I remember when Stouffers and the Holidays were inseperable

This hilarious throwback to the glorious 1980s reminds us of the time when every holiday party simply had to include plate after plate of toasted bread topped with cheap cheese, tomato sauce and something that at least looked like pepperoni.  I can remember every party being pretty much over as soon as the Stouffer's ran out.

But until it did.....wow, such awesomeness.  Big smiles, laughter, and gathering around the piano with friends to sing in between scarfing down flavored toast from the freezer aisle.  Everything was so perfect back then.  I'm pretty sure President Reagan had a lot to do with it.

As a sidenote- notice that nobody in this ad is texting or taking photos with their phones, because nobody- except the owner of the house- has a phone.  Yet, they all seem to be having a good time, despite the fact that they are totally unable to take photos of their chunks of crunchy bread or anything else and where forced to socialize with the people in the room rather than people not in attendance.  They couldn't even update their Facebook pages back then!

We were so weird back in the 1980s.  Better, but weird.

These Febreze Commercials are all really, really weird

The woman in this house can't understand why her gleaming-white house doesn't smell as good as it looks despite the fact that she clearly spends 99 percent of her time polishing it to a high gloss.  She can't understand why it smells bad because in all her cleaning she totally forgot that she owns a dog that she lets stink up the couch.

Now that she's been reminded by her eyes than she owns a dog, she's put two and two together and figured out the whole Cause and Effect thing, and it's time to reach for the bottle of chemicals and start spraying it all over the place.  The problem is, as soon as she's done spreading House Deodorant she's going to forget that she owns a dog again, and if she does that often enough that dog will probably die of malnutrition. 

Then she'll have a dead dog, which will start to stink, and then more chemical spraying until the nice people from the state show up to remove the carcass and take the woman to another gleaming-white building filled with nice people wearing lab coats. 

Maybe you shouldn't be a Lert, either.....

In both of these ads, A Loof is brutally murdered by a bus or a train, a horrific event which has zero impact on A Lert, which goes about it's perfect, everyday life of using the still getting Back2Good Metro System as if absolutely nothing has happened.  So either A Lert is deaf and blind (in which case, he ought to have a dedicated series of Metro Safety Ads) or he's some kind of bizarre Sociopath who simply doesn't care that the train he's happily getting on just ran over a fellow sentient creature.

What a sad world we live in.  When I was a kid I remember Gallant being a goody two-shoes perfect little boy and Goofus being a (much more relateable) jerk, but I don't recall Goofus ever being punished for his behavior by getting maimed by mass transportation while Gallant celebrated his Obvious Superiority by whistling softly to himself and being totally oblivious to the horror that unfolded fifteen feet away. 

We should at least be seeing A Lert crying out in terror and calling 911.  Isn't he supposed to be A Lert?  If you see something, say something!

Heineken's "Holiday" ad: Sorry, but I just don't get it.

And I don't get certain YouTube posters concerning this ad (which is showing up twice per commercial break during bowl games today)  either.

What exactly is non-traditional about this ad?  There's a Dad here.  There are twins. There's a stepdaughter, and a "reveal" that mom- who I guess is either divorced or widowed- has a boyfriend.  Is it that the stepdaughter isn't wearing a pretty dress, or that she' swearing "untraditional" makeup?  Is it that mom's new boyfriend is an artist, and he's not wearing a cardigan or smoking a pipe, or that he has long hair and a beard?  What is it about any of these people that makes them "untraditional?"

Is just that the ad features a blended family?  Does Heineken think that this is a 21st century phenomenon?  Is it even possible that anyone could think this?

I can't get the answer from the YouTube posters who think that this ad represents "degeneracy" and "the breakdown of the nuclear family"- no kidding, check it out.  So can you help me with this?  What am I missing here?

What are we Hungry for? Never, EVER this crud, Stouffers!

If you didn't notice the tiny Stouffers logo in the corner of the screen, you probably thought that this was a commercial for insurance, or McDonald's, or Gatorade, or something that was unrelated to the story that was unfolding on screen and which was supposed to pull at your heart strings or whatever.

With ten seconds left in a 79-second ad, we learn that this guy....eats Stouffers brand frozen boxed crap faux-lasagna.  And this is important because....oh, sorry, can't tell you, because the ad is over.

WTF-ever, Stouffers.

Maybe English is a second language to the Lavazza Family

"For over four generations, the Lavazza family has been perfecting the art of blending coffee."

How can a family "perfect" the art of blending coffee "for four generations?"  Either the art has been perfected or it hasn't.  Once it's been perfected, it can't be perfected any more.  So shouldn't this ad really say that "for over four generations, the Lavazza family has gotten better and better at blending coffee?"

Also- why are all the other ads for this stuff so chock-full of stupid celebrity cameos?  Why does anyone think that this is the way to sell coffee?

Finally- America runs on Dunkin, and there's a Starbucks on every corner. Does this Lavazza family really think that Americans are still looking for "perfectly blended coffee?"  We're not.  We just want the caffeine.  If we cared about the taste, there wouldn't be a Dunkin Donuts every fifty yards in New England and a Starbucks every fifteen feet everywhere else.

Geico's "So Easy" Campaign is Nonsensical, Offensive Rubbish

Notice how every Geico commercial is constructed exactly the same, with five seconds of non-information about the insurance company (usually how long it's been around, or how easy it is to sign up for it or file a claim) followed by ten seconds of banal nonsense that is only funny to people who think that EVERYTHING EVER MADE BY ANYONE is funny?

Check out this particular steaming pile of non-informative nothing.  The fat doofus sitting on his lawnchair tells us Geico has been around for "over 75 years" (eighty-two, actually) and therefore "it's easy to trust Geico."  This is the entirety of the educational part of this ad.  This one line explaining that Geico has been around for what I guess is supposed to be considered a long time for an insurance company.

I'm not going to point out that several of Geico's chief rivals are even older companies and therefore, by this jackass's logic, are even more worthy of trust.  For example, State Farm was established Ninety-Six years ago.  And Allstate, which was established the year before Geico, making it at least a year more worthy of confidence.  Even Progressive is only a decade younger than Geico.  But as I said, I'm not going to point any of that out.

Instead, I'll stick with the as-usual-nonsensical "funny" part of the typical Geico ad, which is always designed to make you smirk or roll your eyes (or, if you are a YouTube commentator, spit your beer out of your nose and fall on the floor laughing before running to YouTube to let everyone know how much you LOL loved the ad.)  This time, the theme is how easy it is to trust Geico, so the guy delivering the punchline tells us it's "Master of Hypnotist easy."  As in, it's as easy as your life would be if you could mentally enslave your neighbors and order them around.  Lovely.

Except, what?  Is becoming a Master of Hypnosis easy?  If not, what is the point of the punchline again?  It seems to me that this guy is actually telling us that trusting Geico is as "easy" as doing something that is pretty much impossible for almost everybody- and if not impossible, certainly not desirable if one's goal is to improve societal health.  Yeah, having slaves makes one's life "easy," if we embrace a very surface-level view of slavery and if one happens to be a slave owner and not a slave.  Even if one is a slave owner, we can see from the few seconds of this commercial that Geico understands the corrosive nature of slave ownership- the guy in the chair isn't using his abilities to enrich anyone but himself, and is turning into a disgusting, worthless slug in the process.

Wait- "disgusting, worthless slug?"  I finally found the right words to describe a typical Geico commercia.  And you can trust me on that, this blog is almost ten years old, after all.