And if you want to sell out, sell out

Other than the use of a classic Steven Georgiou/Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam song to sell cars, there's nothing especially offensive about this commercial.  It's message seems to be "be who you are, and show the world who you are by driving this particular vehicle and defacing it with a gaudy bumper sticker," which again is not especially offensive except for it's overbearing sickly tweeness.   If you want to advertise that you think America is SuperAwesomeAmazing or that you're voting for Trump hey, go for it.  Whatever.

But I still can't forgive the use of the song to sell Jeeps.  I'd like to think that the song has fallen into Fair Use and Mr. Islam has no responsibility for this travesty, except that's obviously his voice....so, unless you've run into some hard times and need the money, shame on you, sir.  This isn't the Cat Stevens I remember at all.  Sad.

For some people, November 8 is the Beginning of the End. Might as well cash in now!

The scenes of Not Caused By Humans storm damage didn't convince me to buy this 25-year shelf life Must Have Survival Food, nor did the happy scene of the extremely white family passing around bowls of hot Gourmet Survival Comfort Food while nuclear winter went on its merry way outside.  I think what really sold me on this stuff was the crazy-eyed woman suffering from the collagen overdose.  Really, will lip enhancement services be available after the apocalypse?

But wait- even if I do purchase the 25-year emergency food supply I NEED, how will I be able to hold on to it in a world where clueless niave tree-hugging hippies and Berniebros and supporters of Killery Lock Her Up Clinton didn't think ahead like I do?  Oh right, I forgot--



Hey, NRA tool- I've got a message for every frightened, bed-wetting little boy who feels more like a man when he's carrying an AR-15 and who thinks that AR-15 is going to protect him from terrorist attacks and a tyrannical government which has nuclear weapons: Issues.  Get help with them.  Until you do, please stop donating and voting.  We are trying to have a society here.

So much wrong with this Mercedes Benz Commercial....

(First- yes, I am aware that it's actually not even for Mercedes Benz, but for a line of special cleaning products designed specificially to keep your Mercedes Benz looking Showroom-New.  Doesn't help.)

Can we just start with the juxtaposition of the guy washing and waxing and shining up his car while his date is primping and preening HERSELF?  She's not busy scrubbing her immaculate-even-for-television ridiculous glowing-white house.  She's getting HERSELF Showroom-Ready.  Meanwhile the guy isn't shaving, he isn't showering, he isn't applying deodorant and, as it turns out, he's not wearing the correct sneakers (I guess.  Whatever.  I don't get that part at all.)  He doesn't need to- he could show up wearing bright orange shorts and black socks with white shoes for all his date gives a damn, because Let Me Step Aside So You Can Check Out My Ride.

And that's another thing.  The guy seems to realize that he's ridiculously underdressed for his date with a woman who spent hours getting ready (always with a giant smile on her face, like this guy is a great catch- because he has a hot car?  Really?)  She's dressed to the nines and ready to go....somewhere glamorous, I guess.  But he looks like he's ready for an afternoon in the bleacher seats at the Cubs game.  Did they get their wires crossed, or what?  If a mistake was made, it was cleaerly made by the GUY in this situation, as he sort of sheepishly acknowledges before reminding his date that Hey Once Again, Check Out My Ride- Does It Really Matter How I'm Dressed?

The bottom line here is that this woman spent all afternoon getting ready for a date- with a fricking car.  I hope they are very, very happy together.  Oh, and here's another bottom line- I've seen puddles far less shallow than these idiots.  They totally deserve eachother- and I still don't know if I'm talking about the guy and the girl, the guy and the car, or the girl and the car.

In Honor of Halloween, the MLB Playoffs, and my upcoming trip to the dentist....

When I was a Freshman in High School, the Yankees won the World Series 4-2 over the Los Angeles Dodgers.  I was (and am) a Red Sox fan, but a lot of my friends were Yankees fans (I had different taste in friends back then) and also big-time Reggie Jackson fans.  We didn't talk about baseball much, obviously.  We hunted and were on bowling leagues and skipped school together, but we didn't talk about baseball.

I wanted nothing to do with the Yankees or Reggie Jackson, but the Reggie Bar is my all-time favorite candy bar.  It was just awesome- just a glob of carmel and nuts and chocolate; what a Take Five bar would be if they switched out the pretzels for nuts, maybe.  It was about as uncomplicated as you could get in a candy bar.  And it was plenty good enough for me to ignore the fact that Reggie Jackson was there on the package, in his Yankees uniform.  Great candy.

Around the same time as I noticed Reggie Bars, Twix were introduced in the United States (they had been introduced in Great Britain in the 1960s, but in the world before the internet, who knew?) and I thought they were amazing, too.  I eat one every once in a while now and I don't think they taste as good as they did thirty years ago; I wonder if they suffered the same fate as Kentucky Fried Chicken, which is considerably less fatty now than when I was eating it once or twice a year back in the 70s and imagining that I would live on it when I was an adult, or McDonald's apple pies, which used to have an awesome thick fried crust but are now slimmed down and contain more fruit- yuck.  Or maybe I just don't find candy bars as tasty as I did when I was a fat little kid.

Whatever.  Reggie bars were discontinued in 1981- interestingly enough, the year that the Dodgers turned the tables on the Yankees and beat them in the World Series, again four games to two.  I  am not sure I noticed- I don't remember feverishly looking for them in the two or three stores available to me in my home town.  Maybe the end of the Reggie bar was so traumatic I've blocked the memory.  In any case they weren't around very long and I've seen the wrappers- yes, just the wrappers- selling on eBay for anywhere from four to ten bucks each (or a signed one for $499.  I'm not kidding.)  Not going to buy a wrapper, and probably wouldn't buy a bar nowadays if they were rereleased because, as I noted above, companies can't leave recipies alone and they'd probably mess this one up too.

So here's to you, Reggie bar.  Never liked Reggie Jackson, always hated the Yankees, but this was a nice candy bar.  I wonder how many kids got them on Halloween and wish they'd kept the wrappers.

I have to admit that "Orbitrim" is a pretty cool name- too good for this stupid gadget though

I just love commercials like this, they are so cheesy and fun and who knows, the products they offer might even work at least a little.

This one- for a trimmer head you can attach to that weed-wacker which doesn't work (I know it doesn't work, because weed-wackers, like electric razors, don't work.)  It ends "accidental mistakes" (can I tell you how much I love that phrase?  As opposed to "intentional mistakes?")

Then we have another spokesperson, Ghada Dergman, who is both a "Professional Landscaper" AND a "TV Personality" for something called the "Vanilla Ice Project" (how the heck did I miss that?)  She gives us this wonderful line- "it is a great product because it allows us to eliminate both your edger, weedwacker, and your hedgetrimmer," using the word "both" to list three things before spinning dramatically to tell us "AND my guys love it 'cause it saves time!"

(BTW, do people really hire landscapers to do things like weed wacking?  F--k you, lazy rich bastards!)

The thing is, if professional landscapers use this product, why isn't it available at high-end gardening stores and not just through cheesy commercials? Shouldn't I be able to find this at Home Depot?  Shouldn't there be gas-powered weed wacker models which have this design built in?

Oh right, I forgot.  Weed wackers don't work anyway (unless "cut for three minutes and then fumble with the fishing line release container for twenty minutes to get another two inches out before cutting for three more minutes" means "works.")- why make one with another feature which makes it not work even more?  It's dumb enough that you have to attach a power cord or add gasoline to get them to not work.  Putting a plastic ring around the trim line is like putting your electric razor in the charger- why bother?  Works just as well when the battery is dead!

The Hartford uses cliches it doesn't even understand....

"When it matters most" didn't include Game Seven of the 2001 World Series or the 2004 ALCS against Boston, I guess, because The Great MarianoTM wasn't particularly steady in THOSE moments, in fact totally choking them away.  The Marlins and Red Sox fans are most grateful that while television continues to treat Rivera like he was some kind of god of relievers, he could actually gag with the very best of them in the playoffs.

Just change time measurement to Before Google and After Google

Just imagine- in the not-too-distant past, this breakthrough in time-wasting, pointless, one hundred percent unconstructive and completely unhelpful mind-numbingly stupid garbage would have been technologically impossible.  Someday we'll refer to that time as the second Dark Ages, perhaps.

Our stories would go like this- "there was a time in history when people had lots of really, really moronic ideas for sucking precious moments out of their lives, but those ideas never went beyond the momentary daydream stage because the technology did not exist to make dumb notions into sad reality.  Then Google came along, and eventually teamed with Apple to make every fleeting non-thought something that could be acted out and shared with an incredibly disengaged, apathetic, and bored world."

Of course, nobody will hear these stories, because they'll be too busy watching their phones with their mouths hanging open to notice that a fellow mammal is trying to have a conversation with them, as if its like a million BG or something.  Want to tell me something?  Put it in a video or animation and send it to my phone, grampa!