Thursday, September 15, 2011

Bad Ads -- Consumer Cellular

What were they thinking?




First of all, they lead off with "The McCann Twins for Consumer Cellular," as if we're supposed to know who they are. (or who he is, I suspect both parts are played by the same master thespian)
As if they were the Yin-Yang Twins or the del Rubio Triplets, or the Dion Quintuplets. It doesn't make any sense since no one knows who they are, I don't think they're even real people.
They sure don't seem like real people. Could they have found a creepier actor(s)? If you saw one of these guys walking toward you, you'd cross the street. Then you'd pull out your smart phone and look him up on Megan's List.

Then there's the actual ad. An ad apparently designed by your great aunt Tillie, because it assumes that most people watching are completely overwhelmed by the complex intricacies of the cellular telephone.  And the ad seems not to realize that no one has made the "hey, guess where I'm calling from? Out on the Street!" call since about 1993.
Oh, they're complicated, oh they're expensive, oh the long-term contracts! Um, no. Have you been to Target lately? You can buy a phone for like thirty bucks and pay for. . . well why am I telling you? You're not a creepy white-haired freak with a rigor-mortis grimace where your smile should be. Of course, you're also not the sort of person who accepts "hey, ugly" as a substitute for witty banter either, so you're probably not in their target market.

Who Sarah Palin Boinks Is None of our Business.

Report: Palin, hoops star had 1-night tryst in 1987

MIAMI — A new book about “tea party” darling Sarah Palin has a salacious revelation about her sex life involving a well-known Miami sports star. 

 There are plenty of aspects of Sarah Palin's existence that can be criticized, mocked, or condemned. But who she may or may not have had sex with is not one of them. Even a person as awful as Sarah Palin is entitled to a private life. Whether or not she slept with a basketball player has nothing to do with any of the things that make her just awful. It's not relevant if she was a blushing virgin bride or whether she bedded the entire NBA.  Neither scenario makes her any more or less of an intellectually lazy, dimwitted, theocratic grifting quitter. No matter how many of her grandkids were conceived out of wedlock (two so far!) she is still the same amount of terrible.  There is no number of men she might have fucked that would make her any less monstrously unqualified to hold public office, or any more likely to ever hold one again. So let's not even discuss this.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Well, it's about time!

Tue Sep 13 03:28pm EDT

Principal makes cheerleaders don sweats under risque skirts


Okay, so maybe I'm a prude. But I find it very disturbing to see the overt sexualization of young cheerleaders. Many many years ago, when i was attending Cal State, there was some sort of cheerleader camp being held on campus. A bunch of young girls who looked to be in high school or maybe junior high, were being led by a male coach in an exercise that reveolved around the word "gigolo" being used as a verb. It went something like this:



I couldn't believe that no parents were complaining about their daughters being taught this sort of thing. Then a few years later, I joined a softball team that played on a field also used for pop warner football practice. And before our games would start, we would see the little boys practicing blocking and tackling and the little girls  practicing cheerleading. Why the little girls couldn't play a sport of their own instead of having to cheer for the boys is a whole other problem, but the mothers of these little girls seemed only to happy to teach them how to dance like Vegas Showgirls. I don't get it. Why anyone would teach their daughters that the highest level of achievement to which they can aspire is to be eye candy for the boys is just beyond me.
And am I the only one who finds the uniforms these girls have to wedge into disturbing?


http://www.cheerleadingonline.com/blog/chasse-performance-uniforms.jpg 

I know I'm probably being a big old prude, but that is just wrong.

http://i54.tinypic.com/jzbgx5.jpg
What is this girl, like 10, 12 years old? she's too young to even understand what's wrong with this outfit.

If the point of cheerleading is to lead cheers, as the name implies, why should the uniforms have to be all about T&A? You shouldn't have to be a half-naked girl to shout "Give me an A!" You don't even need to be a girl at all.

http://cast.thirdage.com/files/styles/large/public/originals/george-bush-cheerleader-prep-school.jpg

Yeah, I should NOT have done an image search for "Cheerleader + Bush!"

So anyway. . . .

As first reported by the San Jose Mercury News, the move to make cheerleaders wear sweats under their uniforms was enforced so they could fall in line with a dress code that requires all skirts or shorts to
stretch lower than mid-thigh. 
Sounds reasonable.
"This is really unfair to us," Piedmont Hills senior cheerleader Antonia Bavilacqua told the Mercury News. The skirts are still OK for games, just not during school.
Oh come on! Games are when these girls are going to be turning cartwheels and high-kicking, that's the worst time to be wearing these miniskirts!

Now Bavilacqua is leading a charge to try and get Williams to ease up on her enforcement of the rule, citing both a prior case in Florida, common sense (another cheerleader cited the weather concerns, saying "It's 95 degrees outside"), and fashion sense as reasons to allow the cheerleaders to wear their uniforms in school one day a week.
After all, as one of the squad's other senior cheerleaders said, wearing sweatpants under a miniskirt is, "dorky."

You know what isn't "dorky," young lady? Wearing proper clothing.
Okay, I'm officially a prude.

Pat Robertson Continues to be Disgusting

Presented without comment:

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Bachmann Slaps the Shit out of Perry

Not literally, unfortunately, but she kicked his ass on this exchange. (gets good around the 2-minute mark)
This was so good, it almost makes me want to like Michele Bachmann, if it weren't for everything else about Michele Bachmann.



Oh, snap! So you're offended that someone would think you could be bought for a mere $5,000? How much does it take?

Of course, Bachman is right for all the wrong reasons. Her main objection seems to be that this was a "government injection," which means, what exactly? I'm not sure. Either the immunization was a good idea or it wasn't (hint: it wasn't. You can tell because Rick Perry was involved) but the government's involvement doesn't make it bad. Nor does it make it good, but if you're going to just dismiss something out of hand because it comes from the government, well, I hope you like not driving on paved roads, or getting your mail, or having a police department, etc. etc. etc. . . .

Oh, but don't worry, parents, you can opt out! If you don't want some durn guv'mint giving your young'uns no government vaccine, you can choode to let them go unvaccinated the way God intended!

Of course, when parents start opting out of vaccination programs, this sort of thing starts happening:


Whooping cough cases on rise

There seems to be a trend in this country of parents distrusting vaccines. And both the right and the left seem to have an equal problem. On the right, anti-intellectualism and anti-science attitudes have been well documented. The idea seems to be that "if we admit that doctors are right about vaccines, then we might have to concede that the scientists have a point about the global warming thing. Then we might end up believing that we're related to monkeys, and we just can't have that! So it's whooping cough for you, Junior!"


On the left, I think that the thinking is that since vaccines are produced by big pharmaceutical compamies, and big pharmaceutical companies are evil, then by the transitive property of evil, vaccines must be bad.

http://www.terawarner.com/hhh/images/jimmy.jpg 
Plus, they're not natural, man!

You want to know what it's like without vaccines? Find an old person. Ask him about polio. Ask him what it was like when whole neighborhoods went into panic mode because someone had polio and no one was safe. Ask anyone who lived through that what they think about opting out of immunizations for your child.

Or just ask the parents of this child if they're proud of their decision:
(Warning, hard to watch)