Stupid, Sexist Garbage and DirecTV: Perfect Together

Ok, does anyone else think that it's more than a little creepy and weird to see a commercial featuring two men being served by an actual female puppet in a commercial in the year 2014?

And I thought the whole "TV Genie" bit, with the scantily-clad slave-girl type recording, storing and playing your favorite shows on demand (as she drapes herself across the set) was bizarrely sexist.  This takes it to a whole new level of bad- this guy's girlfriend/wife doesn't just act like a puppet, chirping brainless pleasantries while serving up lemonade to the Two Males In The House-- she's actually being controlled with wires.  I'm sure her puppet master-errr, husband- is very nice and all, but this doesn't change the fact that she's a fricking puppet being controlled by wires.

And her only function in this ad is, again, to provide drinks for The Guys as they discuss the new DirecTV setup. Maybe I should be grateful that this is her only function in the ad.  I don't think I really want to see what happens when there's no company and Master and Puppet are alone.  Maybe I should give a little credit to the fact that the punchline seems to be "don't call wires weird, because my girl has them and we don't want to hurt her feelings," but sorry, no- I'm not getting past the fact that this guy has a disgustingly-thin mannequin handmaiden who comes- umm, running- with drinks when The Guy has a friend over.  Sick.

April 15 cant' come soon enough

It's bad enough that this ugly idiot's ugly mug is grinning at me from every freaking metro bus and every other freaking billboard in the DC area.  Now I have to watch him pretend to care about my money on TV ads too?

H&R Block doesn't give one flying damn about your refund.  It doesn't care if we "get our billion back."  It doesn't fight for us against the IRS or live to make our lives better by getting more cash in our pockets.  Like all tax preparation services, Block is all about convincing us to let them skim their share off the top.  If they can get us to take "Refund Anticipation Loans," all the better.  They'd love us to take our refunds in the form of gift cards, because they get a nice kickback from participating retailers.  But what they really want is to just convince us that taxes are Scary and Complicated and if we try to do them ourselves we are going to miss out on Big Money so we better let These Experts (you can tell they are Experts from the bow ties) who Care About Us And Our Money do our taxes because They Really Want Us To Get Our Fair Share.  WTF-ever, man.

Oh, and BTW- why does an old, bald white guy with no fashion sense spell "tax expert?"  Isn't it 2014 anywhere in TV land?

As sad as it gets, courtesy of Taco Bell

Hmm...let's see....we can't really get people to talk about how good our food is, because...I mean, come on.  It's greasy hamburger stuffed into cheap taco shells.

So, what else do we got?  Hey, I know!  Let's get a bunch of stupid losers with the unfortunate name of "Ronald McDonald" to talk about how much they like Taco Bell!  That'll be convincing, right?  I mean, they are all named "Ronald McDonald."  That means they should all like to eat at McDonalds- right?  I mean, that makes sense- right?

What?  It doesn't, at all?  Well, whatever.  We're out of ideas, and this concept seems kind of familiar, so let's go with it.  Hey, it's not as stupid as asking people from St Cloud Minnesota what it's like to "sleep on a cloud"- is it? Again, we don't care.  It's late, we don't know what we are doing, and I bet these idiots will be so happy at the prospect of being on television we won't even have to offer to pay them.

So just aim the camera, let these morons tell the world their names, have them shove a piece of disgusting fatty crap down their cake holes, and we've got ourselves a commercial.  This ain't rocket science, after all.

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?