Ummmm....how does this babysitter keep her job?

I'm sure there have been enough incidents to convince Mommy to fire her....maybe she's a little too cute for Daddy to let go of?  Just a thought.....

I mean, this smoke/carbon monoxide detector doesn't do EVERYTHING- if the obnoxious brats this girl is supposed to be watching are drowning each other in the bathtub, it won't yell clueless teen girl into getting off the couch, will it?  One of the kids is "really into fireworks"- but she figures as long as no smoke is being detected, she can continue watching tv and doing a YouTube video about the awesomeness of Nest Detectors?  Does she have an explanation for the parents and the police when Trevor blows his fingers off or fires one of his little rockets into his sister's face, blinding her for life?

I suppose this is a fairly useful product for the average tv family which of course is living in a vast, gleaming-white suburban mansion (it wouldn't do anything for me- if there's a fire in my apartment, chances are I'll know it before the detector does.)  But if I lived in one of these houses and installed one of these systems, I don't think I'd let the babysitter know about it.  Especially this babysitter, who sees it as a "oh good I can just ignore the kids if anything happens this thing will let me know before the damage gets TOO bad" excuse to nap while earning $10 an hour.*

*I have no idea how much babysitters make these days.  I suppose I could have asked a few of my students, but that would be doing research, and as I've mentioned many times in the past, I'm not getting paid for this gig.  So $10 an hour it is.

Infiniti Q50 commercial gets Karma wrong

So let me see if I understand this ad:

Infantile rich jackass lusts over black Infiniti.  Being Infantile, he notices a guy volunteering for the Salvation Army and decides "hey, maybe if I'm nice to this old man, somehow that will translate into me getting my childish, selfish wants fulfilled.  Worth a shot!"

So this guy blows an entire $1.86 on a cup of coffee at Starbucks and hands it to the Salvation Army guy.  There's no dialogue, so we can't know if he shared his Stunningly Self-Absorbed Christmas Wish with the guy (maybe "so.....I did something nice for you, can I have a $40,000 car now?")  But that doesn't matter- the guy believes this man is Santa, and if Santa sees us when we're sleeping and knows when we're awake, he doesn't need to be told that we are fantasizing about owning a new car.

We do know is that he notes a tear in "Santa's" jacket and proceeds to follow "Santa"  to "Santa's" luxury apartment and spend all of five minutes sewing it up.

At this point, let's remember that this guy's actions are all clearly being dictated by "If I'm nice to this guy, he'll get me that car."  Very important that we keep that in mind.

Next thing we know, rich guy is running out of his multi-million dollar suburban palace to  find his Christmas present- sure enough, "Santa" was REAL and decided to reward a few dollars of charity and a few minutes of attention with a $40,000 car.  Because Santa is every bit as big a dickwad as rich guy.

I mean, think about it- people all over the world perform random acts of kindness every single day, without any thought of immediate or future reward, Just Because.  Then there are the people who struggle with illness or poverty of their own, or that of a loved one, who want nothing more than for that illness or poverty  to go away.  For pretty much all of them, Christmas will come and go with no obvious reward.  But this manipulative dicktard basically bribes Santa for an hour or so, and gets an intensely juvenile Want fulfilled.  Just like that.  Heartwarming, huh?

BTW, the only way this whole mess results in actual Karma is if the jackass unsatisfied with his gilded life and multimillion-dollar house who managed to buy Santa gets into a horrible accident the very first time he takes his LookAtMeMobile out for a spin.  A horrible accident that leaves him disfigured, crippled, dead broke- and in desperate need for the prayers and best wishes of people who are nowhere near as loathsomely juvenile as he is.  THAT'S Karma, Infiniti.  Glad I could help.

Buick's Depresssing Salute to Black Friday

See, this ad is "funny" because Neighbor #1 just got back from Black Friday shopping and somehow got a black eye for his troubles.  What we are supposed to gather from this is that another customer didn't like the way Neighbor #1 was reaching for that particular object at Best Buy, punched him in the face, and took it instead.  Because it's the season to be jolly, and all that, I guess.

Neighbor #2 has so much empathy for Neighbor #1 that he responds by showing off HIS Black Friday purchase- a new Buick.  At which point, I'm going to snap out of my "how sad is it that the violence associated with Black Friday Hysteria Shopping is being celebrated here" mood and switch to "I would be perfectly ok if Neighbor #1 gave Neighbor #2 a black eye of his own because jeesh, what a pompous jerk...."

I won't even comment that most car commercials regularly show people acting as if every day is Black Friday at the dealership- rushing in to "claim" cars, practically knocking people out of the way to get the "best" ones, as if there's a limited quality available.  I'm too busy going back into Depressed that the period between Thanksgiving afternoon and the following Saturday has become a kind of Hunger Games for consumers is now considered normal.  Yet really wishing that Neighbor #1 would leave Neighbor #2 flattened in front of his suburban palace, sprawled grotesquely beside his beautiful new Buick.  I guess I'm kind of conflicted about this one.

Audi's salute to a city filled with douchenozzles, I guess

Judging from this ad, Raleigh is some magical place where everyone makes $500,000 a year, lives in a suburban mansion, and drives a massive LookAtMeMobile to Very Important Places which are Very Important because they are pretty people with pretty cars who have places to go (casually, of course.)

As far as I am concerned, it's a magical place which can't be obliterated by a meteor quickly enough.  Hell, I'd take a fast-moving plague if a meteor isn't available.  We could even agree to bury these pigs in their f---ing cars.

"See mom, I'm not wasting my life playing Xbox! I'm 'winning!'"

"Let me tell you something you already know"- ummm, why, exactly?

"Life isn't all sunshine and rainbows"- is that really what you wanted to tell me?  If the answer is "yes," then you're right- I already knew that.  Everyone over the age of two already knows that.

"It's not about how hard you hit, it's about how hard you can get hit," blah blah blah already horribly cliche'd clips from Rocky Balboa which has nothing to do with this ad since nobody sitting their fat butts down and playing stupid video games is either hitting or taking hits.....

"This is what winning is" -- or something like that, I'm not watching this awfulness any more times than I actually have to.  Winning is playing XBox? Um, whatever- I don't see a whole lot of "winning" going on here, unless being an adult and spending money on a stupid, time-consuming toy is what "winning" means nowadays ( I actually don't doubt it.)

Home Depot just broke the Wasteful Consumption meter

I get that ramping up the electricity usage is just something that gets done this time of year- December is "to hell with the bill, to hell with the planet, let's just wrap miles of bulbs around everything and crank up the juice" month.  It's "we won't be satisfied until our house can be seen from space" month.  It's "let's see if we can use so much electricity that we crash the grid or at least melt every bit of snow off our lawns" month.

But this family- good lord, they actually created a sign screaming CHEER for their living room?  What the HELL for?  What kind of lunatic actually does something which screams "Be Happy Dammit, Or Else," let alone does it exclusively for his own family?

Reminds me of that blinking billboard in the classic film Flash Gordon- "All Citizens Will Make Merry Upon Pain of Death."  Jeesh, people- it's bad enough that you are going to consume more fossil fuels in one month than the average not-insane-with-conspicious-consumption-fever uses in a decade.  You have to burn out your eyeballs with gaudy, silent demands INSIDE as well as outside?

Ok- cute or not, this girl's time is up, AT&T

Once this woman finished explaining to the stupid knob customer how easy it will be for him to waste his life fooling around on his new phone with it's awesome gigs plan (WTF-ever, 21st century) it was really time for this commercial to be over.  Buy this phone and this deal, and you never have to have a conversation with an organic life form ever again.  Message received.  Over and Out.

Naturally, AT&T could not let it go before adding an Exclamation Point of Dumb, however.  So we get this other jackass who hasn't noticed that there are fifteen people waiting to be pandered to and told where to sign hundreds of dollars a month away on a stupid toy and instead decides to try to steal Cute AT&T Girl's sale away from her with a little attempt at levity which- I don't want to be overly harsh here- really ought to get him bludgeoned to death in an alley on Christmas Eve.*

New Year's Resolution AT&T- let's move on from this.  This girl is easy to look at but you've run out of plausible things for her to say.  Do something revolutionary and actually end an ad campaign before we are tearing our hair out with bored despair whenever one of your stupid commercials comes on, and a girl who went from being a  Very Pleasant Break from Flo to Oh Her Again finishes up at Oh God I Never Want To See This Person Where's the Damn Remote Make It Stop.   Please.