Nothing Racist or Sexist about THIS Ad. Nope, nothing at all.

In 2016 Peyton Manning retired after winning his second Superbowl in a 17-year career with the Indianapolis Colts and Denver Broncos.  Today he continues to appear at pretty much every commercial break during pretty much every NFL game during the entire season, mainly selling Nationwide Insurance by sitting around the house or standing in line at the grocery store or driving around in a luxury car.  Usually he's humming the Nationwide tune or adding different words to it, sometimes he's just tossing quips to an appreciative audience.

Serena Williams has won 39 Major Titles, including 23 Grand Slam Titles.  She's won the Australian Open seven times, the US Open six times, Wimbledon seven times and the French Open three times.  I've seen her in a lot more blowouts than close matches, even in the championship rounds.

She shows up in commercials every once in a while- like this one for Intel in which she grunts and issues gutteral screams of frustration because....um, because she's using an old racket, I guess.  I'm sure she'd have a few lines in this ad but they were all taken by the well-dressed white guy.  So just grunt and scream, Serena.  If it plays well maybe we'll call you in to do another ad next year.

Yeah, we've come a long way, haven't we?

I love you're Commercial's, Grammarly! They makes me feel so smart's!

"Let's suppose you're writing a resume for a job you really, really want.  Or that you're writing a Facebook post that you want all your friends to see.  Or a research paper you just have to get an A on."

"Now let's suppose that you have all of the English skills of your average injured box turtle, pretty much never pick up a newspaper or (God Forbid) a book or magazine, and have been taught how to read by texting and tweeting."

"Let's continue by assuming that you always managed to get someone else to write your essays for you, but now you're out of High School and that someone else is long gone and for the first time, you find yourself face to face with the reality of a world in which you can't ask Siri absolutely everything and people are actually asking you to physically do something all by yourself."

"Well, no problem- here's Grammarly, a software program you can quickly download (ask Siri how) and let fix all those holes in your education which involve basic spelling and sentence structure.  And because you live in a world where asking an inanimate object how to turn around in your own driveway is perfectly normal, you won't feel even the tiniest sliver of shame while you use it.  Yay Modern World!"

"So go ahead and use Grammarly to pretend to be more intelligent and articulate and capable of expressing the most basic of concepts without the help of an artificial agent.  Hey, it worked for Lilly- she was hired for the job of Social Media Manager in that other Grammarly commercial over applicants whose brains weren't atrophied bowls of pudding!"

Where does the "Safety" part come in?

Let's be serious.  We all know what always happens when you install one of these "organizers."  Within a few weeks, they've turned into expensive junk drawers for your car, filled with pretty much everything that you can't shove into the glove compartment because that is already filled with pens, individual sticks of gum, scraps of post it notes, ancient receipts and half-consumed rolls of Tums.

Now, in addition to that glove compartment which may or may not contain your car registration and almost certainly does NOT contain a pair of gloves, you've got a super-convenient place to stuff your styrofoam coffee cups, practically-empty coke cans, newspaper articles you thought you might want to read later, used napkins and that overpriced water bottle you thought you'd bring inside every evening after work to refill.

Yay Organization!

CVS, 27 years later.....

Today, CVS is a great place to shop if you've got all the time in the world and don't mind waiting until the one person at the one register gets done helping nineteen people in front of you before she finally picks up the g-d d--ned phone and asks Julia to respond to "Code One," which everyone who has ever been in a CVS knows means "we've got a lot of people waiting to check out so how about from the break room and actually doing some damn work along with me?"

It's a better place to work, since only two people- one at the pharmacy, one at the register- work at a time, while an apparently huge squad of people wearing stupid red aprons are hanging out in that breakroom.

Yes, it's a pretty good place to have a "private conversation."  Just not with an actual employee- unless you're willing to hold up the twenty people behind you in line while you have your actually-not-at-all-private conversation with the cashier about why the item you are trying to buy isn't on sale when the g-d d--ned sign clearly says that it is.

Oh, and its a great place to buy $1.99 16-ounce bottles of Coke and marked-down candy left over from Easter- if you can convince the cashier that it really is marked down regardless of what the damn register tells her.  And to call "Code One" before the people behind you blow their brains out rather than let any more of their lives just melt away standing in line.

What the Rich White Kids will be doing this summer, I guess

Wow, check out the awesome coolness, Rich Kids!  While your hedge fund manager parents are away and your nannies are at Whole Foods stocking up on $30 bottles of wine, you've got the run of the mansion to play laser tag along the winding staircases and cavern-sized living rooms!

And if for some weird reason you feel like going outside, that's cool too!  Just head out on to the massive lawn and run between the Audis on the street as you get "coached" by the little voice strapped to your chest.  Don't get confused, that's not your iPhone8, its that other toy you got your "parents" to buy for you to get you off their backs for a few minutes!

So have a great few hours pretending to shoot your friends before getting back to staring at that iPhone or maneuvering a character in a video game on that massive screen in the basement!  And a quick note to the "parents"- hey, at least if you do buy this set, your kids might find themselves outside once in a while this summer!  Wouldn't that be something!?

Ugh, Dads really need to stop thinking of their daughters like this.

This is the second insurance commercial I've seen this year which features a dad looking at his little girl and remembering all the good times he had with her in the back yard and then imagining her wedding day in that same back yard.  Two insurance commercials produced by two different insurance companies, but both with the same message: that when dads look at their daughters, they think about giving her away to an appropriately white, appropriately tall young man who will marry her in that back yard.

I'm not a dad, but is this really all dads think about- their daughters being young women in wedding gowns gazing adoringly at the young man they are going to have sex with that night?

And what does any of this have to do with insurance, anyway?

Questions for Chevy's "Real People, Not Actors"

1.  What incentive to these loathsome, camera-sucking little tools have to obey the bidding of the Chevy spokeschoad?  Were they promised a good truck if they won the "contest" by reading off the awards, or just a Chevy?

2.  "That's a lot of pressure...." um, why?  Is this like the Hunger Games of commercials, where the person least proficient in reading off awards quickly is "eliminated?"  It sure sounds like there's an award being offered to the best reader.  Is there a reason we, the audience, have not been clued in?

3.  Can we all agree that these "Real People, Not Actors" Chevy commercials went to seed quite some time ago, and if we aren't making snarky comments on blogs we are creating parody videos for YouTube making fun of them?  Can they just go the hell away now, because all of these disgusting knobs pretending to be super-excited over Chevy trucks aren't the least bit convincing.  They aren't even attractive or compelling in the slightest way.  They are just camera whores, and we know it- so why can't these ads just go away already?