Meta Insulting

 

1.  If you buy that the people in this ad are Real People Not ActorsTM, well, I guess you're half right- they aren't "actors" in that they can't act.  They are not, however, actual customers of some kind of mailing service who are in a Candid Camera/Punk'd situation and if you think they are, please show yourself out and don't come back.

2.  I mean, the woman we see "was wanting to mail this..." and she has a letter in her hand.  She looks like an adult to me.  Which means she's heard of this thing called the United States Postal Service, which was founded less than a year after the signing of a piece of paper called the Declaration of F--ng Independence.  Why is she going to some shipping company to have a letter mailed?  

3.  If this service is boasting of providing encrypted, totally private delivery of texts, well, what's the point in a country filled with people who carry on extremely sensitive conversations on buses, at the grocery store, sitting at Starbucks and basically everywhere else?  The people who developed this thing think that they live in a country where people are concerned about privacy?  Where did they get this idea?  

4. Oh wait, Meta is behind this?  The company that owns Facebook, everyone's favorite source of hate speech and election-altering misinformation which is currently losing billions in revenue and probably won't exist at all two years from now?  That Meta?  Yeah, pass.  I mean, "not owned by Elon Musk" is a positive, but not THAT big of a positive.  Meanwhile, I've watched this garbage several times now and I still can't quite figure out what they are trying to sell me here.  Nor do I really care.   

With FanDuel, you can use your already poor decision-making skills to someone else's advantage!

 

Or You're already dangerously stupid - why not use that quality to rid your wallet of excess money by downloading the FanDuel app?

I've already posted about how much I hate this phenomenon of advertising impulse gambling like it's some kind of fun activity you'd be involved in already if you weren't such a stick in the mud and not an addiction-creating, finances-endangering disaster waiting to happen.  We've devolved so far from condemning gambling that we now have sites like FanDuel and DraftKings sponsoring pregame shows.  In a few short decades we've gone from "drink this soda or you're a loser" to "drink this beer or you're a loser" to "drink this hard liquor or you're a loser" to "bet on everything imaginable or you're a loser," and I don't call this "progress."  I call it pathetic and sad and more than a little scary. 

I don't see this as innocent fun, especially but not exclusively because we are living in a time of stretched paychecks and flatlined 401(k)s.  I see this horror as a gold mine for a few manipulative greedy scumbags who are too lazy to rip off the desperate the old-fashioned way- by opening a Check Cashing Service or offering Payday Loans or running a Rent-a-Center or pawn shop.  I think these people would be offering free samples of crack* if it weren't for all these annoying laws.  And who is going to pay for all this?  The idiots who don't realize that gambling is as addictive as alcohol and sugar- which will also be heavily promoted in between ads for gambling sites.  Good luck to the rest of us, and get ready for a wave of "I lost my family and my house because of my new drug addiction" stories.  

*please note that ALL of these gambling sites offer their own versions of "free samples" these days. 

Dr. Pepper's Fansville Commercials are the epitome of Lazy-Stupid

 

It's such a simple concept:  there are people out there who never really left college in their hearts.  College was the peak experience of their lives, maybe because it's when they found their significant other or it's just when they were at their healthiest and most fit and (because they had the rights of adulthood but not yet the responsibilities) simply the Best Time They Would Ever Have.  I get it.  I really do understand the concept.

So- the concept goes- let's just create an imaginary community entirely populated by these people who insist on living largely in the past, pretending that they are still in school despite the wrinkles and gray hairs and full-time jobs and mortgages.  Despite all that lame "adult" stuff the only thing that matters to these people is The Big Game coming up between Alma Mater University and The Other Guys.  These people go around dressed in school colors and even paint their faces just like they did (or think they remember doing) when they were actual students at that school which I presume they live down the street from because that's where their hearts are and they can't bear to be too far away.  How they go about their lives between January and August, when their team is not playing, is a mystery we're not supposed to think too hard upon.  It would be like asking what the people of those entirely Christmas-themed towns in Hallmark Movies do between January and November.  Better to leave such queries to ourselves.

But like all advertising concepts, this one had a shelf life and like way too many, that shelf life has been ignored so what we have pounding at us from our televisions every weekend is stale and monotonous at best, We Get It Move On Now obnoxious at worst.  I don't want to meet anyone who likes these Fansville commercials because their limited supply of amusing ran out somewhere around 2019.  Also, all this dramatic fuss is over a soda.  A soda that tastes like cough medicine.  I mean, come on.  It's not even beer.  It's SODA.  That stuff you never touched when you were in college because YOU WERE IN COLLEGE.  Are we supposed to believe that one of the things that the Fans of Fansville most fondly remember about their halcyon days in the hallowed halls of AMU was drinking DOCTOR PEPPER?  So they had no social life at all back in college- and, judging from at least one "episode" of this long-running series which includes loony mom and dad sending their kid off to college with a 12-pack of the stuff- they don't want their offspring to have one either?

Can Someone please explain the mentality of the people in this Kohler Commercial?

 

In the fall of 2005 my parents in Vermont lost power for three days as a result of a freak blizzard.  The following year they invested in a generator.  On the rare occasions it's been put to use, it powers about one-third of the house- it keeps the heat going, along with the electricity in the kitchen and....that's about it.  And that's plenty because hey, it's for emergencies.

So someone explain to me why the people in this ad responded to losing power and having to switch to their EMERGENCY GENERATOR by USING AS MUCH ELECTRICITY AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE (I'm actually impressed that we don't see at least thirty cell phones being recharged during this massive party going on; was that scene just cut from the final version because someone said "maybe that's a bit much?")  The drain that these idiots are putting on that generator is almost frightening- if they'll suck up this much juice when they are using their own gas to generate it, how do they behave when connected to the grid?  It's like they are worried that people ten blocks away won't notice that they have power.  Seriously, what the hell is going on here?

A Dollop of Dumb

 

1.  "Adding fat makes stuff tastes better."  Wow, what a revolutionary concept.

2.  Yes, that woman is eating strawberries with sour cream, something that no human being on Earth has ever done or will ever do.  Just because it's white and creamy doesn't make it whipped cream, lady.  That's just gross. 

3.  Yes, this really is a commercial for a brand of sour cream.  Because Americans just don't get enough junk into their arteries already, I guess.  So let's encourage everyone to drop several tablespoons of milk fermented with bacteria on to EVERYTHING, including strawberries.  That will be a big help. 

That Extra-Creepy Gum Ad where the dolls are not the creepy part.

 

Yeaahhhh....if you're a 28-year old guy who likes to sit on beds with 12-year old girls,* I don't have a lot of sympathy for your feelings of discomfort.  If I were you (and I thank my non-existent god that I am NOT) I'd be checking the closet for Chris Hansen.  

*12-year old girls channeling Damien Thorne, yet.  Seriously, what the hell is with this chick?  If I were this guy I'd start to wonder if I had fallen into a Get Out type of situation.  She looks like she's going to do her best to drag him into her basement so he can be ritually sacrificed to her personal Cat Demon. 

The Ultimate in First-World Problems, and a case of Foolish Economy

Check out this article from CNN published today:  https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/disney-price-hikes-visitor-demand/index.html.  It opens with the sad, sad story of an adult woman who decided to fly to Southern Florida to go to Disney World but then, when she found that the entrance price had increased by "forty or fifty dollars" (which one?  Why the estimate rather than an actual price? Does it fluctuate?) made the decision to "cut her trip by a day."  

What the actual heck?  This woman spent god knows how much money to fly across the country to visit some stupid theme park but decided she needed to save $50 by only going to that park for a day instead of her originally-planned two?  This would be like me flying to Paris and then not visiting the Eiffel Tower because the cost of the elevator had risen from $20 to $40.  Or me spending $4000 for a week in Ireland and then not buying a t-shirt because, hey, it's that $20 again.  I mean, is this really the moment I'm going to choose to save some money?

I am not even going to get deeply into the whole "problem" of a theme park in which attendants are constantly assaulted by commercials while waiting in endless lines (and are encouraged to pay extra to get into slightly shorter lines, essentially creating a caste system right there in the park by charging more for the "experience.")  Theme parks are not grocery stores and rides are not food or medication.  If Disney World, Disney Land, Six Flags or Hershey Park become "too expensive," people will stop going, and the prices will come back down.  This is called Capitalism and while I'm not a fan, I do get how it works and how pointless it is to complain about it (and how dumb it is to make the decision to spend a thousand dollars traveling a thousand miles and then deciding it's time to economize over forty or fifty bucks.  What did that stupid woman do with the extra day she had because she didn't go to Disney World?  Did she just fly back home early, or did she stand in the parking lot at Disney World looking through the gates at the exhausted, sweaty People of Means having "fun" in there?) 

And oh, one more thing- Times are Tight.  Millions of people are struggling to pay their grocery bills and rent and other Necessary Expenses.  If a day at Disney World (but not a cross-country flight) seems a bit pricey to you right now, seriously, touch grass.  I don't care about this particular "problem," sorry.