Panera: Food for Rich White People

"Clean Pairings."  Did you hear that noise?  That was my soul dying under the weight of the narrator's self-satisfaction.

Ugh, the pretention!  It BURNS!

Seriously, though- the entire message of this heaping, steaming pile of bilge is "when you've got money, you don't eat prole food- you don't go to KFC or McDonald's or Burger King or even Subway.  You go to twee designer bread places like Panera, where you can get 'dirty' salads with 'clean' dressing, $5 cups of Low-Fat Vegetarian Garden Vegetable Soup with Pesto  sprinkled ever so gently with organic garlic, and $4 pitas to dip into it.  You bring all this stuff home to your Not Very Appreciative kids, all of whom would just kill to see a bucket of fried chicken or a sack of White Castle burgers just once, if only you asked them.  But you'll never ask them."

So, to all you "progressive" posers-- please, continue to bring this overpriced junk home and dissapoint your kids, time and time again.  Don't be too surprised when they begin to find reasons to not be home for dinner, coming home later with grease on their faces and empty Quick Wipe packets in their designer jeans.  Because believe me, there are only so many dirty salads one can eat, and there are only so many ways to disguise tasteless lumps of warm bread.

Here's a better idea- buy some rolls and salad (buy them at Whole Foods Market and make sure they are 'organic,' if you insist) and a can of soup, throw it together yourself in your kitchen,  Send the money you saved to Oxfam, you awful pretentious twats.

Two Pieces of Bad News For Flo

1.  Progressive Insurance is using an animated talking box to sell its insurance in this recent commercial (and several others playing during news and NFL playoff games.)

2.  The box is totally out-acting Flo.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out, Flo.  Man, was that a long and painful run.  You will not be missed (and if anyone out there wants to write in and tell me that they will, in fact, miss Flo as the Progressive Insurance spokeschoad- please don't.  You are too sad for me to want to know about.)

The three moments in this Chevy ad that make me want to really hurt someone. Or several someones.

1.  When one of these zombies actually says "this reminds me of my first Lexus."  Did you buy it right after you came back from your 14th trip to Europe, you little twat?

2.  When another woman responds to the car's map capabilities with "this car gets me."  That's nice.  It's still just a freaking car, loser.

3.  When one of the guys here bleats "this is a game changer."*

So congratulations, Chevy. You've created a commercial that makes me want to inflict damage on THREE people, instead of your usual one.  Great job.

*this hackneyed cliche needs to be put to bed, right now.  No, not bed- it needs to be buried underneath thirty feet of cement, where it will never bother anyone, ever again.  Enough already.

Another cringeworthy effort from McDonalds

There's nothing about this incredibly cheesy-even-for-McDonalds ad that makes me the least bit interested in taking advantage of the ridiculous "any two items from the Dollar Menu for two dollars, you know like always except we've got this two for two slogan thing going" deal.   Certainly not the revoltingly bland, stupid twentysomethings having a virtual party with their crap junk food.  Certainly not the gang signs captured for Facebook by those people who seriously have way, way too much time on their hands.*

And don't even get me started on how nothing on the McDonald's Dollar Menu would induce me to visit one of their grease pits.  Except the coffee.  McDonald's has excellent coffee at an excellent price.  But I only need one at a time, thank you.

*the first woman who actually walks up to the counter and makes the "two" sign as if she thinks the kid at the register is too stupid to know what the word "two" indicates should be tossed into the deep frier.  At least it would get that stupid grin off her face.

The clever dishonesty of Credit Repair Ads

1.  This video offers a binary proposition- either you are contacting CreditRepair.com, or you are "waiting around instead of working to fix your credit."   There are no other options, apparently- calling your creditors and working out payment schedules, cutting back on unnecessary spending, cutting up unused credit cards and cancelling them- nope, unless you hire CreditRepair.com, you are just "waiting around."

Kind of like the Optima Tax Relief ads, which suggest that one has only two options when they get a tax bill- sit around and wait for the IRS to smash down their door and drag them off to jail, or-- you got it-- hire Alan Thicke's personal gravy train.  "Don't take on the IRS on your own"- oh, heaven forbid.  You might find that you can deal with your tax issues without hiring a middle man to take a nice big bite out of you for doing something you are perfectly capable of doing yourself.

(One more quick note concerning Optima Tax Relief- all their ads give you the same two arguments, usually delivered by Mr. Thicke in the same breath: First, the IRS is out to get you, with their Freeze and Seize manuever, their garnishing of wages, their relentless army of ruthless agents.  Second, the IRS is a very reasonable agency staffed by people who would rather just leave you alone and "go home and play with the kids."  I don't get how they can be both, but they are, according to Mr. Thicke.)

2.  The narration in these sleazy ads always include the following "claim," which is so transparently deceptive that I can't believe anyone actually falls for it- "on average, our customers see SIGNIFICANT improvement in their Credit Scores."  Um, how can you justify using the terms "on average" and "significant improvement" at the same time here?  If you are saying that the average customer's credit score improves after they engage the services of CreditRepair.com, why don't you tell us how many points the score goes up- ON AVERAGE?  You know, instead of using weasel words designed to present an impressive-sounding claim which is only impressive-sounding until it's examined carefully?  Or did I just answer my own question?

This sentence could easily be translated into "the average customer sees their credit score go up after hiring us."   By how many points?  Doesn't that mean a good portion DON'T see their credit score go up?   "It's a significant improvement."  What does significant mean?  You'll notice the improvement?  Is a rise in credit score from 350 to 360 a "significant improvement?"  Is that increase- about three percent- about "average?" If not, why not tell us what the average score of a customer is when they sign up, and what the average score of a customer is when they are no longer using the service?  You know, instead of this "on average" and "significant improvement" crap?

Oh, right, because those Truth in Advertising Laws are almost toothless, but not quite.  So I guess you'd better stick to the weasel words and manipulation of the language to convince desperate people that you actual peform a service worth paying for, and aren't just bloodsucking vampires trying to take advantage of the most economically vulnerable among us.  Yay Capitalism.

The Brave New World of AT&T

I only got through the first 39 seconds of this awfulness, but that was enough to see a little girl wake up and start "communicating" with the internet before she had wiped the sleep out of her eyes, and her father taking in a stream of nonsense on his bathroom mirror while brushing his teeth.  I'm sure all this digital noise appeals to some people, but I don't know who they are, I don't want to know who they are, and they are way to distracted to have time for another actual human being in their lives anyway.

Someone else can watch the rest of this horror- I'm sure it involves a "happy family" sitting around the kitchen table at breakfast, absorbed with their own personal electronic best friends, before "seamlessly" moving on to the same revolting self-absorption in the "family" SUV.  And I'm sure the message- "your life is lived on the web, and your value and gratification level can only be measured in the amount of data you can let pour all over you in any given day" is relentless.  But I'm not being paid to write this blog, so I'm not going to subject myself to it.

Instead, I'll just continue to congratulate myself for being born into a world where none of these "wonders" were available outside of science fiction books and movies, because ugh I can't imagine what this is doing to the brains and social skills of people who buy into the idea that any of this is necessary, let alone a net positive.  This is just gross.

Silverado Presents: The price we have to pay for watching playoff football*

The only way this commercial could end well is if these walking male cliches- and their dirty jeans, three-day beards, and generally scruffy "I'm just killing time 'till the next Trump rally by driving out into the wilderness with three total strangers" attitudes beat the commercial spokeschoad to death with his own sense of smug.  And then pushed the "mobile office" off that cliff.  And then fulfilled a suicide pact.

Meanwhile, anyone else get totally disgusted at the fact that Chevrolet and some hideous crap sitcom called "Superstore" apparently bought ALL OF THE FREAKING AD TIME for the Packers-Cardinals game?  Hell, I'd actually welcome a Trump ad right about now.

("Real People.  Not Actors."  Yeah, no kidding.)

*this, and having to listen to Chris Berman's schtick- which was so very played twenty years ago- in the postgame shows on ESPN.  His act is so worn out, he ought to take it to Branson.