War II field radio" ads I remember from a few years ago. Still, there's something rather obnoxious about the suggestion that senior citizens- you know, that population of people who AREN'T under water on their mortgages because they didn't leverage them or buy houses they couldn't realistically afford, who have file cabinets containing every warranty and every owner's manual for every appliance they've ever owned, and never, EVER pay full price for ANYTHING because they have a coupon for everything that could possibly on sale, wouldn't know how to manage a simple cell phone contract.

Second, that seniors are being left out of the Wonderful World Of Talking Your Ass Off About Anything That Pops Into Your Head At That Moment No Matter Where You Are, and here's this wonderful product which will allow Even People 55 And Over to entertain the rest of us with their pointless, idiotic conversations as we are just trying to get on with our lives WITHOUT being kept up to date on the non-lives of total strangers. No longer will Being a Total Anti-Social Dickweed be the sole dominion of the Forty and Under crowd- thanks to this new Senior-Friendly phone service, we may now expect to hear Grandma's cell go off in the middle of the movie theater, and continue to ring as she spends ten minutes fumbling through her knapsack-sized pocketbook to find it. (And if she's like most seniors I know with their cell phones, she'll then proceed to yell into it as if she's trying to update HQ on troop movements during the Normandy Invasion.)

And I won't even get into the "Hey, Handsome!" and "Hey, Ugly!" comments which bookmark this little lump of Dumb. I guess that's just some ad agency's idea of How Seniors Talk To Each Other. Somehow, I don't see my brothers and I addressing ourselves this way when we finally join the Silver Set- but we aren't adorable twins like these guys, so who knows.

Then again, the day I find myself having a "conversation" like this at high volume as I walk down the street, assaulting innocent bystanders with my pointless blather, I really hope that someone points out that I've become my own worst enemy- and theirs, too. Of course, by then, no one will notice my behavior, because everyone else will be doing the exact same thing. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Unfortunately on Ebay the Snipers don't actually kill anyone

Has the term "Techno-Dicks" been trademarked yet?

This guy's response to being ribbed by a crowd of obnoxious jerk coworkers for using a (gasp) pen instead of an I Pad is, naturally, to go on Ebay and find one for himself.

Not to defend his use of a perfectly good pen (which must explode in his pocket, of course. Because I Pads never, ever malfunction, fail to take a charge, get cracked screens, etc. etc. ETC.) Not to quietly point out that hey, I have a fucking BUDGET, and why should I spend money I don't have on a big, expensive toy which after all does nothing more for me than take the place of a fucking PEN and PAPER? Not to tell his coworkers to kiss off and maybe re-read the part in the employee handbook covering harassment.

No, the response to being mocked and ridiculed is to give in to peer pressure and join the crowd. What an awesome message, Ebay. Thanks for nothing.

So Very Connected to Nothing at All

Wow, this is so depressing.

First, we have a stereotypical twenty-something couple which mysteriously can't even manage to pick out a restaurant unless it can read reviews in the form of floating bubbles on a cell phone. Never mind that the restaurant they are looking for is right. Across. The Street. Hey, it's 2011- can't tie your shoes unless there's an App for it, right?

I don't even want to know what those kids are trying to accomplish as they run through a field with their glowing cell phones in hand. Seems like there is some kind of Locator Device or map on each screen- again, I don't want to know. I guess it's just supposed to remind me of trying to catch fireflies, which I somehow managed to do as a little boy despite my lack of "connectivity" to a "living, breathing machine" (ugh, get the fuck over yourselves please, AT&T.)

The only really familiar scene in this ad is that of the guy walking down the street staring at his phone as the world passes by. I just wish that, every once in while, this scene would conclude with the guy walking into a moving bus. Or a wood chipper. Because admit it, that would be really cool.

The scene in the ambulance, where the patient who has obviously just been in a terrible accident is locked into a stretcher, in a neck brace....and is being reassured by the floating head of a doctor which appears on the paramedic's cell phone (the paramedic must be thinking "I went to medical school to do this? To hold a phone over somebody's head? Really?") Or maybe he's not a paramedic at all- maybe we don't need paramedics in ambulances any more, because now we can have doctors "face to face" with patients thanks to the miracle of cell phone technology. Maybe we just need people capable of holding the phone above the patient's head.

And speaking of "face to face," I can't tell you how much I loathe the "stay connected with your family" theme illustrated in the final scene, where a woman's self-satisfied smile as she talks to her kid (she can SEE him, which is just as good as being there, if not better!) puts just the right touch of hate into the ad's conclusion. Son is doing fine without mommy, because he's not really without mommy, because hey there's her face on his phone. Carry on with your life, mommy! Son is just a phone call away- a phone call made possible by the "living, breathing machine" which is The Network.

AT&T's nonstop campaign to get us to Stop Looking Up And Actually Talking To People Ever is, in my humble opinion, nothing less than a war on society. One that AT&T is winning, with the help of a population of overgrown, spoiled children determined to find comfort and guidance in little glowing boxes.*

*I give the woman with the e-book a pass. E-books are not stupid, pointless little toys. They are books. There's a difference.

No one held a gun to your head, lady

Hard to feel sorry for a woman who

1. Married a guy who is referred to as "G-Dog" by his friends,

2. Thinks it's ok to juggle changing his kid (guys in commercials like this always act as if they are babysitters with their first gig, or ten-thumbed morons attempting to assemble a ten-speed bike, when they have to do ANYTHING with children) with exchanging BS with a guy who really needed to be dumped as a "friend" right after the wedding,

3. Married a guy who uses the terms "I'm just kickin'" and "gotta bounce," and

4. Married a guy who is, let's just admit it, clearly an overgrown child who was not ready to have a wife and a child, and would much rather be "kickin" with friends who refer to him as "G-Dog."

So- sorry, lady. Put away the harried, "oh my God I was doing the laundry because you SAID you could do this one little thing" look for someone who can work up a little sympathy for your situation. You wanted the package- the guy, the house, the kid. Congratulations, you got them. Now, live with them. And dump the attitude- no one tazed, tagged and locked you into a relationship with this little boy (and no, I'm not referring to the one getting his diaper changed.) It's a little early for the "oh I suffer so with this moron I'm married to" bit.

Bed. Made. Lie. My guess is, you guys deserve each other. I just wonder how many times your kid is going to hit the floor because your chosen Sperm Donor decides to drop him instead of letting the call go to Voice Mail.

I can see taking your chances with cancer

Here's the basic theme of this commercial: there are a lot worse things than yellowed teeth and fingers, bad breath, coughing up your lungs every morning, spending a hundred dollars a week on something that makes you a smelly social outcast, and the strong possibility that you will someday die of cancer.

Included in those worse things is the apparently endless, Would Be Laughable If They Weren't So Darned Depressing (depression is included) side effects you "may" experience while taking (or when you stop taking!) Chantix, a drug designed to help you break your addiction to nicotine which, if you really pay attention to this commercial, turns out to be nowhere near as bad as the "cure."

It tells you an awful lot about the Food and Drug Administration that Chantix has been approved for use by animals who are not lab rats. None of it is good. After all, Chantix MAY cause skin disorders, wild mood swings, depression, thoughts of suicide, agitation, hostility, rashes, swollen face and throat, mental disorders, nightmares, sleeplessness, and nausea, but it also MAY help you quit smoking, and do you have any idea how much money Big Pharma pours into Washington, DC in the form of campaign contributions these days?

Clearly, the Just Get The Damn Thing On The Market Mania still dominates the pharmaceutical industry. As long as you provide a long list of side effects, you've made the company attorneys happy. The addicts who desperately need real help with what is, in fact, a disease? Well, hey, Chantix hasn't been shown to cause cancer!

Starting our Sunday with a little morsel of Stupid

Ugh, can we please enact a moratorium on calling babies "miracles?" I mean, if babies are "miracles," they are the most common "miracles" in the history of the universe. If babies are miracles, miracles take place every few seconds everywhere on the planet. If babies are miracles, then miracles have become much noisier, smellier, and time-and-money consuming since I used to read about them in Sunday School.

Seriously, can we stop with this "miracle" crap already? Here's what would be a miracle- if these two people continuously had sex and yet never managed to produce a rather large-headed, pale, bald mammal that was not made up of DNA from both parents. If eggs repeatedly failed to fertilize despite being assaulted by sperm, that would be quite a "miracle."

I understand that couples tend to get a little excited when they manage to produce one of these things. Really, I get that. What I do not understand is their insistence on butchering the English language by consistently referring to their offspring as "miracles." Because sorry- unless you use the same term to refer to seedlings becoming plants, or your dog producing a litter of puppies some months after the neighbor's Best Friend got through the hole in the fence, you aren't making a whole lot of sense here. And you are really watering down the concept of "Miracle."

Maybe the real "miracle" here is that this commercial features a guy, his wife, and their baby, and the guy doesn't come across as a COMPLETELY worthless loser who appears perfectly capable of injuring the kid through his own cluelessness if left alone with it for five minutes. I guess that's something.