In other words- "Surprise! You thought Sam Adams was crap!"

Remember back in the 70s when we saw commercials like this: "We secretly replaced the gourmet coffee in this restaurant with Folger's Crystals.  Let's talk to the customers and see what they say?"  All of the people in these ads would tell the strange man who for some reason was interviewing them about their coffee in the middle of a restaurant how awesome the coffee was, then express shock to learn that whatever they had consumed for dinner had absolutely murdered their taste buds, because after all if you can't tell the difference between fresh-brewed real coffee and instant you probably order your gourmet cheeseburgers off the Dollar Menu.

What's that you say?  You don't remember these commercials because you aren't old enough?  Well, neither do I, because I'm not old enough either.  So how about those ads a few years back that showed people eating pasta from Dominos and thinking that it's high-quality Italian food (those people obviously think that "high quality Italian food" is something you get at The Olive Garden?)  Or "It's not Delivery, it's DiGiorno" (featuring intensely sad idiots who have never experienced good take-out pizza, ever?)

Well, I guess this is what the makers of Sam Adams are going for with this mess.  But it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.  I've never equated Sam Adams as the instant coffee or frozen pizza of beers- that's what Rolling Rock* is there for.  I've always considered Sam Adams a reasonably high-end beer-- so why are it's makers trying to convince us that we've always regarded it as tasteless, cheap junk (like instant coffee and frozen pizza?)

*We used to drink this when we weren't of legal age, because it was very inexpensive and even when gasoline was 90 cents a gallon we had to cut corners if we wanted to have a good time on the weekends.**

**No, I'm not old enough to remember when gasoline was 90 cents a gallon, either.  Shut up.

Hey, at least they are all using earbuds. That's something.

Here's an iPhone commercial which commits two sins very common in TV Land-

1.  First, it's too damned long.  We get what it's about in ten seconds, but it proceeds to go on for thirty.  People like using their phones to listen to music.  It's not complicated. WE GET IT.  We DON'T NEED SIX MORE EXAMPLES OF SELF-ABSORBED MORONS LISTENING TO THEIR PHONES.  We GET that the iPhone can be used as a RIDICULOUSLY EXPENSIVE WALKMAN.  Can we move on now please?

2.  Second, it's pointless.  If you have an iPhone, you already know you can download and listen to music on it.  If you don't have an iPhone, is this really the feature that is going to get you to finally break down and buy one?  Not the forty million Apps?  Not the games?  I won't even ask about actually using it to call and talk to people- when was the last time that was used as a selling point for any cell phone?

And until Congress finally kills off the post office, we get regular mail service here, too!

I just love how this woman and her family are living in some fricking palace in the landscaped 'burbs, yet seem to be trying to convince us that she and hubby moved the entire brood to a desert island or the shadow of the D.E.W. Line, and Look How Amazing It Is That We Are Still Connected To Civilization LOL!

I also love how we are supposed to be happy that they are using that Connectivity so...um..."productively."  Dad is DOMINATING his fantasy leagues.  Daughter is downloading music to her phone.  Son is....umm...."doing his homework" by....umm...looking at somebody's generic idea of a "Dinosaur."  Yeah, the internet is soooooo vital to this family's daily survival and happiness.  WTF-ever, HughesNet.

But I still just can't get past the idea that these people are not exactly living on an orbiting space station or a shack in Upper Mongolia here.  So, where the hell are they where they could buy a multi-million dollar home which doesn't have standard (read: good, reliable) internet access?  My parents live on a farm in Orange, Vermont, five miles from the nearest...errr, "city," which last time I checked had a population of about 12,000.  The pavement ends about two miles from the house, and most of their neighbors are cows.  They have phone service and Dish Network, no problem.  So where do THESE people live?

Now Anne's just a long-term cell phone contract away from being financially stable

This is Anne.  She just got out of school, and she's got a "Freelance Gig."  Anne's got a quarter of a million dollars in student loans to pay back, but she's working freelance.  Anne's not the the sharpest tool in the shed.

Anne's freelance gig wasn't going very well, so she decided to hit Best Buy for "all the Samsung products she needs."  In other words, Anne decided that the reason she wasn't getting enough gigs to begin paying off those student debts was that she didn't have enough expensive electronic crap.  So she did what most people do when they find themselves with a large amount of debt and a small amount of money coming in - she accumulated more debt.

(Personally, I already have "all the Samsung products I need."  Which is to say, I don't own any Samsung products.)

Now that Anne has dug herself a deeper financial hole with a visit to Best Buy, she'd better start raking in the cash, because it sure looks like she's run out of excuses.  But what the heck, if all those new Samsung products don't make her more productive, I'm sure they at least make her downtime between gigs a lot more fun.  And she "needed" them, after all.

She has to do a few things first, too- like change her Facebook status back to "Single"

1.  Remember all those times you were in a romantic restaurant, or sitting at home on the couch, or laying in bed, with this guy?  That was the time to start discussing the idea of starting a family.  Not in the middle of the fucking street, surrounded by people like me who aren't interested in your spontaneous "I want to pop out a mammal!" decision.

2.  You want to have a baby- with THIS guy?  Look at him.  I'm telling you to do this because you clearly haven't lately.  You want to mix your DNA with THIS guy?  Really?

3.  Listen to what this guy says in response.  He wants to go spelunking with his friends.  He "still hasn't built that killer robot."  I'll say it again- you want to have a baby- with THIS guy?  You want this guy helping you raise a little person- a guy who isn't sure he wants to start a family because after all, he hasn't crawled around underground with his drinking buddies or hibernated for six months in a basement to build a robot (and he's clearly over twelve?)  REALLY?

All is forgiven if this guy's Visions of a Pathetic, Developmentally Challenged Future interrupted the girl's sentence which, if allowed to continue, would have gone something like this:  "I want to have a baby- which means I need to find a stable, mature adult to be with.  Tootles!"

(Heads Up:  I'll be on vacation until next Saturday night at a place with no internet access again....see you when I get back!)

Lets go back to playing the quiet game now

Does it bother anyone else that all of these "I Like And Better" commercials require the same implausible elements to come together to make even the slightest amount of sense?

1.  The driver of the car has to wait until the passenger inexplicably praises the car he or she is travelling in.  I have never, ever done this, but I'm pretty sure that if I found myself saying "hey, this car is really nice" it would be a very strong signal to the driver that A)  I was sitting here feeling really awkward, and felt I should say SOMETHING, and B) I am the worst conversationalist in the history of the known universe.

2.  The driver then gets to respond by pointing out two positive attributes of the automobile which have absolutely nothing to do with each other.  "Yeah, it has anti-lock brakes AND great gas mileage."  "Yep, electronically adjustable mirrors AND Sirius satellite radio."  "You got it- heated seats AND a foot-controlled hatch."*

3.  Idiot passenger, realizing that he's unwittingly stumbled into a lame "lets talk about my awesome car" conversation which promises to be even worse than the heavy silence that forced him to vomit up his stupid "hey, this car is really nice" comment, ramps up the dumb by observing that "and" is better than "or."  I'll give the idiot passenger credit for quite reasonably believing that THIS should so totally flummox the driver that he finally agrees to turn on the fucking radio and end this torture.

But noooooooo.......

4.  Cotton Candy For Brains Driver, believing that no conversation is so utterly vapid that it should be allowed to die a natural death, actually challenges his Dying Inside, Wondering How Much It Would Hurt If He Just Jumped travel companion to imagine fun other situations in which "And" is better than "Or."  Fun, that is-- if they were, say, six years old and the DVD player in the SUV was on the fritz.  "That would be like black OR white photography."  "That would be like sweet OR sour chicken."  "That would be like 30-day paid vacations OR stock options."

5.  Shared mental image.  Who is the originator of the image?  Who cares?  Both people in the commercial manage to create the same unimaginative, ludicrous scene in their heads at the same time.

6.  Well, that conversation is over, Thank God.  Now what will we talk about?  Let's play the quiet game, shall we?  Nah, let's just continue to make the Geico "Happier than..." series look like high art.

*99.9 percent of the time, foot-controlled hatch used by drivers overburdened with pizzas or KFC buckets.

The Future of Brain-Dead, Fat, Pasty, Socially Retarded America. I Get It.

This summer, commercials trumpeting "the future of Awesome" are becoming even more aggressive, with the narrator taking a hammer labeled "When You Get It, You GET IT!" to our brains every other ad break.  What we are supposed to "Get," of course, is that while the sun is streaming through the windows and there are flowers to pick, balls to throw, bikes to ride and lakes to swim, what's REALLY AWESOME is when everyone in the family has their own screen to gaze at while drool drips down their chins (yes, that's a plural) and there is absolutely no lag time between downloads which might encourage someone to, I don't know, GET UP AND WALK AROUND EVEN A LITTLE BIT.

Or, hell, even TALK to those other life forms which seem to inhabit that house with you.  Because conversations might move beyond "check out this movie" to dangerous stuff like "what the hell are we doing indoors on such a lovely day" or "I'm blowing my summer vacation watching tv?  Really?"  Can't have that.

So let's all listen to the very insistent narrator, sign up for Fios, equip everyone in the house with personalized idiot boxes, and settle down for "Endless Fun" until our eyes melt out of our heads and our bodies atrophy into warm, useless mush.  Because that's the Future of Awesome, after all, and the future can't come fast enough for us, right?

But, geesh..at least, pull the damn shades.  The glare off my screen is really annoying, besides the fact that it gives me this unpleasant feeling that there might be something more to life than becoming part of the couch while my waistband expands.