The cure for wage stagnation: Lots and lots of coma-inducing grease and carbs. Wooooooooooheeeeee!!

I can remember when Golden Corral commercials weren't so open about appealing to the No Money No Taste Just Wanna Stuff Ourselves Hillbilly market.  A few years ago ads for America's Feed Bin featured what looked like Middle Class families heading out for a nice, affordable night of togetherness, sitting at tables congratulating themselves on saving money ("for about ten bucks!") which might have been spent on a babysitter for the kids and a much nicer dinner for the parents.

About six years ago, the slack-jawed yokel image began to permeate GC ads- suddenly we were supposed to be interested in grandma's reaction to the fountain dribbling Hershey's chocolate syrup ("My jaw....just....dropped!") you could stick strawberries, macaroons and your own fingers into, Make-Your-Own cotton candy, and all the other things that scream UNSANITARY GIMMICK to anyone with a modicum of taste.

Now, Golden Corral has gone Full Hick on us, hiring everyone's favorite Seriously He And His One Joke Are Still Around poser to hawk the attractions of heavy, greasy food piled into warming pans to be picked at by blue-collar and no-collar bottom-feeders who appreciate a break from their usual diets of 7-11 pizza, the McDonald's dollar menu and bags of Tyson's frozen chicken somethings.  Only on special ocassions, of course- because I think GC still requires shirts and shoes.

Listening to this crowing jackass scream about America's lard pit while a crowd of fat morons pour out of limosine sure doesn't do anything for my appetite.  Then again, neither would walking into a Golden Corral.

Parenting 101: It's all about caring. And frozen bags of bird parts

These kids hate the food their Evil Mommies and Daddies try to get them to eat- fish, vegetables, fruits, all that Awful Stuff the Meanie Adults put in front of them.  My guess is that they hate all this actual food so much, they are on their cell phones every few minutes to tweet about it.

Ah, but they all love Tyson pressed "chicken" parts that Mommy and Daddy, when they aren't being Quite So Mean and actually want to Show How Much They Love Them, take the time to pour on to a pan and warm in the oven for fifteen minutes or so.  The pressed and fried "chicken" from the wonderful plastic bag is so yummy and oily and easy to grab and pop into the mouth, so what if it doesn't have any actual nutritional value- when Mommy and Daddy serve it up, it shows how much Mommy and Daddy Really Care.

So, Mommy and Daddy?  You can either watch your Precious Little Bundles squirm and complain and maybe refuse to Facebook Friend you and threaten to hold their breaths until they turn blue as you try to get them to experiment with veggies and fruits and actual food (and come on, let's face it, you don't want to do that- it so time-consuming and expensive, and the bags of greasy pre-cooked stuff is right there in the same section as the ice cream) or you can invest all of fifteen minutes of warming and hand them this stuff.  I wonder which path you'll choose.

I can't imagine why we have an obesity epidemic in this country, I really can't.  Such a mystery.

Can London start falling now?

I'm pretty sure Gerard Butler could drive a tank through the gap in Ms Jagger's teeth....

Ok, that was mean.  But heck, I've got a reputation to uphold here.  And I just gotta say, with all this woman's obvious attributes, does she really want to draw attention to her mouth?  Answer: Yeah, it's probably her trademark.  I don't pretend to understand the modeling industry, any more than I understand the advertising industry.

Scented Candles are the Audi of Punjab, apparently

Or "stupid and insulting is stupid and insulting in any language."

Punjab is sometimes referred to as the "bread basket of India."  It has the lowest level of hunger of any province in the country.  So it's got that going for it, anyway.

But the statistics are pretty much downhill from there.  The fertility of the soil has been dropping pretty dramatically over the last few decades, as most of the land is rotated between only two major crops- corn and rice.  This has also created a great deal of pollution.  The need for Punjab to supply a huge percentage of India's food has also lead to the creation of an enormous population of migrant "casual workers" who own no land of their own- 45% of the male population of Punjab is made up of agricultural workers who do not own any land.  My guess is that they don't own televisions, either, so they'll at least be spared this disgusting bit of Americana.

I guess this commercial is for Punjab's one percent- the tiny fraction of pretty people who live in substantial houses and throw parties for their pretty friends and are in the market for scented candles which change color over the course of beautiful warm evenings of chit-chat and self-congratulation.  I don't speak Punjabi, but I imagine that these pretty people are spending most of their time talking about how great it is not to be agricultural workers and instead be able to afford not only nice homes, but these cool scented candles which change color.  And how they all aspire to be Americans some day and move on from appreciating candles to appreciating flashy cars with Bluetooth technology.  Ah well, everything in it's own time, right?

Lifelock expects a lot from a $12 an hour security guard, don't you think?

I'm not exactly sure what the customers at this bank expect the security guard to do.  He was there to serve as a warning to wannabe Dillingers that yes, the bank does employ armed security.  That was supposed to dissuade those bad guys from robbing the bank.  My bet is that 99.9% of the time it worked just fine.

But when it doesn't work, and bank robbers totally ignore the fact that there's a guy in a blue shirt and a badge with a gun and start smashing things and waving guns around, I'm not exactly sure how the people here expect the guard to react.  Should he escalate the situation by pulling out his gun and shooting?  Other than leading to bullets dancing around in a room full of innocent people, what would that accomplish exactly?

Back in the late-80s (when I was twelve) I managed a video rental store in downtown Washington, DC.  When I wasn't restocking shelves or doing a little cleaning, I was usually standing next to the register- you know, to keep people with sticky fingers from stealing the money inside.  Three times in two years, someone with a gun attached to their sticky fingers came in and demanded cash (they also stole vhs tapes- tapes you couldn't give away on Ebay today.  Go figure.)  Guess what?  I gave it to them- even though my job was to run the store, not hand money to guys with guns.  And I don't recall ever hearing a customer say "why did you do that? You were supposed to be taking care of the register?"

So when these bank robbers exit, I hope none of the idiots on the floor actually start complaining to the security guard- "why didn't you stop that from happening?"  If they do, I hope he takes out his wallet and shows them pictures of his wife and kids and says something like "because stopping armed men from taking federally insured money isn't worth the risk- if you think it is, next time there's a robbery ask to borrow my gun."

And nope, I'm not even going to get to a snark on Lifelock.  Been there, done that.

Irritating the tobacco lobby. But only a little.

If this ad had been produced for Australian Television, the kid buying the cigarettes would have walked away with blood spurting out of his mouth and his jaw swelling to the size of a watermelon.  He would have screamed his head off as he pulled his tooth with the pliers, by the way.  Because Reality.

Ah, but this is American television, where anti-smoking ads can't feature anything resembling reality.  Instead we get CGI monsters crawling into cigarette packs.  Just like the anti-texting while driving ads are more comical than scary- because getting run over by a car is actually more of an inconvenience than anything else.  And don't even get me started on the ads which calmly, quietly and sweetly encourage us to maybe kind of think about not drinking to excess before getting behind the wheel.  Sure, the message is important- but the tobacco, phone and alcohol lobbies are enormous, musn't ever tick them off too much.

From this ad, we get the idea that if you smoke enough cigarettes, it might cost you one of your teeth.  I can see a lot of smokers thinking "hey, I remember being told that smoking covered my lungs with thick tar and lead to all kinds of nasty diseases and birth defects and early death.  Losing a tooth?  I can totally deal with that."  Sometimes I don't know why we even bother, if this is the level of edgy we are willing to go for.

And don't forget, George W Bush kept us safe, except for those times he didn't

These people spend roughly ten seconds telling us that their driving record is absolutely perfect, until it isn't.  And then "despite their perfect driving record," which is no longer perfect, their insurance company won't "cut them some slack."  Gee, you'd think that insurance companies would understand an argument like "but my insurance record was perfect before the accident," just like "I never once stabbed anybody and then hid the body in the celler until that day I did."*  You'd be wrong about both.

BTW, anyone else shocked that it's the guy in this commercial who had the accident?  Anyone at all?

*I'm not speaking from experience, so shut up.  What were you thinking?