The times these ads are shown

It's 1.15 pm Mountain time, and I'm watching TNT. They're showing The Fugitive starring Harrison Ford.

And they've just shown an ad for Enzyte, the "natural male enhancement" pill or whatever it is.

Some guy with a huge smile on his face - but otherwise looking like a department store dummy, as if the rest of his brain is fried - is walking around with women giving him yearning -have sex-with-me-now looks. As always, these commercials glorify animal-sex, not romantic sex.

And who is watching these movies at 1.17 pm in the afternoon. Admittedly it's a school day, so those kids who actually go to school won't see it. But what about all the drop-outs?

Last night, I was flipping through channels and stopped briefly on the Family channel. The Family channel - a channel that is presumably supposed to be showing movies and TV shows suitable for viewing by the entire family. And what was the commercial they were showing, during a movie that would be watched by kids as well as parents?

It was a Victoria Secret commercial! The one where all these women are dressed in skimpy bras and panties, and lying on the floor and squirming around and acting like they're in heat.

Definitely not suitable for kids, yet there it was.

Sylvan - Commercial

Sylvan is a chain of private education facilities to teach your kids math and English, if they are lagging behind in real school.

Nothing wrong with that - more power to them.

But their latest commercial is soooo offensive. Some teacher is giving a lesson, when this smug teenage boy stands up and starts talking about how good Sylvan is. Okay fine - does it matter if the spokesperson is a boy or a girl? (Well, considering that girls always do well in math until they reach teenage years and then plummet precipitously, and that there is therefore this myth that girls are no good at math, perhaps a girl spokesperson would have been better in order to recruit girls to the programs.)

But what I found really offensive is that the boy is standing between two teenage girls, and these girls are looking at him - not appreciative at what he's saying regarding math, but just looking at him with moon-calf eyes as if they're in love with him. So is that the subliminal message being sent to girls? "Join Sylvan and there will be boys there that you can get for boyfriend, because having a boyfriend is soooo much more important than being able to do math!""

Very sad.

Maybelline Long Lash Commercial

So Maybelline has this new product. Women can add half an inch or something to their lashes (why? I've never understood it, I confess).

But does this commercial feature the long eye-lashes? No...we get closeups of the women's bare leg, and of the shadows around her breasts as she zips up a dress...

Sex...sex...sex...

The message here apparently is if you have long lashes, you look sexy and you can get some sex.

Just what today's girls need to hear.

America Ain't Got Nuthin on the Rest of the World

Being American and living in the US, of course most of my posts here are about American commercials and Tv, but it must be said that the US - at least right now - doesn't have anything on other countries.

Japan, for example, has gameshows on during prime time in which men compete to give fellatio to women. There's go-kart races where the woman is dressed in bondage-victim gear and the male drivers are the bondage- makers... disgusting... but an example of how the Japanese actually think about women...

(They have comic books called Hentai which are the same thing - young teen boys being mean to young teen girls, who accept it with no problems.)

Sad, sad, sad.

Lego Friends - Toys and Commercials

Lego has lots of fun toys for girls and boys - underwater world, harry potter, space...

And they could have come up with something .... four girl superheros or adventurers or something. Instead, it's 4 girls who like to cook and give their friends makeovers and crap like that. Typical girls only want to do makeup and eat and gossip and search for boyfriends. They don't want to explore and solve mysteries have have adventures, oh no!

Blech.

Fedex Golf Commercial

Watching the Northern Trust Open on CBS.

I've seen this commercial a few times. A father is strapping his golf clubs tenderly into his car, while his wife and little daughter watch.

It's not funny - how many men feel that way about their clubs as opposed to their kids? Probably quite a few.

There's a similar commercial - guy wants to send his golf clubs but wants a test run first - his wife's wedding dress and his "cold fusion" invention. Yes, in a sense it's "over the top" so you know it's supposed to be funny, but it just isn't.

Many a woman in a loveless marriage has fallen foul of the idea that if she could just present her husband with a child - preferably a son - that would cure the marriage, and of course it never does. All it does is drive them further apart because woman concentrates all her love on the child, man feels neglected and goes and finds himself a mistress.

If husband and wife aren't well-matched to begin with, having a child is just a bad idea.

"You had sex with me and my father: Who's the baby's father?"

That is the headline I saw for the Maury show as I looked through my TV's Guide channel.

And I'm thinking to myself: Who cares who the baby's father is? Dump the slut who had sex with both you and your dad.

There was another headline a couple of days ago. I can't remember which show it was on - a guy's show whom I didnt recognize, not that that's saying much as I don't watch any of that crap.

But it was some similar headline - my husband had sex with me and my mother, should I divorce him?

And I'm thinking.... Yes. Divorce him, and your slut of a mom, and go live among normal decent people. That is if you can find any.

One wonders these days if you really can.

I mean, a man - or a woman - having an affair with a friend while still married. That's somewhat understandable. But having an affair with a family member - that's downright sick.

And the fact that they even have to ask.... should I stay with this person... that's what scary. Of course you shouldn't. That behavior is unacceptable!

But there are thousands - hundreds of thousands - of men and women who put up with partners cheating with family memmbers, I guess if these crap shows are anything to go buy... it just makes you despair for the human race.

Do We Need to Know "•Hearse arrives at NJ funeral home handling Houston"

The coverage following Whitney Houston's death has been absolutely ridiculous.

She's dead. Her fans mourn her. End of story.

But no. We learn her cousin Dionne Warwick has postponed a concert. We learn that it will take weeks for the autopsy to find out how she died. (And yet CSI can do it in half an hour!) And today we've learned that the hearse carrying her body has arrived at the funeral home!

This type of minutia is just ridiculous. It's the equivalent of TV news cameras watching OJ's fleeing white van - or whatever car he was driving - for four hours while not a damn thing happened.

People should not care about this stuff. People do not need to know this stuff.

The artices haven't been sugar-coating her death. They point to her drug use and her erratic behavior...

Will her early death cause teenagers to thihk: "Jeez, she was beautiful and rich, and now she's dead at only 48. Maybe I better not take drugs or the same thing will happen to me." ?

Probably not.

The Bad Corrupts the Good More Easily Than Vice Versa

Many is the story we hear of some fine upstanding individual who goes away to college. They don't drink, don't smoke, and care about their studies.

After a few months of college life they are binge-drinking, smoking like a chimney or doing drugs, and could care less about their studies.

That's because one good person going in amongst a crowd of not-so good people - it's not the good person who influences the druggies to give up their ways...it's the druggies who convince the good person that if they want to "fit in" - they've got to "loosen up" and "live."

Most college students get over this phase - although several drop by the wayside.

I was thinking of that yesterday when I heard the news about Whitney Houston. I'd never been much of a fan of hers (my interest in musicians stopped in the 1980s with Styx and so on, these days I listen to soundtracks) but I read a bit about her.

And it seems that everything in her life was fine until she married "bad boy" Bobby Brown. Then she got into drugs, and it was a downward spiral from there, until she finally died yesterday at the age of 48.

All that talent...all that goodness...wasted, because she decided to marry a man whom she could not bring to the "honorable" side. Instead he took her over to his side.

That's why movies like Twilight are so dangerous. I've never seen it, but I know the plot. A human woman loves a vampire, so she wants him to turn her into a vampire so that they can live together forever. In other words, she's a willing instrument of her own corruption.

(Here's a clue, folks, vampires are bad people - Barnabas Collins not withstanding!)

Axe Anarchy - commercial

Axe is a cologne for both men and women.

Their latest commercial is horrible. An elegy to destruction...and to having sex while in the midst of that destruction.

The commercial shows a big city, New York City presumably, with people just going crazy. A man and a woman catch sight of each other - total strangers - and make a beeline toward each other, finally stopping in a pose like they're just about to tear their clothes off and have sex.

Meanwhile, all about them, there are car explosions, buses turning over, a man in a wheelchair about to be hit by a truck, a little dog looking for its lost owner... just mindless violence that viewers are supposed to find amusing?

They may be attempting to do the "over the top" thing that is supposed to be humorous - that worked so well in that latest Shatner commercial - but this over the top is just repulsive.

Luvs diapers - OMG

Or more accurately - oh. my. Gawwwwd.

I don't know. Maybe mothers would get a kick out this commercial.

Three babies in diapers holding a pooping contest. Animated, obviously.

Each baby walks up, turned around, and has a "blow out" and the diaper expends appropriately. There were three of them, the third guy with his huge diaper full of...I suppose both feces and urine - won.

I could not believe my eyes.

latest Priceline - okay, this was funny

There was a British movie starring Michael Caine, many years ago, in which the ending scene is of the thieves on a bus with a load of gold, and the bus has gone off the side of the road and is teetering, and the movie ends, and the audience never knows, do the crooks get off the bus or not.

I'm assuming that famous scene was the inspiration for the latest Priceline commercial in which a passenger bus is teetering on the edge of a ravine, and William Shatner is in the front of the bus, helping people to exit, telling them about Priceline. A final woman gets off the bus, he hands her his cellphone and says, "Save yourselves... some money."

Then the bus tips over, falls and explodes.

The woman makes her booking on the cellphone and then looks up to see someone watching her. With great timing and delivery and expression, she says, "It's what he would have wanted."

Perfect!

And over the top enough so that no one could get offended by what has actually happened in real life - at least in Mexico, people on an overcrowded bus plunging into a ravine and dying.

But no...I liked this one.

NCIS - the Director Shephard years...

I liked NCIS - when it focused on crimes against Navy and Marine folk. When they got all hot and heavy Ziva and her father and her half-brothers and all that crap, it got on my nerves and I sort of lost interest...

But one thing I never liked was the Jenny Shepherd character and how she was treated on the show.

She was the Director of NCIS, but Gibbs - of course, a former lover - never treated her with the respect she deserved.

In one of the early shows, she comes down to the bullpen, sits in Gibbs chair, and asks questions about the current investigation. Gibbs team gets nervous...and then when Gibbs comes in and sees what shes' doing, he takes his team up to her office and sits in her chair.

That whole dynamic irritated me, and it has to be blamed on the scriptwriters.

Of course her death episode stunk, too. She and Mike Franks are holed up in a restaurant. She has recruited Mike Franks to help her survive...so what does he do? He goes out of the restaurant to get some water, so he's conveniently out of the way when her attackers come in, there's this shootout, and Jenny dies. Talk about inept!

Every Single Super Bowl Ad - Except the Polar Bear ads

If there was a Super Bowl ad that didn't have a sexual component - and not a romantic sexual component, but rather a "I'm a woman look at me and fantasize about having sex with me because that's why I'm on this planet" - I didn't see it.

Oh, there was one where the women got a bit of beefcake - some car commercial I think where first we see a lot of women in bikinis sitting on a chair, then they are magically changed into beefcake guys - but for the most part, it was all beautiful women prancing and posing as mere eye candy.

Then of course there was the halftime show. I thought Madonna did a good job, but there was some woman rapper named M.I.A. who swore and also apparently gave everyone the finger. Apparently her brain was M.I.A. and one hopes the money she was supposed to have been paid for appearing on the show will be M.I.A. as well. I think that's what the network is going to have to do in future. A clause must be put in their contract - if you do something vulgar or stupid or something that was not in your act as you rehearsed it - you . do . not. get. paid.

Maybe that will stop them.

Oh - the Coke Polar Bear ads. No sex in those.

So...they've remade The Lorax

Just saw the commercial for The Lorax on ...TNT or some channel - I'm watching Law and Order.

I had the sound down...but the main character, according to the commercial...is a young boy. At one point he is tugged down to the ground by a young girl.

I turned the sound on just to hear, "We don't have time for kissing," and the boy says, "We have a little time for that."

Yep, let's inject sex into a story for kids. More than that, let's inject it into the Lorax story!

The Lorax is a Dr. Seuss story that was filmed for TV thirty years ago. An unseen character visits the only man in an abandoned factory in an abandoned town, in a land with all its trees cut down and so on. The man tells the story of the Lorax, a creature who had come to the factory when it was in the city of a thriving town and a thriving green area around it - but they'd cut down everything and destroyed the environment in the area.

Now, for this movie, the Lorax is apparently still there (the last thing shown on the commercial was the Lorax looking out of the O in the title The Lorax - the only time we actually see it) but the main characters are a boy, and a girl, and her aunt or mom or someone who doesn't want the two of them to kiss.

Bleck.

Fedex - now this is a good commercial

I'm watching the Waste Management Golf Tournament on Ch 5.. I think it's ABC. And they showed a commercial for Fedex.

A middle-aged black businessman is going on vacation. He has invented a shrink ray to shrink his clubs to make them easy to carry.

A white businessman comes into the room. "Why don't you just send them Fed Ex?"

The black inventor says, "I think you've mistaken me for a guy without a shrink ray."

Then the other businessman says, "How do you enlarge them?"

And the inventor says, "I hadn't thought of that."

And a FedEx delivery man, who has been shrunk, says, "Wha?"

Hilarious. And fun.

Art showing "bodies" in water or under wheels

When I signed on to yahoo with my laptop this morning (as opposed to my PC which I'm using now) there was a link to an article called "Don't panic, it's just art."

The "art" consisted of life-like human dummies lying face down in various public locations - in a shallow stream, underneath the wheels of a car, and so on. There were a few photos of these pieces of "art". And so lifelike were they that people had actually called 911 telling the police that there was a dead body here - or there.

And this is just awful. It's the equivalent of shouting "Fire" in a crowded movie theater. It's not art, it's just causing trouble.

And while it's nice to know that people who see what they think is a dead body will actually call 911, you wonder why they don't actually go to the body to see if they can do anything to help. OR do they just dismiss the body as someone who is drunk?

(This happened in real life in New York last year. Some guy had seen some woman getting mugged, tried to help, and got stabbed for his pains. He lay on the sidewalk underneath a security camera for several hours - and the camera showed people walking right past him, ignoring him. One person even took a photo of his body with their cell phone.)

Having said that...if I saw a body and thought that it was a dead one...I don't know that I'd have the courage to do anything more than call 911 myself. I can't even stand to touch dead squirrels...I couldn't stand to touch a human body to see if it were actually dead...

Where are the female actrion heroes?

Hollywood has tried. Sort of. There was Angelina Jolie's Lara Croft. There was the abominal Catwoman starring Halle Berry. The Resident Evil series starring Milla Jovovich seems to be doing well - after all its had five movies altogether...(I've never seen any of 'em)

But for all that, 99% of all actioners have stern looking guys...

On the IMDB page today we've got posters for:

--The Cold Light of Day - 2 guys, one of them Bruce Willis, and in a sort of far, full-length shot, Sigourney Weaver in a pants suit
--Skyfall starring Daniel Craig
--The Hunter

One of the sad things about any actioner with women in it...most of the time all the guys are wearing fatigues, the women? Shorts riding up to their butts and close fitting, V-neck shirts revealing their cleavage. I don't know about you...but if I had to go out into the jungle with enemies on all side - either human or alien - I'd want to be in normal fitting fatigues, too!