If their lifestyles were anything like this before, they wouldn't need this stuff now

Keep your weight down.

Eat right.

Exercise.

And stop looking for youth in a tiny bottle, a pill, or (you've got to be kidding me) an underarm deodorant.  Man I am ashamed of my fellow males today.  What the hell is the matter with you idiots- thirty years of being a pathetic, KFC-and-Doritos-gorging couch potato finally catching up to you?

Want to live forever?  Not going to happen. Want to feel young longer? Take care of yourself, and stop asking your doctor for a prescription to fix the problems you created yourself over the last several decades.

By the way- all you losers in this ad?  I don't care how you think you feel- you still LOOK old.  Sucks to be you.

Oh just bite me, AT&T

1. If it's so important to keep that baby from waking up, why did these idiots pick NOW to walk into an AT&T store and try to find a decent data plan?

2.  Is it really society's job to condescend and compensate for this stupid decision?  In other words, does everyone in this freaking store have to be oh so quiet because the moron parents brought their pwecious wittle bundle in with them?  Well, sorry, no.  Your sleeping little mammal is YOUR problem, breeders.  Don't even TRY to make it mine.  Seriously, that "SHHHHH!!" in response to "can I help you?" REALLY ticked me off.  You are in a store, people.  You walked in on your own accord.  Now the planet has to be quiet because your kid is sleeping? Who the hell do you think you are?  WHY ARE YOU HERE?

3.  Why do they even NEED a data plan with 10 gigs "to share?"  How much time is that baby going to spend on a freaking cell phone?  (Oh who am I kidding- that kid will be downloading before it learns how to talk.)

Oh, and two more thoughts-

1.  One day I woke up and found myself living in a world where $160 a month for phone service seemed like an amazingly good deal.  I wish I could get back to sleep.

2.  The guy is carrying the baby.  Why is the woman bouncing along with him?  Does she think that helps in any way at all?

Another Awful Subaru Ad

Ugh, come on.

Subaru has been making a determined effort to convince us that their cars aren't just cars but part of the freaking poetry of our lives for quite some time now.  The guy with the cheesy perm and faraway gaze in his eyes who pollutes this minute-plus bucket of pond scum is just another example of Subaru's apparently endless parade of mopey minions who credit their car with making their lives...well, with making their lives.

The worst part about these nuggets of nothingness is the conceit- we are really supposed to care about any of this?  Oh, and the fact that nothing ever happens in these ads which couldn't just as easily happen in any other model of car.

And the worst part about THIS particular commercial is the more-creepy-than-cutesy attempt by Perm Guy to snag a date with the woman who rear-ended him, and the fact that we are supposed to believe it worked.  I mean, come on.  Ick.

"When you have the serious illness YOU can decide where we go on vacation, honey."

Bob woke up one day and decided to face death right in the face.  To Bob, that meant living life to the fullest, every day. Which meant not having "the usual" at the local diner (so what are you going to have, Bob? Or did you just show up at the diner to impress the waitress with your willingness to-- um---"change up your life?")

It also meant turning right instead of left.  I have no idea what this means.  It's kind of implied that Bob used to go to some clinic for treatment which he no longer needs because of this awesome new drug.  But if he doesn't have to go there anymore, why did he program the destination into his Garmin GPS?  Is Bob so far gone that he told his GPS he needed directions to the clinic- just so he could tell it to "suck this, I'm making my own decisions, Garmin!"  If so, is Bob really weird, or what?

At first, I thought Bob bought those flowers for his travel agent, who was also his mistress.  Turns out I was wrong about that, and the truth is even stranger.  Bob sits down with the oddly-still-employed agent (it's 2014- these things still exist?) and seems about to arrange a trip to FLORIDA when he suddenly notices a poster for NEW ZEALAND- and decides he wants to go there instead.  Whatever this new drug is, it's turned Bob into a really impulsive person.

It's also turned him into kind of a controlling jackass, because we now learn that those flowers are for his wife, who gets the "good news" that they are heading for New Zealand.  Ok, some people will find this very sweet and lovely and all that.  I think it's kind of obnoxious that Bob decided on a major vacation destination without even talking about it with his significant other.  Maybe she's his girlfriend and not his wife, and maybe Bob makes all the money in the family- doesn't matter.  A reasonable person who gives a damn what she thinks makes her part of the decision-making process.  Maybe she really wanted to go to Florida.  Maybe she wants to see Rome, or Greece, or any of a number of other places I'd rather see than New Zealand.  But apparently what she wants doesn't really matter- she's thrilled to be going to New Zealand, and that's a good thing, because that's where they are going.  Bob has Spoken.

Maybe Bob is just determined to bleed to death in New Zealand.  Good health care down there, I've heard. And I can certainly think of worse places to experience all these horrible symptoms.  Still- what a jerk.

Rewinding to the Best Days Of Our Lives

In 1987 I landed a part-time job at a video rental place (named, without much imagination, Video Place) in Crystal City, Virginia.  I was just finishing up college, looking at graduate schools, and wondering if my long-time college girlfriend was ever going to be interested in moving on to the, umm, next step.

That was a great job.  The store was a little hole in the wall in an underground mall, next to a liquor store and directly across from a Waxie Maxie's (where my exclusive contacts managed to hook me up with a copy of Zelda II just in time for Christmas for my eight-year old nephew.)  We rented portable VCRs and even sold a Goldstar on occasion (I'll probably have to do a few years in purgatory for that) but mostly we rented movies and music videos, $2.49 a night and a $1 fine if you failed to rewind (a fee I'm pretty positive we never once actually imposed- unwound tapes went into the car-shaped rewinder behind the counter.)  We watched a lot of music videos -- Tears for Fears (Songs from the Big Chair,) Genesis (Visible Touch,) Janet Jackson (Rhythm Nation,) etc.  We spent a lot of time assembling display stands- the one for Throw Momma From The Train included a computer chip which let you hear Anne Ramsey bleat "Owen loves his Momma, Owen loves his Momma" when you pushed a button, and some of us employees came pretty close to murdering the kids who would push it 100 times while their parents picked films off the shelves.  We always had customers who wanted us to give them the displays when they were ready to come down, and we were generally willing to do so- except that the ones for Disney films remained the property of Disney and had to be returned to the studio.  I sold 400 advance copies of E.T.  and won a television set for selling the most 4-packs of Kodak VHS tapes (turned out that the blind guy who purchased most of them was a bootlegger who finally got nabbed by the feds.)

One summer the prudes who ran Northern Virginia came down hard on video stores and our company decided that we could only show G-rated musicals and Disney films on the store monitor- we didn't have much selection at the time, so we watched Calamity Jane and My Fair Lady pretty much every day until we were ready to go insane.  Fortunately our regulars found it obnoxious too, complained, and we got back to music videos and PG films by Labor Day.  I used to be able to lip-sync An American Tail. 

I remember the Stock Market crash of 1987, the time volunteers for the Hart-For-President campaign tried to cut a better deal on bulk blank tape purchases, and the day my manager brought in his recording of Buster Douglas upsetting Mike Tyson and showed it for a crowd of people who were perfectly willing to be late to work rather than miss the ending.  I remember the 30 days we tried to be a TicketMaster outlet, and how the machines never worked.  I remember calling in credit cards to get authorization codes, and the time I had to stall an irate crook because the operator told me to hold his card until the police could get there and take him down.

In 1989 I became a manager, and moved to a downtown DC store.  I was robbed at gunpoint twice, and on another day opened bright and early in the morning to find fingerprint dust everywhere- my assistant manager, closing the night before, had been robbed.  I remember catching numerous would-be shoplifters and failing to catch many, many more.

In 1990 the owner of our 7-store chain decided to sell out, which meant the inventory had to be liquidated.  I turned out to be a pretty good salesman, so I was sent from store to store running close-out sales.  When I closed the store back at Crystal City I sold every single VHS tape we had available but one- a copy of Satisfaction ("starring" Justine Bateman- come on, Liam Neeson was in it too, and it wasn't THAT bad..)  One guy bought every Disney movie we had- about forty tapes- for $200.  Hope he enjoyed them.

In 1991 I left the video rental business for good, got my graduate degree, got married (not to that college girlfriend- she left for grad school without saying goodbye in 1988 and I never saw nor heard from her again) and moved to upstate New York.   I didn't know it at the time, but I had spent four years in an industry that was staring oblivion in the face.  In the following decade other chains would vanish, replaced by RedBox and Netflix and other online services, and the idea of puttering around a store trying to pick out a tape to watch on the VCR that night suddenly seemed as quaint and archaic as Drive-Ins.  Want to buy a movie now?  That's what Amazon is for.

Anyway, here's a heartfelt salute to an age that left us way too soon- and I think left us all a little poorer with its departure.  For every awful customer who didn't seem to understand that "OPEN 10AM-7PM" did not mean "OPEN 6:30 AM- 7:30 PM" or thought it was perfectly ok to call every fifteen minutes to ask if a certain film had been returned and could we please hold it for him, there were far more fun regulars and great co-workers and overall good times.  Even the robberies were fun after the fact.  So goodbye Erols, goodbye Blockbuster, and especially goodbye Video Place- your contribution to my life and American culture in the late 20th century deserves more recognition than I can give you in this little blog.   Every now and then, I'll rewind a tape in your memory.

In the Future, these guys will be Greeters at this same Walmart

1.  Isn't it great that the black family in this ad have made choices that the white people in this ad approve of?  And the black family looks so happy about it- I bet they run home and tell the neighbors how the awesome white workers at Walmart gave a big geeky thumbs-up to their ridiculous spending spree.

2.  I'm impressed that two twenty-something white guys working at Walmart are actually enthusiastic and optimistic about the future.  I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be, were I them.

3.  When sneakers are equipped with jet packs ARE available, you can bet the place to buy the cheapest version will be at your local Walmart.  Of course, by then, it will probably be the only store within fifty miles of your house anyway.

Campbell's salute to Moms

What do moms dream of?  Nah, it's not a life beyond diapers and bag lunches and homework and cleaning and being a handmaiden to the Guy Who Made All This Possible.  It's how to be "more fun."

Apparently the "answer" to "how can I be a more fun mom" is to be found in the wisdom of a Wise Kid (he's wise because he's got a beard and lives on a cloud or a mountain or something, get it?)

No, mom can't dance- but she can use a can opener.  And we all know how much kids love soggy canned noodles, processed chicken cubes and salt-infused broth, don't we?  (Jeesh, when I was a kid I liked Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup- when I was sick and couldn't keep down anything else. When I was a normal, healthy kid with a normal, healthy appetite?  Yuck.)

So mom can change diapers, bag lunches, help with the homework, keep the house spotless AND heat up cheap soup.  Boy, was she a catch.  Not especially fun- but a catch nonetheless.