Capri Sun Presents: Latchkey Kids of the 21st Century

So are these kids only in communication with mom through video chat?  The only way they can get her attention is by threatening to kill themselves performing dangerous but highly shareable stunts and posting them to YouTube?

Where the hell is mom, anyway?  This stunt which turns into a plea for more Capri Sun juice boxes looks like it took a little while to set up.  Maybe mom is still relaxing on the couch enjoying her Philly Yogurt Me Time, under the impression that Daddy is on Temporary Parent Duty?

Where IS Daddy?  The kid doesn't even mention him.  Out of the picture already?

Do these kids even HAVE parents?  What the hell is going on here??

Oh Verizon, will you never stop giving me material?

Why nobody is ever, ever going to hire the insanely stupid woman in this ad:

1.  She has a very important job interview, but she's going to miss it because the subway she planned to take is twenty minutes late.  That's right, folks- she really really wants the job, but not enough to give herself ANY extra time to get there.  If she had a car, she might have been stuck in traffic.

If she really wanted that job, she would have planned to be an hour early and parked herself at a coffee shop across the street from the location of the interview.  This isn't freaking rocket science.  She does not really want that job.

2.  She thinks that she's going to save her job prospects by just calling in to the prospective employer.  Oh sure, lady, this is going to work really well.  Your call in from the subway platform is going to be much more impressive than, say, the person-to-person interviews the guy on the other end of the line is going to be conducting with job seekers who actually got their act together and managed to show up on time.  Might as well spend that first paycheck right now.

3.  She tells the prospective employer that she's a "people person."  Seriously, she comes right out and says that.  The cymbal crash which accompanies this makes perfect sense, though not for the reason that Verizon thinks.  It's basically the end of the interview.  I can't imagine ever being impressed by a job applicant who tells me "I'm a people person."  It's like being asked "what do you consider your greatest weakness" and responding "I'm kind of a workaholic, I tend to do everything my employer asks of me and never consider whether its really my job or if I'm getting paid for it, tee hee hee."

I'd be more likely to respond "Oh, you're a people person?  Me too- now if you'll excuse me, I have actual people waiting in my office who are so interested in working for me that they managed to get here in time for their interviews."

Or just tell her that I'm not a person especially impressed by hackneyed cliches OR job applicants with crappy planning skills.  Either works for me.

(BTW, how is the guy holding up the phone to make the interview happen going to prevent a train from approaching in the opposite direction and blocking his view of Stupid Woman on the other platform?  Is he going to order that train not to enter the station, just like he commanded Jackass Please Die Right Now "musician" to stop making a noisy nuisance of himself so Stupid Woman could talk to her potential employer?  I mean, what the hell?)

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?