Subway presents: Your tax dollars at work.

Can we agree that Subway really knows construction workers?

For the past two weeks, the street outside my apartment is being torn up.  This is the second time in eight years there is major work being done on the same section of street.  I wonder if the same company is doing the work, and if anyone asked them why it wasn't done right the first time (or is it just par for the course for streets to need major work every eight years?)

Just like 90 percent of the "workers" out on my street, the guys in this ad are doing nothing resembling actual work.  The people on my street are wearing hard hats and yellow and orange jackets and heavy boots and safety glasses because I guess that makes standing around watching one guy operate a piece of heavy machinery slightly less dangerous.  The jokers in this Subway ad aren't even going through the motions of pretending to earn their $30 an hour- they've got their backs to the site, blathering away about Subway's jingle.

I guess I should be glad they just acting like lazy morons and not making lewd comments at women as they pass by.  If they did that, I'd be convinced that Subway went out and found actual construction workers to star in their ad.

(Oh and BTW, in the outtakes one of the guys in the ad offers to "sign my sandwich" if I happen to bump into him at my neighborhood Subway.  Um, seriously, buddy.  Get over yourself.  No one knows who you are and that's not going to change because you were a total tool in a Subway ad.)

The Dramatic Twist at the end of this Commercial.....

....is when you realize that it's for dog food.  And that it's not an SNL skit or some other form of brilliant snark.

Nope.  The big buildup- the woman either being thrown out of the house or breaking up with her significant other or whatever that is, her quest for a hotel which takes pets (which fails on the first night, requiring her to sleep in the car,) her driving for what seems to be hundreds of miles, her finally finding a pet-friendly hotel after having a bitter, fruitless conversation with (presumably) her significant other which ends with her dropping the phone (and she's using a payphone, which I guess is supposed to be even more dramatic, besides marking her as the only adult in the United States under the age of forty who doesn't have a cell phone).....concludes with her opening a can of Cesar dog food and feeding it to her bestest friend.  Two minutes of this.  Two minutes of my life I'll never get back because I was curious enough to see how this ended up, at the end of which I was half-convinced it was going to be a pitch for the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints because it sure looked like that.  But it's a dog food ad.  A dog food ad which is really, really ripe for parody for anyone who wants to take a crack at it.  Won't be me, but someone just has to.

And by the way, "Road Trip?"  Really?  This woman acts as if she is fleeing an abusive relationship and except for her dog, her whole life is going to hell in a handbasket.  That's what Cesar calls a "road trip?"

Seriously Depressing Bud Lite Commercials

Actually, if your beer has your team's name on it and this is important to you, that makes you a pathetic tool, and about as far from a "legend" as you can get.



And in THIS commercial for the same product, the utter stupidity of going for beer because the company that made it also bought the rights to use the team logo is actually demonstrated when one of the actors sticks a can into a beer cozy with HIS team's logo on it.  That's right, folks- you always could carry a beer with your team's logo, long before this dumb idea was greenlit by Bud Lite.  It didn't even have to be a Bud Lite (even better.)  You just needed to invest a dollar in a foam beer cozy.

"What if?"  Yeah, what if?  Not answered.  Probably because "who gives a damn?" is a better question.

Oh but please acting like a moron with zero life or taste in beer, scruffy loser Steelers fan.  Catch that beer passed to you by one of your equally vapid friends.  Then please, open it immediately and let all that awful watery crap spray all over your face.  Loser.

Buick isn't going to let Lexus make the only disgusting car commercials this holiday....

1.  I guess it's supposed to be "funny" that the guy unloading boxes from his trunk got a black eye from Black Friday shopping.  Because being assaulted going for bargains- or any reason- is just f--ing HILARIOUS, especially during the holidays.  Ugh.

2.  The message here is that all of that awful violence and hassle could have been avoided if.....the injured guy had just done his Black Friday shopping at Buick?  How does this make sense in any universe?  So he wouldn't have been beaten up buying presents because that kind of thing doesn't happen at the Buick Dealership....but neither does buying presents for anyone, except maybe yourself.

"I found a way to avoid the hassle of Black Friday-- I went down to Buick and bought myself a new car."  Um, what?  Huh?  How does this go over with the wife and kids?  If this commercial was a scene in a bad sitcom, I'd suspect that the douchenozzle who bought himself a Buick might be in line for a black eye after all, he'll just have to wait for Christmas morning when he tells the people who live in that house with him that the Buick he came home with the day after Thanksgiving is the only present he bought because....well, Black Friday is dangerous.

I'd say this is going to get worse before it gets better, but seriously- how can it?

Lexus' Make December Great Again for the One Percent and their horrid offspring....

Hey look everybody, it's another Lexus December to Remember, in which we are treated to two months of watching  people who already have everything see their dreams of Just A Little More come true.

In this ad, two alleged adults have decided that having a massive house and tons of money are really really nice but what would make them really happy is a new Lexus sitting in front of that massive house on Christmas morning.  Why they don't just go out and buy a new Lexus instead of attempting to con a fairy tale into giving them one kind of escapes me....but what do I know, I'm still mystified that people could be so immensely shallow they'd flip over a Lexus anyway....

The punchline of this ad comes when Barron Trump pops in on the people who Ooopsed  him into existence, sees that they are appealing to Santa Claus, and apparently threatens to veto the request unless a puppy is added to the list.  He does this in an adorable way which makes his parents think that if they don't obey, they are going to end up in the cornfield.  This is all super adorable and also very relatable to the viewing audience, right?  We really want this nasty little creep to get a puppy from his shallow, materialistic, greedy pig parents, right?

Anyway, because it's the holiday season and because people like this always get exactly what they want, come Christmas morning Mommy and Daddy have their $60,000 car and Barron has his puppy, and the rest of us are shopping for deals on a new television set because we just tossed a heavy object through the old one.  Thanks again, Lexus.

As long as they don't start snarking on commercials....

Hey look, yet ANOTHER new YouTube Channel featuring obnoxiously bubbly young white people with way too much time on their hands and who share a dream of getting rich without effort by producing videos of themselves doing obnoxiously bubbly white things!

And they even have an awesomely hip and totally with-it names and a super-clever name* for their group- they're the original Three Musketeers!

And you can bet that over the next several weeks they'll be making a hundred or so superawesomeamazing videos in which they endlessly mug for the camera while prancing, playing, cooking and taking selfies while also endlessly reminding us how young and hip and free-spirited they are By The Way Please Don't Forget To Upclick They Really Really Want This To Be Their New Career!

My guess is that they did a quick survey of YouTube and saw that reviewing movies has been done to death,  the market cornered long ago by people who know how to do more with a camera than just point it out themselves before downloading to YouTube.  Ditto discussing Religion or making instructional videos.  Plus, they aren't really talented at anything other than being young and perky- so they'd thought "hell, we've got $100,000 each in college loan debt and no skills to show for it- let's try cashing in on this whole interwebs thing- we already love to use Twitter and spend most of our lives looking at OTHER people's videos, how hard could it be?"

Good luck, kids.  I won't be watching this version of "The Three Musketeers" but I'm sure that having a job and friends and a life and a functioning brain, I'm not part of the target audience anyway.  And I really don't want to meet anyone who is- because that would be really, really sad.

*Come on, Effort is hard!

(Editor's Note:  Turns out that these three "kids" didn't "spontaneously" decide to start their own YouTube channel Because What The Heck We Love To Have Fun, but are instead the hosts of a show being funded by M&M Mars.  So this is basically the Mickey Mouse Club for candy bars.  I'm going to keep my original comments though, because the "kids" are still total tools.)

I have different "Questions," North Face

It's not actually about questioning "sanity" or questioning "motivation" for me.  It's more like questioning priorities.  As in, why do the people in these ads always choose to feed their colossal egos instead of, I don't know, handing over a little of their obviously overflowing bank accounts to people in actual need?

I mean, think about it.  Every single one of these North Face "Question" ads features some unbelievably self-absorbed white person reflecting on how the world (or, more likely, their tiny and rapidly diminishing circle of friends) simply can't understand their "need" to climb that rock or ski that mountain or do any number of ego-stroking stuff they can do because they have enough Capital One Awards points saved up.  The local food bank?  Meh.  Nothing but losers with lame ambitions there.  Ugh.

(I also like the "can't do this" cry from the woman trying to climb that rock- how about "I shouldn't be doing this, this is really stupid" or "why aren't I doing something more productive and beneficial to society with all my 'determination?'")

Anyway, I thought this was a good ad to feature on Thanksgiving- god knows the people in this ad have plenty to be thankful for.  Like being able to give the middle finger to the rest of us, who wonder why it's always the most shallow people who have the most disposable income.