Aspiration Presents: Virtue Signalling with a freaking Bullhorn

Seriously, there is so much ridiculous piled into this short ad, I hardly know where to start.

All that happens in this ad is that a woman notes while jogging that someone is selling flowers "cash only," gets some cash, and buys some flowers.  That's it.  Somehow this is presented as doing something amazing for the human race- no, never mind the human race, the PLANET.  Oh, she does interrupt her jogging to toss something into the recycle bin, which I guess qualifies her for Sainthood, but really...

After noting that she needs cash if she wants to buy flowers, this woman buys a cup of coffee using a debit card which is just sitting in a big floppy pocket of her jogging suit, waiting to leap to freedom first chance it gets.  That's a pretty stupid way to carry around a debit card, lady.  Oh, but then she walks over to the ATM in the coffee shop and withdraws twenty bucks- what the hell is with you, stupid woman?  You couldn't just get cash back from the coffee purchase?  You know what, if you had gone to the nearest 7-11 instead of this pretentious coffee shop you could have got that $20 WITHOUT wasting time at an ATM machine.

(Oh, and "FDIC Insured?"  Isn't that kind of required for a bank to operate within the borders of the United States these days?)

Then she goes back outside and buys a bouquet of flowers from the flower lady.  She hands the flower lady TWENTY DOLLARS for a small bouquet and walks away with the bouquet AND NO CHANGE.  So this ridiculous jogging woman just went for a run with her debit card, saved the planet by tossing something into a recycle bin, bought a coffee, used an ATM, and handed twenty bucks to cart salesperson for what looks to be maybe $5 worth of flowers?

What is this woman Aspiring too?  Bankruptcy?  I mean, come on.  What the hell is the matter with you, stupid jogging woman?  And what's with that permanent look of Enlightened Liberalism you've got stitched into your face?  What Amazingly Progressive thing did you do that I obviously missed?  'Cause I don't see giving a flower woman a $15 tip as advancing any cause unless it's the depletion of your bank account.

(Why did this woman buy coffee in the first place?  Who interrupts jogging to buy coffee?  Is she just going to walk back home now with her coffee and flowers?  I bet the cashier at the coffee place wished she had used the ATM first and paid cash for that coffee, considering what an awesome tipper she is.  Instead, she didn't tip THAT guy AT ALL because she used plastic and THEN got cash.  What the serious heck is going on here???)

And while we're at it, what is wrong with the person who asks about the background music in the comments?  Are you freaking insane, or what?

A moment later the boss sees what this kid is doing with his on-the-clock time and fires his sorry butt

Because as we all know, people who own businesses and yachts typically get their taxes done by an annonymous numbers monkey at TurboTax.  What, was the line behind the guy in the Statue of Liberty costume down at LibertyTax too long?

Seriously, how sad do you have to be to go to such great lengths to impress the TurboTax person?  And isn't your sad little facade going to collapse the moment she looks at your 1040 form and realize that if you are being at all honest, you are the worst-paid CEO in the United States, along with being the poorest yacht owner?

Echo Dot Presents: A girl who never got the real message from dad

And I thought having to listen to my father's favorite Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album over and over was bad....

This girl grew up listening to Dad's favorite song, which I guess she never noticed was about how men are doomed to be treated like playthings by evil, manipulative women.  Since she never paid the slightest attention to the lyrics, she sat with her father and listened to him play it again and again, failing as she grew to understand dad's pathetic obsession with someone or another who hurt him once and who convinced him to bury his soul into a song.  She realized the song meant a lot to him so she learned to play it on the guitar, and whenever she thought about her dad she thought about that song and maybe dad's inability to just let go and move on with his life already.

When she finally went to college, she packed everything she owned into a gigantic Amazon box and went off to a dorm room where she realized she'd be surrounded by exactly the kind of horrible females who destroyed her father (the kind with eyes and hair.)  She felt frightened to be in such a nest of Jezebels and decided to take comfort- or don armor- by asking her Echo Dot to "play dad's playlist" which, again, consists of exactly one song with a pretty creepy message.

I hope she has a roomate who, after listening to this song eight or nine times over the first weekend in the dorm, asks her what the hell is going on with the fixation on that stupid song.  And when Daddy's little girl explains that it's always been Daddy's favorite song, they can have a chat which is enlightening on both sides.  And when Daddy's little girl goes home for break, she and Daddy can have their own little chat about how Daddy got hurt and why Daddy never let his pain go, never grew the hell up and moved on, and insisted on passing his hurt on to his daughter.  And how none of this is charming or sweet or anything like healthy.

TurboTax hates people

I could go along with the YouTube commenters who want to focus on how rude the woman in this ad is.  And I could do an entire post based solely on that aspect of the ad- she bumps into a guy she knows at a coffee shop who tells her that he invented this App and it's doing great.  He starts to give her some details about the App, and two seconds later she decides that his idea is not only really stupid, but it's not worth one more moment of her time, and she's relieved to be "rescued" by the tax person who randomly called her to ask if this is a good time to go over her tax return "line by line."

She behaves as if she's just been given a reprieve by the governor because she can't simply be A)  nice to the guy and let him talk for a minute or so before wishing him well and moving on, or B) brutally honest and tell him she's so uninterested that she'd rather talk to some tax choad on her phone than listen to one more word out of his stupid face.

I could do that, but that would be following the YouTube commenter script, which if you check it out gets really, really ugly- I mean, these guys really, really don't like women at all.  They've got issues.  I'm not going to quote them, but there it is.  I'm not following their lead.

Instead, I'll just point out that sitting in a coffee shop using it's easily-hackable public WiFi is probably NOT the perfect place to "go over your taxes, line by line."  No matter how desperately you want to end a conversation you've decided you just can't bear to continue for some reason.  But I'm sure that when this woman DOES go through her taxes "line by line," she'll continue to do it without using earbuds or anything like that, because there's nothing private about tax forms after all and I'm sure everybody in that shop is as super-interested in hearing it as she is in avoiding what probably would have been a 2-minute conversation that made a fellow human being feel a little better about his accomplishments.

Two points about this iPhone x "Color Flood" ad

1.  It's an iPhone commercial.  In other words, Much Ado About Nothing and just another sad attempt to get people who already own a perfectly good iPhone to shell out a thousand dollars to "upgrade" it Because Hey It's Just Money Burning a Hole in my Pocket.  I mean, I guess you could convince yourself that you really "need".....ummm.....better color than your current phone offers.  I guess you could.  You probably can, if you've already purched thousand-dollar phones in the past.  So you probably don't need this commercial at all.  What a waste of effort.  Which brings us to....

2.  What a waste of effort.  In the days before CGI, this commercial might justifiably be lauded as a masterstroke of direction and gain plaudits for it's brilliant choreography.  Now we know some jackass with a computer just vomited this out after a few hours of rendering with a software program, and it probably includes no more than a dozen actual human beings jumping around with the rest being digital creations.  Which makes it all just another boring iPhone ad trying to convince us that a thousand dollars is NOT too much to spend for a phone because Hey Check out the Color.

But hey, who am I kidding.  Half of you are probably off to the Apple store like an army of drooling lemmings with credit card in hand to buy the Perfect Phone for the First Quarter of 2019.  Morons.

Wait....what?

So if you are so burned out on life that you can't be bothered to notice that your grandchild has opened up a box of something and is spilling it all over the place, the smart thing to do is book a flight to a vineyard where you can get drunk and ignore the fact that your grandchild is running through a vineyard all over the place?

Seems to me that the grandmother in this ad (that's not the kids mother, is it?  She looks at least sixty years older than the kid, right?) doesn't need a break as much as the people working in the grocery store, who have to clean up after little kids who aren't being tended to by idiot old people who bring their grandchildren to stores and let those grandchildren treat the produce like toys.  Just sayin'.

But those people at Liberty Tax never told me nothing about this

I'm a little concerned about an adult with at least one dependent child who is not aware that child care costs are deductable.  Not for this guy's wallet, but for that child.  Because I don't have any kids, but because I've filled out tax forms before I'm aware that you can claim child care costs and get a deduction for them.

Somehow, this stupid slob managed to get someone to have sex with him, produce a kid, incur child care expenses, and yet through all that never learn that those expenses are deductable.  I don't know how this happened unless he's either a pampered brat who until this year always had this stuff done for him (maybe he's recently divorced from a woman who did the taxes for the family before she got sick of being married to a clueless child) or he's just really, really stupid and it never occurred to him that JUST MAYBE he should ask if he could deduct child care expenses before just shrugging and sending the feds more money than they were entitled to.

Oh, wait- there's another possibility.  Maybe he spent years moving from state to state to avoid paying child support before finally being tracked down by the authorities and being forced into accepting his financial responsibilities.  Now that he's being compelled to act like an adult, he needs to learn the rules, including the rules involving the deduction of child care costs.