Commercials

Monica: I have big news
Chandler: What, that 5th dentist finally came around?


I worked for 4 different insurance companies from 1986 to 1995. At the third one, I was still a smoker and we had a real ventilated smoking room. First, sometimes my co-workers would mention a person’s name and I would not know who they were talking about. Then, they’d come back with “You don’t know her because she doesn’t smoke”.

Anyway, there were few topics where every person could contribute to the conversation. A certain movie? Some people had seen it. A book? Some people had read it. One topic that was universal was TV commercials. “My husband – some hotshot…”.

So I was drin… thinking about something: What if aliens could see our commercials from North American TV? What would they figure they knew about us? It would be like those archaeological digs where all we decide what we know about a group of people is based on their death and burial rituals.

I think they’d come up with something like this:

1. Women are way smarter than men – men can’t cook, they know nothing about their children, the wife has to tell the idiot how to microwave a burrito over the phone. I think the wives have to dress them and wipe their asses. I can’t imagine most of them are smart enough to get drivers licences.


2. Children are way smarter than adults.


3. Animals are way smarter than people and they can “talk”.


4. Everyone is married and there are no divorces.


5. All couples are heterosexual.


6. Until recently, all people were white.


7. Until even more recently, all couples were of the same race.


8. Life on earth involves a lot of jingoistic background music.


9. People with perfect skin use acne cleanser.


10. Everyone is thin except for those in weight loss commercials.


11. Very few men loose their hair


12. 21 year old gorgeous women (and men) won’t get dates if they use the incorrect shampoo, toothpaste or face soap.


13. Everyone has a good job, except the people in ads for vocational schools.


14. People have beer – they never drink it, they just have it around.


15. You can make fun of people – as long as they are white.

RE: 15. The Scottish: IT’S NO…OATMEAL. Italians: There was a commercial for a pasta sauce that was so authentically Italian that after the people at it, they all started singing opera. Can you imagine a bunch of black people where the fried chicken was so good that they all went out and started playing basketball?
TF

God is a Real Jerk

God? He's my favourite fictional character
-Homer Simpson


The great thing about religion is that no part of it has to make any sense. Being a religious “thinker” or leader, is about the only job where that is true. If you design bridges, and you do it wrong, the bridges will collapse and you’ll never get another bridge gig, will you?

If you are a chef and people die after eating your food, you’re not going to be a chef very long.

Not so for fundamentalists down south – a unique form of asshole.

The Earth is as old as the literal reading of the bible says so men and dinosaurs lived at the same time. Bill Hicks had a good point: Why aren’t there dinosaurs in The Bible?????

Did you folks know just how much of an asshole their god is?

Ok, here goes: God creates men and women. He creates 10-15% of them gay, BUT demands that they pretend to be heterosexual. He prefers that they marry and have children and live a total lie (I guess bearing false witness against thyself is ok). If they do not do this, but live as gays and have a parade, God destroys New Orleans. You see. God is not only a jerk, he sucks at geography: San Francisco would have been a more logical place to send the Hurricane.

Then again, if God created these fundamentalists in his own image, it makes sense that he’d be an asshole.

TF

Earth Speaks

If I were The Earth, I wouldn’t think much of humans – if in fact I gave any thought to them at all.

You can write an opera? Well, here’s a Tsunami! Oh, they were quaint back a thousand years ago and I’d snicker every time they drew me flat with three continents and Jerusalem at the centre.

But, I liked my ozone layer and these bastards blew fucking holes in it. I like that rain forest and I don’t need my oceans warmer and my ice caps smaller.

And some of them are tying to “save” ME. What a joke!! I am in no danger. Humans are messing themselves up – I don’t need an atmosphere to be a planet – Mars gets along just fine and there haven’t been any sentient life forms there since early 20th Century Sci-Fi.

I remember the dinosaurs – I liked them but a big rock hit me and they all died.

These idiots are extincting themselves but they can’t really harm me. Big rocks, now those scare me.

The Earth

Thomas

The Golden Age

I think every major civilization has a “golden age”. It’s already there as far back as Homer (The Greek poet, not Marge’s Husband). In the past, things were better: men were braver, women more beautiful…Maybe it’s because wisdom and stories used to be told by the elders who (inaccurately) remembered being young and how wonderful it all was, all of the time.

I guess for my age group we’d have to pick the 1970s, but, by definition, a golden age cannot contain ABBA and Disco.

I remember being young and a lot of it was good and a lot of it was crap.

I remember a youthful body and if I really strain hard, I can remember having hair on my head. I also remember family members using words like “Nigger”, “Paki” and “fruit” at the dinner table. (I am composing this in Microsoft Word and the first two words pass the spell checker – isn’t that interesting). Some of them still use those words.

When I heard the first “Paki” joke I had to get clarification: “Do you mean people from Pakistan?” I wanted to make sure I was hating the correct people, not that it was difficult – anyone who’s skin tone, religion or sexual orientation differed from my own was on that list anyway. Good thing I never ran into a Chinese Protestant Lesbian – I would have had to stab her on the spot!

We were reading Shakespeare in Grade 9 – the bard used the word “chink” and we asked the teacher, I am not kidding here, what was a Chinese person was doing in a wall in Elizabethan England? Well, it turns out that word could also mean a part of a wall that had a crack in it. Well, that replaced fart and masturbation jokes for a few weeks when we could say “chink” and get away with it!!! “Hey Man do you have a chink in your locker?”

I think some people like their golden age so much they live there forever. What the hell does that mean? I mean, emotionally. So many people who are well into their 30s or older have that same grade 9 sense of humour and have not developed past that point.

I think I had more of a pewter age myself. If we could weed out Disco and ABBA, maybe it could be as good as bronze.

Thomas

Hollywood

Is there a phonier place on earth? Can one even be imagined? How many things can we see get blown up, how many happy endings can we endure?

Since Hollywood only understands money, they had to get hit in the pocketbook this summer to realize they keep putting out the same shit and even once faithful movie goers are staying home. Corporate America has sanitized movies so badly that they have no oomph to them. Maybe the bad result this summer might send some moguls back to the drawing board

I’d put Tarantino in charge of Hollywood, myself. This would mean Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Madsen would be in 237 films each per year (104 of them in the same film).

Kill Shrek.
Star Wars Episode 14: Revenge of Mr Pink.
The Sicilian Patient.
A Beautiful Brain Spread All Over the Sidewalk.
The Godfather IV: The Apology

Yes folks – dialogue and scripts would be back in vogue. Actors would have to act.

But seriously, will this summer’s disaster mean Hollywood will get a lot better?

Fuggetaboutit.

Mr T.

It Got Louder

I grew up in the 1970s in an affluent Country far from genocides and wars and disasters. The World Wars ended almost 2 decades before I was even born (1963).

I did grow up as a citizen of a Cold War country, but long after it’s apex in the early 1960s (also before I was born). There was a scare when Reagan started talking about a “limited” nuclear war after taking office in 1981, but he chilled when Gorby came along.

History, in one way, is a series of wars, genocides and disasters. Starting with the 1990s they began again, or actually, continued. The Gulf War was the first time I remember Canada being at war. Then the Yugoslavian and Rwandan episodes showed that genocide was back.

September 11, 2001 was a shock – not because it was the long expected terrorist attack, but because of the enormity of its success. My money had been down on an attack at LAX. (That attack had indeed been planned but foiled at the BC – Washington border).
I had never imagined suicide bombers in North America – that seemed such a Middle Eastern and far away thing.

The invasion of Iraq showed that America had unlearned all of its lessons from Viet Nam.

The Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 has to rank as the biggest cyclical thing in my lifetime. Since I know some history, the last such major one in the Indian Ocean had been after Krakatoa erupted – in 1883 (none of my Grandparents had been born for that one).

I had spent the 1990s studying and even writing about the World Wars as they seemed too far away from the quietness of my times.

Then my times got louder.

TF

The Return of Critical Thinking in The American Media

Jon Stewart, pointed out, once again, something I had noticed myself (we think alike).

After 9/11, the media turned into patriots and stopped judging Bush and the administration critically. The obvious example was the lead-up to the war in Iraq. I have been watching CNN at least as far back as The Gulf War of 1991, although I always have been able to take it for only so long. The so called “liberal” media disappeared and Bush was allowed to invade Iraq with no plan whatsoever. I stopped watching CNN and any American news media for almost 3 years.

With the disaster of Katrina, the media finally regained its teeth and began to question yet another idiotic “planning” of the administration and how they bungled the rescue relief worse than anyone could have imagined.

Bush said nobody could have anticipated the levees breaking. Al Franken, on his radio show, pointed out that MR BILL the play-dough guy from old SNL was featured in a commercial for the Louisiana Wetlands and HE knew the levees might break.

Ted Koppell, to “Brownie” (as Bush called him): Don’t you people watch TV?

In Bush’s Truman Show – no.

Taking a vacation by playing guitar in California? Sounds great to me - unless you are The President when the largest displacement of Americans since The Civil War is taking place.

TF