Un-Flipping Believable....but lots of people believe it anyway....

This guy brags on his radio commercials that he was "once so broke, I had my electricity turned off NINE TIMES!"  Yes, this is the guy I want to go to for advice on how to manage money and flip houses.

He's certainly has figured out how to make money in the largely unregulated property market, and it doesn't involve hard work or study.  Those things are for suckers like he used to be, when he was getting his electricity turned off NINE TIMES.  Only a total loser who doesn't share his beautiful vision of American Capitalism would work hard, live within one's means, and invest wisely when this guy has this book which is FLIPPIN' AWESOME and FUN TO READ to boot!

What you do is, see, instead of all that hard work and saving and investing, you send money to this carnival barker to attend his seminars and buy his DVDs and learn how to flip houses like a pro (because flipping houses is a profession now.)  He gets rich and famous.  Maybe you flip a house now and then, maybe you don't.  But let's not take our eyes off the main point- he gets rich and famous.

There's nothing new about any of this.  Late-night television has featured "Magic Real Estate Secrets" packages since before there were VHS tapes, never mind DVDs.  I can remember being offered standard audio tapes and a series of workbooks which would turn me into a Real Estate Wizard, Wall Street Genius, and Multilinguist fluent in Japanese and Mandarin inside of six weeks Or My Money Back Yeah Good Luck With That.  In High School I had a close friend become a cultist for a certain Sell Ridiculously Expensive Household Cleaners Door to Door pyramid scheme I won't mention by name here but which rhymes with Scamway.  Get Rich Without Work was invented the day the first person discovered that work was hard.   It's still the most attractive proposition out there, and if you don't believe me, check out your state's Lottery sales.

This Verizon ad really should end....

With this socially disfunctional jackass being run down by a truck or at least dumped by his girlfriend because his electronic addiction takes priority over EVERYTHING ELSE.

Seriously, we see this guy spend his ENTIRE DAY staring at his stupid hand-held drug of choice as the world goes on around him and without him.  He manages to get on buses and elevators- awkwardly- because a tiny part of his brain still operates like the warning lights in a well-equpped car to remind him that he still inhabits a damage-prone body and there are these other life forms around him he has to avoid.  He goes to theatres for some reason- I'm guessing because for a few more years going to theatres is something humans do and he's a human so there you go.  But he can't even pick his ass off the seat before consulting that G-d d--ned phone again....which means that, like I said, we really need to see that girlfriend dump his sorry butt.  Or push him in front of a truck.

Come on, Verizon, give me SOMETHING here.

Apple, making the world just a little bit dumber

Or you could just say it using your voice.  You know, in person.  Like in olden times, before you became a socially disfunctional hermit crab who doesn't have the first clue how to communicate with your fellow homo sapiens without using an electronic device.

Like people did for thousands of years before these things came along and made Conversation a Lost Art.  Thank goodness those days are over, huh?

Intellivision to the Rescue!

Since Mattel stopped making the consoles in 1990 after a very successful 12-year run, you probably don't remember these if you are under the age of forty.  I never owned one myself, but they were for a time Atari's only real competition in the home video game field.

Back in the 70s, the idea was that the home video game would replace the board game as the best way to keep families engaged with eachother instead of the images on the screen.  Mom, Dad, and Kids would compete in fun contests of skill by manipulating joysticks instead of dice or cards.  Innocent fun and all that.  And much better than the pathetic, zombie-like couch potatoes they were when they were just watching tv, never interacting in any meaningful way.

Ugh, can you imagine?  People used to spend up to two or three hours a night watching television.  Then Atari and Intellivision came around and instead they started spending an hour or two a few nights a week playing video games.  We sure were obsessed with glowing screens back then- if it hadn't been for Atari and Intellivision, I bet we'd still be spending hour after hour ignoring our families and staring at the tv.

This was in the late-70s.  Thank goodness things have changed so much, right?  Thanks for saving our society, Video Game Industry!

Nice Job, Hasbro.

Every once in a while I have to stop snarking on commercials and actually endorse one, because the message is just too good.  It doesn't even bother me that the games being featured indocrinate kids to be Good Little Capitalists and Breeders.

If I was married with kids, this is what my house would look like, except that the kids would be a lot better looking of course.  We'd be playing board games on the nights we weren't reading or just talking.  Nobody would be blathering away on cell phones and nobody would be texting or staring at a glowing screen.  Because as the ad implies, none of that involves living, just existing.

I see adults with kids in parks, at ball games, at the beach etc. all the time redefining "family time" to mean "people related to each other being in the same general location fiddling with and staring at electronic devices."  It's freaking heartbreaking, and it's also so repulsive to see such asshattery being normalized.  Is the "connectivity" addiction so damned powerful that people need to be forever putting their alleged loved ones on the back burner?  Aren't we all getting a little sick of playing second fiddle to a glowing box?  Why is someone who isn't there always a higher priority than someone who is?

Maybe I'm just in a mood because every day I have to be extra careful crossing streets, watching for people who think that self-driving cars are already a reality and its perfectly ok to text while they are in motion.  But I think its more than that- more and more I wonder why people even bother to pretend to be social animals when all they really want is to crawl into an electric cocoon and be left alone.   Or why such people went through the motions of getting married and having children if they weren't going to give spouses and kids any quality time beyond "lets go to the AT&T store and get you hooked up so you can leave me alone until you move out."  What the hell is going on here?

When you're watching racist McDonald's Commericals- there's a Big Mac for that!

You know what, never mind.  I could spend the next hour spilling out eight paragraphs of rant fixated on how a multi-billion dollar sludge factory owned by massively rich white people made rich by churning out poisonous but very cheap junk for poor black and white people thinks that the best way to appeal to its customers is through bad rap.  But I've got things to do, so I'll just focus on the revolting behavior of the people in this ad:

According to this loathsome two-minute wall of noise, there is a Big Mac for That if

1.  You're sitting in a library.  Because libraries just love it when patrons use them as a setting for eating hot, greasy food.  But hell, if you feel comfortable letting out a loud squeal of delight while sitting in a library, you probably don't give a damn about the other patrons anyway.  So please chomp down that Big Mac while blathering at high volume on your cell phone.  Because as far as you are concerned, society is for losers anyway.

2.  You're sitting on a bus.  See No. 1.  Everyone on that bus loves the smell of your food and the site of you jamming it into your face.  The bus company loves the mess and the vermin it attracts.  We all wish you'd just go back to yelling into your iPhone or playing your music with no headphones or with ear buds (same thing.)

3.  You find money in the dryer at the laundramat. Because I don't know about you, but the heavy smell of chemicals and lint really spike MY appetite.  Sometimes I go out of the way to eat dinner at the local 24-hour Wash and Dry.  Especially when the library is closed.

4.  A hot girl returns your text.  Because if you think you are going to land a date with your dream girl, the first thing you want to do is shove about half a pound of grease and carbs down your pie hole.  Try to make sure she's there to see you do it.  She's sure to swoon.

I think that the real message of this commercial is "no matter how big your mouth is, we've got a sandwhich you can shove into it if you open that mouth really really wide and really don't care who might be able to see you, you disgusting trashy slobs."

Tax Solutions: Let us help you become even bigger victims!

I don't know why all of these Duck Your Taxes commercials don't just cut out all the narration and just skip to the obvious punchline- "I'm a tax cheat and I got caught, oh noes what do I do now?"

Oh, right- because the message in all these ads is "the big bad Internal Revenue Service lives in a giant white castle and uses the power of the Evil Federal Government Run By Faceless Money-Hungry Socialist Bureaucrats to take YOUR money, and its coming after you so you need help call this toll-free number before it's too late!"

And in case you don't realize how late it really is, check out the digital clock, counting down the seconds until that knock on the door!

Of course, all of these tax cheats- err, I mean Honest Americans Who Are Being Victimized- live in big houses and have innocent, pretty wives and pretty children who are all made out of ticky-tacky and all look just the same, and who all just want to go about those pretty little lives in peace but can't because the Trolls at the IRS are hounding them to death oh please make it stop all we did was not pay our taxes, its not like we are criminals or anything!

I'm sure commercials like this do a great job massaging the sense of victimhood the tax cheats watching them desperately want to feel- they aren't bad people.  They are just Good, Decent, Hard-Working, Home-owning, Breeding Americans trying to Live the Dream but Can't Sleep at Night because the Government is Interfering Why Cant they focus on Defeating the Terrorists like they are supposed to this Must Be Obama's Fault?  If you think I'm exaggerating, do a Google search of "Complaints about Tax Masters" (a now-defunct company which spent years stealing money from would-be tax dodgers.)  They include things like "the government was hounding our small little business" and "instead of doing their job the IRS was picking on little guys like me," etc. etc. etc.  They would actually be hilarious if they weren't so pathetic.

And of course they all include testimonials like "they offered to settle my $80,000 debt for $27 and an upfront fee of $3500, but they LIED!"

Yes, the IRS makes mistakes.  When that happens, guess what you can do to address the problem besides hire a middleman like these scum-sucking pigs?  You can call the IRS and work it out.  In rare cases, you may need to hire a tax attorney- and if that's necessary, you hire someone local, not a damn voice on the phone you can't visit in his office, you morons.  Oh, but if you do any of those things, you might have to accept the reality that you aren't going to be settling that debt for pennies on the dollar.  Which means you don't get to victimize the society you are supposed to be doing your share to support.  No sympathy here.