Classic American Express "We're just sayin', things happen" ad from the Good Old Days

Remember when Karl Malden was wrapping up his career by appearing as the Hovering Spectre of Vacations Gone Wrong?  When if someone was getting his pocket picked, you could count on Malden suddenly appearing to express his disgust that someone would fail to take the simplest of steps to assure that their dream vacation wasn't completely trashed Seriously What is Wrong With You People?

These ads were supposed to tickle our That Could Happen To Me bone, and back when money came in paper form, I guess they worked pretty well.  Now that money is mostly imaginary, experienced only as lines of digits on a screen or on plastic cards which can be replaced instantly with one phone call, the idea of carrying around American Express Traveller's Checks seems kind of silly, like buying Life Insurance or Smoking or serving your kid Pizza Rolls- you know, stuff you did when you didn't know any better.

Well, Karl Malden isn't what he used to be (he's dead, for one thing) and neither are Traveler's Checks.  If any of you have been on amazing, life-fulfilling vacations to other continents and would like to share your Traveler's Checks Saved Me stories, I invite you to call a friend but please, don't bug me with them.  For the next week I'll be at fabulous Hampton Beach New Hampshire for the annual family getaway- if I lose my wallet, I think I'll manage to have a great time and get back to Vermont alive without the help of American Express or anyone else, thank you very much.  I'll be spending most of my time taking long walks and playing in the surf.  Because I am who I am, I'll also be mentally cursing out all the "parents" who would rather sit and smoke than play with their offspring, and wishing that more of the clueless teenagers squinting at their cell phones would accidentally drop them into the water, because that would really be awesome.

And because I am who I am, I won't be bringing my laptop or checking my mail while at the beach.  So no new updates until next Saturday.  Have a great week everybody!

Chase Sapphire blows its chance to make my summer

You know, Chase, I put up with a lot of crap from you.

Women who inform their husbands that No, Sorry, we can't go on that dream vacation you've cooked up, because I just used our hoarded Rewards Points to buy myself a dress.  "Men" who blow through other rewards points by attending Rock and Roll camps.  Women who use theirs to mount giant phallic symbols with their boyfriends (I never got this one at all- why would she consider using HER points to help HIM buy her a ring?) so that they can stand on top of said phallic symbols and, well, look around for a while before climbing back down.

And now you give me some privileged twat wading in the surf, trying to contact your Pakistan-based phone bank, and you can't even end the ad by having this pampered dick drop his freaking phone?  Because that would have made up for so very much.

Of course, he would have picked up a brand new I Phone from the nearest Apple Store- probably on the boardwalk- using his Chase Sapphire Rewards points.  But still, I would have had that image of Mr. Entitled fumbling his precious phone into the surf to keep me warm when times are tough.  Thanks for nothing, Chase.

McDonalds- because LSD is still illegal, and Soma doesn't exist outside of "Brave New World"

Here's another McDonald's commercial that I could barely get through without groaning and hitting the mute button (hard.)  McDonalds seems pretty convinced that only the most cloyingly sweet, artificial junk ads are good enough to sell their artificially fattening, junk food.

In this particular commercial, the ubiquitous chain restaurant takes credit for basically everything that makes life worth living, and a few things that simply don't.  The moron with the surgically-implanted smile and apparently no place to go drives from place to place, marveling at all the Gosh-darned amazing, happy things he sees in his Gosh-darned amazing world.  All thanks to pancakes drenched in corn syrup, fried pig parts served between over-buttered biscuits, and milkshakes sold as "coffee drinks."  Along the way, the guy experiences any number of hallucinations- brought on by a grease, sugar or caffeine overdose, we are not told. 

A great parody of this ad would be this guy blissfully taking in muggings, fires, parents being abusive toward their kids, homeless people waving "will work for food signs," etc without ever, ever taking that stupid-ass grin off his loathsome face- because after all, he's loaded up at McDonalds, so all must be well in the world.  But McDonalds ads are pretty much parody-proof, because they are so damned stupid and insulting in their original form.

I'll just end by noting that if you are really enjoying life as much as this guy is, why would you take steps to cut it short by consuming this garbage?

Of Clorox, Overgrown Children, and MommyWife

Message: "Fun" is what you have when MommyWife is away.  It's also what comes to a screeching halt once MommyWife comes back.

If women would just pop out kids, keep the house clean, and get the damn meals on the damn table when they are supposed to,* otherwise getting the hell out of the way, DaddyHusband and kids would have so much fun.  Every day would be filled with paintball, water balloons, and the kind of Endless Fun which has nothing to do with Xfinity.

Unfortunately, MommyWife can't be relied upon to just make herself scarce when she's done doing her MommyWife chores, so DaddyHusband and kids need to get their fun under the radar.  They need to snatch up moments of pure happiness when MommyWife is away (shopping, getting her hair or nails done- whatever they do.  I wouldn't know.)  Except for the cooked food, cleaned and folded laundry, and all those other little things that MommyWife takes care of, man life would be so much better if she just wasn't around.

Family Values, brought to us by Clorox.

(two best moments:

"I made a lasagna..." Yes, because naturally DaddyHusband could never, ever be relied upon to feed YOUR kids on his own.

"You're doing laundry?"  Hey, imagine that- a guy doing laundry!  Like a fish riding a bicycle! What will he do next- wash the dishes?  Has the world gone MAD?)

*When I was grading APs in Louisville last month, the worthless dick sitting across from me managed to mention something his wife forgot to pack for him pretty much every day- "I told her to pack my favorite shirt, of course she didn't....I reminded her over and over again not to forget to pack my phone charger, so what do you think happened?  She forgot to pack my phone charger."  Which means I spent most of the week mentally braining this helpless jerk with my chair.  I bet he just couldn't wait to finish up the grading so he could get back to MommyWife.  I wonder how he managed to dress himself every morning.

Um...why would you serve this to "people you love?"

Time-saving tips from ABC Family, in partnership with Hamburger Helper in a nefarious plot to rot our brains AND our intestines with crappy television and even crappier food:

1.)  Install a massive whiteboard onto the wall in the kitchen.  Whiteboards have a million different uses- they allow kids to write stuff like I AM AT TIFFANYS NOT LIKE YOU CARE MOM and DAD CALLED HES PISSED AGAIN and FU I AM ON A DATE WITH TONY YOU DONT UNDERSTAND HM WE R IN LUV.   Or for parents to jot down loving notes like OUT AGAIN TONIGHT PIZZA ROLLS IN FRIDGE or DONT FORGET SET BURGLAR ALARM FEED CAT.

 (At the school where I teach, Whiteboards are used to congratulate female graduates when they do the only three things females do which are worthy of praise- when they get engaged, when they get married, and when they have kids.)

2.)  On the rare occasions when you DO get the entire family together, remind them exactly why it's ok that they are so rare by feeding them horrible, cheap slop like Hamburger Helper.  Nothing says "I see dinners with the family as a massive inconvenience considering my busy schedule" more than mixing up a big ol' frying pan full of this trash.  Well ok- maybe Manwiches.  But this is definitely a close second.

So since you are home, and it's dinnertime, well, it can't be avoided, so....here's six dollars and fifteen minutes worth of effort.  No need to thank me, just my way of showing exactly how much I love ya, honeys.

What, you are still here?  Well, let's all plop in front of the TV and see what ABC Family has for us then.  Get the message yet?  It's ok if you are never home.  If you are home, this is what you can expect.  Because Mommy and Daddy are awfully busy and jeesh, don't you have other kids you want to hang with?

Another "Problem Solved, and it was So Simple" insulting little nub of dumb from America's Natural Gas Companies

There are roughly 800 of these "Energy Voter" commercials currently polluting the airwaves- 17 second spots featuring a typical Useful Idiot expounding the benefits of drilling the hell out of the country, destroying the aquifer and basically sending life as we know it to the brink of extinction through the release of even more greenhouse gases for the sake of (possibly) slightly cheaper natural gas and petroleum.

In this episode of I'll Gladly Sell Out My Future And The Future of My Child For a Few Dollars and 17 Seconds of Face Time, "Felice" bounces around the screen with her oblivious daughter, explaining how awesome it will be when we finally get at all that wonderful natural gas just waiting for "us" to pull out of the ground underneath "our" feet, solving "our" energy issues in the wink of a Fascist-Corporatist's lizard eye.  Yay for Felice's daughter!  Middle East Wars, oil spills, ruinously high gas prices (do you know we pay almost 30% as much as Evil Socialist Europe does for a gallon of the stuff?) are soon to be a thing of the past.  All we have to do is Get to Work, Get the Environmentalist Al Gore-Loving, Polar Bear and Clean Water Worshiping Weirdos out of the damn way and Drill Baby Drill.

"I'm Felice, and I'm an Energy Voter."  Actually, you are what they call a Low Information Voter.  And that's being polite.  I could just call you a Pawn.  Or a Sellout.  Corporate Whore is a little rough, so I won't go there.  Sucker?  "Actress" doesn't seem to fit, because you aren't especially convincing.  Then again, isn't Katy Perry an "actress" these days?

Whatever you really are, Felice, please don't pass your rank stupidity on to that poor kid.  Let her grow up to be an unreasonable adult who selfishly wants stuff like non-flammable water and who thinks that maybe continued reliance on oil and gas isn't the best idea on a planet where China, India and Brazil's fuel needs are skyrocketing.  An unreasonable adult who thinks that maybe there are no Easy Answers, and who is intelligent enough to realize that all that oil and natural gas underneath "our" feet isn't really "ours" and will just go on the world market where we will compete to buy it, just like we always have.  An unreasonable adult who has overcome her upbringing to develop a social conscience and is about 100 times smarter than her mom.

Of course, she'll grow up drinking bottled water and wondering why her parents generation thought that frakking was such a great idea, too.  Can that one website you visited, which had all the answers, deal with that question, Felice?

Come to Times Square, and get your Range Rover molested by strangers

The "idiots with nothing better to do in their sad little lives staring lovingly at cars" theme has been popular in automobile commercials for several decades now.  You know the drill- a showroom-shiny car which Despite What the Narrator Is Telling Us Looks Exactly Like Pretty Much Every Other Car on the Road cruises slowly down the street, and all activity stops as people freeze and drool over it.  Recently, animals have gotten into the act, as we insult dogs and cats by pretending that they share the same shallow non-values as television people.

Anywhere, here's another Check Out Our SameMobile attracting the inappropriate attention of a mob of total losers in Times Square.  See the losers take photos of the SameMobile.  See them lust over it.  See them stroke it (does anyone ever do this, ever?  Why? Please don't try to convince me that certain cars have a different "feel" from the OUTSIDE.  Do these clueless weirdos think that they'll somehow develop an emotional bond with the car if they engage in physical contact with it?  Do they think the car will follow them home?  Do they believe that by touching it, they achieve a kind of spiritual connectivity with the SameMobile?  What the hell?)

This ad is about as silly as all the other auto commercials featuring labs and wind tunnels and electronic blueprints which try to convince us that we are about to be introduced to something Brand New- but the "Brand New" always means a new bell or whistle which isn't obvious from the outside, so what's with the constant staring and open-mouthed astonishment?  And why is it that no matter how cool the "concept car" looks, once it hits the market it's just another SameMobile?

Maybe people really don't want to buy a car that total strangers will paw with their greasy mitts?  Just a thought.