I don't care what Home Depot says. You don't got this.

I've been in a Home Depot maybe 500 times in my life, and not once has anyone walked up to me to ask me if they could help me find what I was looking for.  Maybe I needed to stand in front of stacked piles of former trees with a stupid, lost look on my face in order to attract attention.  I suspect that if this had worked, the Home Depot guy would have been irritated when I told him that I was just trying to decide which of the 1500 light bulb options were right for me- "oh no, I'm not here to buy $6000 worth of wood and tools so I can hurt myself in a hundred different ways, I just need a few light bulbs...."

But of course Amazing SuperSuburbanDad, being hit over the head with the hammer of Inadequacy and realizing that having a job which pays for this great house in the suburbs, the trophy wife and the kid is suddenly not good enough, figures that the credit rating that bought all that stuff can buy him the skills to build a treehouse, too (a treehouse which suddenly must be built because his son has got it into his head that Dad knows how to build one, or its awesome that he has a friend whose dad knows how to build one, or something.  I'm not sure what is really going on there, but if I have it right, what the kid learns at the end is that all he has to do to get what he wants is to casually mention that Cody's  Dad Got One For Cody.)  He just needs the right materials.  So the Home Depot guy, spotting him as an easy mark from across the store, quickly convinces him that even though he can't boil an egg without setting the kitchen on fire he's perfectly capable of handling heavy materials (including a power saw- I can see this ending well) and putting together a treehouse twenty feet above the ground...well, if nothing else, it should make an amusing afternoon for the neighbors...

Naturally the guy who can't find his ass with both hands and a flashlight manages to slap together a virtual mansion of a treehouse in no time at all, and without losing a single finger in the process.  Which makes me wonder why anyone learns carpentry when all one really needs is a few minutes with a Home Depot guy and the willingness to spend a huge chunk of money on tools you'll use exactly once because you couldn't bear the thought of your son not realizing Daddy Can't Do Absolutely Everything.

But hey, at least he finally got some practical use out of that enormous pickup truck he bought for some reason last year.

Saturday in the park, mugged by another dumb Verizon Commercial

1.  How many total losers can you get to stand around in the middle of a park to listen to a Verizon spoakschoad make a fool of himself if they think that there's a slight chance that they might show up on television later?  Apparently that number is in the dozens.  Or maybe the crowd in this ad is made up of handpicked Not Actors who flunked the Chevy commercial audition because they didn't drool and squeal enough over the looks-like-every-other car they were being shown.

2.  Just imagine- the guy who wrote this ad thinks it's clever.  You can just tell.  He probably presented the idea to a group of mentally ill squirrels and they didn't respond by tearing his face off, so he figured "hey, that's a good sign, people will find this amusing."

3.  The only way this commercial ends well is if the crowd starts booing or just walks away in disgust at the wannabee standup's sad attempt to be funny while admitting that yep, Verizon set up those enormous letters in the middle of the park and asked people to gather around.....for a fifteen-second sales pitch and a bad joke which didn't get better with repetition.  Otherwise, it's watching it is a waste of time.  But at least we didn't have to set up those letters or stand around around for twenty minutes waiting for the director to tell us we could start pretending to be interested.  So that's something anyway.

I want to be a "Social Media Manager!"

Seriously, it sure looks to me as if Lilly has just landed the easiest job on the planet, if it really does consist of sending out one-sentance alibis to disgruntled customers she doesn't even have to talk to. She even has Grammarly to help her- meaning that she quite literally needs no expertise at all to do her "job" (when the network goes down, she has absolutely no clue- yet it's apparently her "job" to respond to customer complaints that the network is down and to reassure them that someone- certainly not her- is working to fix it.  Please explain to me why an automated system couldn't do what she's doing, and much faster?)

And yet, when the day is over, she's asked if she had a tough day.  Holy crap, if that was a tough day, I wonder what an easy one looks like!

Happy Valentines Day from Amazon and Doritos!

1.  This is a perfect opportunity for you to re-evaluate this relationship, and your life in general.  Why are you so desperately afraid to be alone for a little while, when THIS is the alternative?  Instead, you are just going to do what you always do, which is rationalize- "he's usually not like this," "every guy on the planet acts like a disgusting eight-year old with food,"  etc.  And just sit there like a slug and ask your electronic friend to order Doritos.

2.  This is also a perfect opportunity for you to excuse yourself to go buy more Doritos.  Maybe you can use the time outside the house to, yes, re-evaluate that relationship and your life in general.  Maybe you'll admit that you've had enough of spending every Sunday sitting on the couch for seven hours while "your man" fills himself with grease and stares at the screen like a zombie.  Maybe you'll admit that you jumped the gun a bit because you hit 25 and you heard that clock ticking.  Maybe you'll realize that you want a bit more out of life than this, and he's NOT going to change, and in ten years he's going to be 50 lbs heavier and even more loathsome and there's still going to be football every Sunday.

3.  Just think- the way technology is going, we are only a few months away from Doritos automatically being ordered when his fingers hit the sensors at the bottom of the bowl.  They'll arrive by drone and just tip into the bowl, and he won't even notice he's eating a fresh supply.

4.  Why are you sitting there?  Oh right, I keep forgetting- the house.  The MRS degree.  It's Better Than Being Alone in This Scary World.  But is it?  Really?

Oh and BTW, what's "Atomic" about the Atomic Lantern?

Notice how so many of these late-night Only Available on TV products are sold as "military grade" by scruffy guys with tough voices who I'm pretty sure are all trying to convince us that they are veterans of Operation Desert Storm and not serial killers?  The guy in this ad "needs" a tough "lantern" (i.e. flashlight) because he has this habit of tossing them into the back of his pickup truck and driving for several seconds through rough terrain before stopping and using it again.  Jeesh, why not just leave it in the front seat with you, moron?

Anyway, this "lantern"- which is just four sets of LED lights made in China- is available for $19.99 with free shipping, and if that isn't good enough to get you rushing to your phone, you can get a seconed one "for just an extra fee."  I really hope that the "extra fee" is another $19.99, because that would be hilarious- "you can get a SECOND Atomic Lantern for just double the price of one!  WOW!"

Anyway, the weird psychopath who likes to toss it into the back of his otherwise-practically-empty pickup before driving another twenty yards really likes it, plus you can encase it in ice or blind the fish in your aquarium with it, so I guess that's pretty cool.  Except I found another guy on Youtube who tells me that the only difference between this Atomic Lantern and the electric lanterns you can buy at Big Lots for $5 is that the Atomic Lantern is black and the ones at Big Lots are orange.  Hmm.

April 15 can't come fast enough...another stupid tax prep ad.....

Let's just ignore the fact that the only way that this guy knows how to research online tax preparation services is to use three laptops.  Because "New Window" is just not a thing in this guy's universe.  Whatever.

I'm more irritated at the thought that the guy in this ad can afford a nice house and three laptop computers, but he's spending his weekend looking for an online service that will do his income taxes for free.  Ugh, talk about penny-wise and pound foolish.  He's the kind of clown who is going to end up using LegalZoom to write up his Last Will and Testament because.....well, it's the cheapest option.

Moron.

Cookie Do. Less Solution, More Problem

Maybe the only thing the fattest nation on the planet needs more than another McRib season:  the perfect dessert to grab on the way home from another trip through the Taco Bell drive-thru.

Remember when eating cookie dough was something little kids did when there was some left in the bowl mom had used to mix it to....you know, make cookies?  Remember when eating large amounts of raw cookie dough was something comedy show writers imagined that heartbroken young women and single young men did because they were damaged or just plain infantile?

Of course, those were the days when watching hour after hour of television was seen as the last refuge of the friendless loser.  Today we buy cable packages which allow us to record thousands of hours so we never, never have to STOP watching tv, and gazing at it while sitting on buses or walking down the street is seen as perfectly normal, even desirable.  So, overflowing waffle cones stuffed with cookie dough?  Just par for the course.

I'm buying stock in pharmacutical companies that specialize in insulin tomorrow.  My comfy retirement is assured.