Coventry Direct: Just don't let the kids know

So the old couple in this ad is addressing us from a freaking palace of a house, trying to sell us on the idea that they "thought" they had planned carefully for their retirement but then "quickly realized" that they needed to supplement their income.  I wonder why this commercial doesn't feature people who live in an apartment or need to look into retirement communities instead of a couple who are clearly very well off and what they "quickly realized" was six cruises a year were going to add up even for them. 

The guy in this ad found out about selling his life insurance policy, but his (wife?) was skeptical....yeah, no big surprise there.  Women tend to outlive their husbands.  If I were her, I'd be a little skeptical about getting rid of a policy I was likely to benefit from too.  But then she saw what the cash settlement would be and decided a bird in the hand, and all that, huh?

So they sold their life insurance policies and now they can enjoy time with their grandchildren, as long as they don't let the parents of the grandchildren know about the whole Selling the Policy thing.  I suspect those parents are a lot more attentive to grandpa and grandma if they think there's still a life insurance policy out there to be read to them by a lawyer when these old people finally bump off.  Sure that's cynical, but I live here in the real world.

The Monsters COVID created.

 

Let's arrange to get the people from Monster.com together in a locked room with the people from Indeed.com to settle the whole matter of Capitalism for us, shall we?  The Monster.com people can declare the Era of Desperate Huddled Masses begging to be "given" jobs over, and the Indeed.com people can whine to their hearts content about ungrateful employees leaving for better pay because they lack Loyalty to the Company and to the Horatio Alger dreams of their employers.  If the Indeed people begin to feel overmatched, maybe we'll let them bring in a few spokechoads from Bambi to buttress their argument that "minimum wage laws" and "wrongful termination suits" are destroying Free Enterprise, which is to say Destroying America. 

I'm actually kind of enjoying all this, probably because I don't listen to right wing radio or peruse Reader's Digest OR spend any time over at DailyKos being told what the "correct" view is.  I'm a pro-Union Establishment Democrat who has no patience for exploitive bosses OR whiny lazy jagoffs who think that government benefits should be Eternal.  We all need to go to work, and we all need to get paid.  That's all. 

Becca Balint for Congress, for the weirdest reason imaginable.

 

I don't vote in Vermont anymore (I actually haven't voted in Vermont since 1988) but if I did, I think I'd vote for Becca Balint in the Democratic Primary tomorrow.  Not because I prefer her stand on the issues over that of her main opponent, Molly Gray- I would actually prefer a home-grown Vermonter to represent my state, seeing as we've had a bit of a tradition lately of electing people from New York City to represent us.  But I'd vote for Becca because I can't resist supporting someone whose yard signs look like they are selling some old-timey pre-Great Depression root beer. 

I mean, come on.  That's just awesome.  

Shopify's ads continue to break my brain and bleed my ears

 

Sure, we might not make cars or electronics or much of anything else of value anymore, but gosh-darn it, America will ALWAYS be Number One when it comes to Multi-Level Marketing and people selling coffee and t-shirts with pictures of dogs on them out of their garage and Keto Shakes out of their kitchens.  Because there's nothing more American than the idea of selling nonsense garbage to stupid people with not enough money to pay the bills but more than enough money to throw away on Said Garbage.  Is getting an actual job in which actual services are performed which add actual value to society just not a thing anymore?  I mean, seriously.  This is getting depressing.   But hey, Number One is Number One.

U-S-A!  U-S-A!

One of the Kardashians for Pretend Meat. I'll Pass.

 

Well, if America's favorite walking, talking mannequin thinks it's good, who are we to argue?

Seriously, though, this is the same vapid 3-dimensional magazine cover that was selling us "skinny teas" and "cleanses" roughly thirty seconds ago.  The same person who has pretty much come out and told us that she'll sell anything, to anyone, at any time, for the right price.  Why would I care what she thinks about chemicals pretending to be meat?

Is this the way people are supposed to watch their weight in 2022?  I just listened to an episode of Young Dr. Kildare on XM Radio Classics in which a woman wanted to lose 20 lbs. through SURGERY, but was instead put on a diet of - dry toast, grapefruit, lettuce and black coffee (you know, the standard Joke Diet that dominated most of the 20th century before someone noticed that eating more protein and fewer carbs allowed one to actually feel FULL while losing weight.)  Of course the diet worked- once Lionel Barrymore's character figured out that it "wasn't working" because the woman kept cheating with chocolate malteds- and we had our happy ending without surgery- but not before we got the ridiculous conversation between Dr. Kildare and the woman's husband, who resented being "forced" to exercise despite not needing to lose weight to be an ally to his wife, because seriously why would anyone exercise if they weren't trying to lose weight?  Ah, America in the 1940s....

That being said...I'll be off on my annual beach vacation starting tomorrow, so sadly this is the last blog post until the second week of August....based on the view counter, nobody will notice anyway, but I thought I'd just throw that out there.  Enjoy the archives till I get back!

GOLO is yet another example of Expensive Nothing for Sale

 

"I've tried detox, I've tried teas, I've tried pills..." have you tried Calories In, Calories Out, Denise?  I mean, now that you've tried all the stupid get-slim-quick gimmicks, have you considered using basic thermodynamics?

That's a pretty damned substantial-looking living room you've got there, Denise.  Did you ever consider a gym membership or a personal trainer?  Don't tell me you can't afford that, Denise.  

I'm told you lost 22 pounds in six months using GOLO.  Well, isn't that something.  That's what you could have done with a modest, 500-calorie-per-day deficit.  I'm glad you've taken the weight off and kept it off, but why did you need another gimmicky program to do it?  You achieved rather slow, sensible weight loss- which is remarkably simple if you just cut out processed carbs and sugar and consume more protein and healthy fats.  And move more.  There, I just gave you an absolutely trustworthy and safe way to lose a modest amount of weight in a medically safe way, and I didn't charge you a dime.  And if you had asked, I would have told you to skip the stupid "detoxes" (they are not a thing, you have organs that came with your body that detox for you, for FREE) and teas and pills, all of which almost certainly did you more harm than good and don't come close to addressing the real issue, which is the amount and type of food you eat and the amount of work you make your body do on a daily basis. 

Don't know much about GOLO, but if it involves healthy eating habits, then go for it.  But if it does, it seems to me that this is another case of Stone Soup Syndrome- putting a fancy label on common sense behavior and then giving the label rather than the behavior all the credit for positive results.  I guess you've got the money so it doesn't matter, but I wonder about people who are influenced to put this "system" on a credit card when eating less and better, and moving more, is really all they need. 

Skyrizi is a lot of expensive, dangerous nothing

Most Americans are overweight, and a third are obese.  The favorite past time of the great majority of Americans is watching television or surfing the internet or (if they are really "ambitious," doing both at the same time. But not a single user of Skyrizi is anything short of a young, svelte athletic type* who is constantly on the goal with their mountain biking, swimming and overall just being outdoors with friends.  Is there a correlation between being healthy and active and having bad skin, or what?

Anyway, in the pursuit of ridding yourself of unslightly rashes more and more Americans with solid gold insurance plans are partaking in this extremely expensive ($30 k per year) series of injections which "may increase risk of infections and Tuberculosis" and maybe you shouldn't take if you "plan to or have recently received a vaccine" (any vaccine?  Even for the Illness that Shall Not Be Mentioned?  If you haven't received that vaccine and don't "plan to," what are you doing in the doctor's office in the first place?  Shouldn't you be ingesting horse de-wormers to rid yourself of that scaly red skin?  I bet you don't think the election of 2020 was stolen either!)

The real bottom line, though, is that I really hate this stupid song.  "Nothing is everything...I see nothing in a brand new way....I just got saved..." what the actual hell?  Get off my television already!

*ok, there is that one fat guy swinging his kid around.  He's still being very active.  Not one shot of people just enjoying clearer skin while waiting for their McDiabetes at the drive-thru or bingeing on Tiger King?