The Assistant Manager of this Dominos has a PhD in Astrophysics. He gets a 10 percent discount on Thursdays.

Yeah, whatever.  Just get it here inside an hour and I'll be happy, Pizza Monkey.

I just love these Dominos "our pizza makers are artisans who are real people check out their really cool stories about how talented they are when they aren't making pizzas for minimum wage" commercials, don't you?

I mean, it's really cool that this guy is an artist and he sees his hands as his tools- I guess.  I mean, I really don't care.  What this guy does when he's not on the clock at Dominos isn't anyone's business and it's kind of hard to see why it's of interest to anyone other than himself.   Not to be rude or anything, but, dude?  It's not that people think of you as "just a pizza maker, just a pizza boy."  It's that we don't think about you at all.
You want us to know that outside of Dominos, you paint?  Um, ok.  Mission accomplished.  Did you want us to care? You still have a long way to go with that one.

And oh, hey, Dominos?  If you respect this guy's skills so much, if you want us to think of him as a craftsman and of Dominos as a company that hires craftsmen to make your pizzas, where do you get off failing to pay these Artists a living wage or providing them with a decent health insurance package?  Sorry, but you don't get to have it both ways.  Either you hire desperate kids drowning in student loans who can't find a job in their field because the economy is still in the toilet and will work for slave wages for a massive, impersonal corporation, or you take advantage of budding dreamer artists who also are willing to work for those same slave wages.  Either way, don't expect any plaudits from me.

Oh, and your pizza still sucks.

Golden Corral invites us to kill ourselves this weekend

Ah, Golden Corral, you truly are the gift that keeps on giving....

Come in on Friday for All You Can Eat For About Ten Bucks batter-fried fish, hush puppies, and french fries!  Remember we are only open till 10 PM, so we strongly suggest that you get back on line before you actually finish the food on your plate- and don't forget the Chocolate Wonderfall!

Come back on Saturday for All You Can Eat For About Ten Bucks steak, mashed potatoes, and macaroni and cheese!  Don't forget to wear your sweat pants- and don't forget the Everyone Stick Your Hands Right In There Cotton Candy Machine!

What could be better for getting the bad taste of church out of your mouth than a Sunday Afternoon at Golden Corral and all the fried chicken, waffles with chipped beef on toast, and pancakes you can shove down your cakeholes (oh yeah, don't forget the cake!) It's all yours for About Ten Bucks- and for a change of pace, we've got a Caramel Wonderfall to stick your macaroons in now!

If you're still alive on Monday morning, good luck rolling out of bed and squeezing your fat ass into your car and heading off for another week of wheezing and sweating in your cubicle, just a few pounds heavier and a few months closer to a premature death brought on by your truly horrible eating habits.  See you Friday!

Passive-Aggressiveness in a Jell-O Ad

Wow, really- mom* decided to show her disgust at daughter's cell phone obsession by encasing the thing in a bowl of Jell-O?

Somehow this is preferable to setting simple boundaries, like "this is how long you are allowed to use your phone each day- and if you go over that amount, you'll lose it?"  I get that "you'll have a cell phone when you can pay for it, including the monthly bill" is Totally Out There Unrealistic in 21st century America, but are parents simply not allowed to set any rules at all anymore?

Anyone else think that his family needs some serious counseling, that this ad isn't the slightest bit funny, and that daughter really needs actual parents who will actually Do Their Freaking Job and establish a few- you know, "rules" she must live by?  There's more to life than your phone, stupid- but your current parents don't seem interested in teaching you that.  They'd rather roll their eyes, shrug their shoulders, and cut off their own noses to spite their faces by ruining phones (the only way that thing got into that Jello was if it was placed in there while it was still in liquid form- if people try this in real life, they are going to end up with a broken phone.  And you KNOW these parents will replace it, quickly, because they have no interest in listening to daughter's DT-level rants if she has to go without a phone for more than a few minutes.)

(BTW, how did Daughter lose her phone in the first place?  Isn't it basically connected to her hand?  Was she in the shower while it was being swiped, or what?)

*Yes, I'm assuming it was Mom who made the Jell-O.  This is TV, after all, and on TV Moms do the food prep and cleaning and child care, and Jell-O is way too complicated for guys anyway.

Hey, Bank of America? Keep it to yourself, it's my life!*

Larry has spent his entire "life" being a disgusting, money-and-death-obsessed creep.  He started very young, using Grown-Up phrases like "under-served season" to describe winter because having a Hot Chocolate stand just for the fun of it simply would not do for Larry.  Oh, and then he walked out on his "partner" because his "partner" would not "offer a 401(k) plan" (my guess is that this happened because the little boy who just wanted to make a few extra bucks raking leaves was concentrating on being a kid and not on being too old to work anymore- in other words, wasn't willing to go through life with a gigantic pole rammed up his ass like Larry.)

Everything worked out fine for Larry- he managed to find a woman to marry him and produce a kid (being totally devoid of human emotion beyond "how has my portfolio performed since I checked it five minutes ago?") and was even willing to part with some of his precious money to buy a gilded cage--err, house-- for said woman.  Now he can pretend that his fixation on Having Enough Later has something to do with them- he's just being responsible, you see.  Never mind that he's just doing what he's been doing his whole life- he just found someone to clean up around him and have sex with from time to time in the off-moments he's not doing it.

Everything is NOT going to work out fine for that kid, though.  Check out the abacus- Larry is willing to look up from his screen now and then to make sure that the next generation is just as damaged by pointless Move Money Around Until You Die And Pretend This Is Really A Fulfilling Way To Go Through Life as he is.   That's a nice house but....still.  Poor kid.

*Title is a shout-out to the YouTube droolers who bleat "what is that song?" in the comments section of every commercial posted- seriously, what is the matter with you idiots?

Well, at least they're outside. Still- Chex Worship?

Oh, and this doesn't seem to require the use of cell phones or tablets either, so maybe I shouldn't be snarking on this so much, but....

I think we can safely conclude that The Pearsons have completely run out of ideas for family activities, don't you?  I mean, they apparently devoted an entire afternoon to making a commercial about their favorite cereal brand.  Worse, they did a lot of it on their lawn, in full view of the neighbors....I hope nobody was trying to sell their house that day.  I can see the Century 21 lady trying to distract potential buyers who might not be thrilled at moving in next to these dipsy lunatics.

And just another pet peeve here- women who narrate commercials and refer to their families as "The Pearsons" or the "McCullens" or the "Smiths," etc.  I really hate when these people are so gosh-darned proud to have dumped their birth names overboard in order to better submerge their personalities with their husbands.  I'm glad I've lived long enough to see more and more women keeping their "maiden" (gag) names or at least using hyphens, and to more or less see the extinction of the obnoxiously awful "Mrs. Henry Jones" bit, but I really hope I live a little longer and get to see the day when it becomes standard for women to just keep their last names when they get married.  It's the 21st century, for cripes sake- women don't become the branded property of their husbands when they accept a ring, so what the hell are we still clinging to this stupid tradition?

Because Being Common is for the Commoners

Know what matters?  That in this mass-produced, one-click, cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all world, which sometimes seems to be designed for the Great Unwashed Masses known as the Middle Class and Poor, if you have a lot of money you can still have a unique driving experience by purchasing an Audi.

So leave the dry spaghetti, Prego, frozen fish sticks, and (snigger) hand-held cell phones to the Not Nearly As Good As You mob.  You are way, way above that.  Get yourself a red Audi with this "communications" system you can activate with--errr, one click-- and let the world know who is really running this place.

Bite me, Audi. Bite me really, really hard.  This commercial is Exhibit A when the People's Courts are called and the guillotines are being mass-produced (there's that phrase again) by the people you can't be satisfied to simply ignore, but felt the need to sneer at with crud ads like this.  I'll bring an extra large basket for your swelled heads.  Dicktards.

Hotels.com solves a problem which has always been very common for me

I can't tell you how many times I've faced this dilemma which I'm sure is familiar to pretty much every guy out there- or, at least, every guy out there who even approaches me in the looks department (there have got to be some, right?)

I make eye contact with a hot girl at a bar.  Since I'm obviously about to strike up a conversation with the hot girl, and since she's obviously going to want me, the first thing that pops into my mind is "uh oh....where am I going to find a hotel to shag this girl in, at THIS hour, without reservations?"  I know what you're thinking- couldn't I just use my iPhone to scroll through choices while she's stroking my leg and begging me to take her out of there (which should be happening, oh, I don't know, five minutes after I've introduced my gorgeous and awesome self?)  Sure I could- but hey, I'm a gentleman.  I put my phone away when I'm seducing strange hot girls in bars.

Hotels.com is clearly made for guys like me- guys who need hotel rooms fast, at a moment's notice, because we are always having hot women flinging themselves at us wherever we go (I was going to say "when we least expect it," but we always expect it.)  Guys who know that their apartments aren't as clean as they could be, and are just too classy to bring a strange hot girl whose name we just learned to a rumpled bed and a sink of dirty dishes.  (To guys like us, nothing is too good for beautiful strangers we've just met in bars.  That's why we are called gentlemen.)  No way- girls I hook up with know they can expect only the best- Quality Inn, Best Western, Howard Johnson's- I know them all- as long as I can get a room, fast.  And now I know I can.

And BTW, quick tip for you guys out there who have lives just like me, or wish you did- the only thing women appreciate more than a guy who is ready to follow up a chance meeting with an evening in a hotel room is a good continental breakfast.  They especially love that make your own waffles deal.  Who wouldn't?