Coke's new ad campaign gives me whiplash

Remember when Coca-Cola was running it's "Share a Coke With...." ad campaign?  It was roughly yesterday.  I still have about a dozen cans in my refrigerator which suggest that I share them with A Friend, Mom, Sweetie, a Superstar, etc.

Well, so much for that deal.  Maybe it's because Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's and Valentine's Day and the rest of those Togetherness Is What Matters holidays are over.  For whatever reason, nowadays over at Coca-Cola it's all about getting your soda delivered in a colorful package and making sure the rest of the world keeps it's damn grubby mitts off.

This kind of reminds me of watching "Roll a Rollo to your friend" and "You can have a Half and still have a Whole" (Almond Joy, in case you don't remember or are under 40) going the way of carbon paper and being replaced by Twix "Two for Me, None for You" nastiness.  And I wonder if, sometime in the late autumn of next year, Coca-Cola will pretend to be in to be into the whole sharing thing again.  Until then, I guess I'll enjoy the colorful cans.  I guess.

Isn't Jan jumping to conclusions here?

I thought that the stupid customer in this commercial just brought her friends to help her pick out a car- why does Jan just assume that every person she brought with her is ALSO in the market for a brand new car or truck?

I mean, wouldn't that be a rather odd coincidence- "I want to buy a car, and I brought along with me three friends who are also interested in purchasing?"  Holy crap, really?

And Jan has her usual stock answers for each person- she can let them know exactly what is available for each one of them without even a glance at their credit scores or even asking them individually what they might be looking for.  She can just TELL which ones want a sportscar, truck, 4-door, 2-door, lease deal, used (excuse me, "certified pre-owned,") etc.?  How?  By looking at their shoes?

I suspect that this is all about Jan refusing to ever, ever get up from her freaking desk.  In magical tv land, this does not prevent her from selling 200 cars and trucks a day to excited, blithering idiots who rush in bleating "I want it I want it I want it where do I sign?"  Damn I missed my calling- selling cars looks like the easiest damn job in the world.

Still- I came in here with a person interested in buying a car.  That doesn't mean I want to buy a car.  And it certainly doesn't mean that you get to hand my friend a sheet of paper and say "sign here where it says you agree to pay $400 a month for the next five years, do it quickly and I might even show you the actual car you're buying."  It's going to take a little more than that, Jan.

Buffalo Wild Wings performs a nasty bit of surgery on this guy, for absolutely no reason at all

1.  These kids are a little too old to be acting like mommy is going away to have cancer surgery and will be back in a week or longer.  Either that, or those apron strings are really, really tight.  I shudder to think how they'd handle "I'm leaving because your dad can't appreciate my love for my college basketball team, and I'll see you ever other weekend."

2.  Daddy can't appreciate college basketball "because he went to art school?"  I wonder why Buffalo Wild Wings didn't just go with "because dad's gay and we figure gay people don't like college basketball," because that's EXACTLY what they really WANT to say here.  I get that this is supposed to be about exaggeration being funny, but the "art school" bit is not only mean and stupid, it's also 100 percent unnecessary.  The commercial would have been every bit as effective if the kid had just said "Dad's college team didn't make the tournament."  There.  Done.

Except "Dad's team didn't make the tournament" doesn't leave dad looking like a eunuch which, again, is the real point of this commercial.   F--- off, Buffalo Wild Wings.

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?