Running for the Border

[Int. Car - Driving past a Taco Bell- Day]

M: A Volcano Taco

C: Yeah, I saw that and was wondering what that was, too.

M: It probably makes you erupt violently after you eat it.

C: So, it's just a regular Taco Bell taco?

Rejected PostSecrets

By now, pretty much everyone is familiar with PostSecret, the blog made up of anonymous postcards with awful, sometimes sad, sometimes horrific secrets written on them. What you may not know is that PostSecret doesn't use all of the secrets sent to them. In fact, there are some categories that automatically get dropped in the discard pile. In a stunning exposé, I am presenting here 3 types of secrets that never manage to make it onto the PS blog or into one of the books.




Category 1: Adolescent Male Humor








Category 2: Cultural Reference




















Category 3: Meta

Hola!

I think my favorite commercial on TV right now is for Verizon Wireless. In this ad, a man is telling his kids that they can send messages on their phones to anyone. They reply that they already do, and he tells them that it means that their mother can quit her second job. At that point, the mother walks in wearing a taco costume. The father looks at her and says, "Hola!" (Wow, this works much better on screen than in text)

It cracks me up every time I see it. I think it may be that his greeting is exactly the type of thing I would do, and would end up getting myself into a bit of trouble.

Here's a link to the video.

Come On Down

I've mentioned before that living close to work means that a few days each week, Melissa and I go home for lunch. This also means that we typically watch The Price Is Right while eating lunch. As we rapidly approach Bob Barker's retirement and the inevitable decay of TPIR, I have noticed a few things about watching the show and the commercials that accompany it.

Bob is getting up there in age. That's no surprise to anyone. It's why he's retiring. However, as he gets older and closer to his retirement date, he is getting awfully grouchy. When someone has problems coming up with a bid or spends too much time listening to the audience screaming prices at them, Bob starts to get irritated and tries to hurry them along. When that doesn't work, he starts yelling at them. Don't get me wrong, I find them irritating, and I'm yelling at them too, but I'm not getting paid to be the host of the show.

If the commercials shown during TPIR are any indication, Wilford Brimley is on television more than any other human being on earth.

Have you ever noticed that some things never cease to be amusing? It's that way with the scooter commercials where a huge bald guy (who happens to be a nurse and the inventor of this specific power chair) comes out and says, "Hi I'm Tom Cruise." Sure his name is "Kruse," but it still amuses me.

Also not getting less amusing, the Beltone hearing aid ad where a golfer doesn't hear other golfers yelling "fore" and keeps getting hit with golf balls. It's completely ridiculous, but I laugh harder and harder each time he gets hit.

While I'm pointing out things about the show right now, my real issue is that there are apparently auditions for the next host going on even as we speak. Considering the list of people rumored to be up for the job, I can't help wonder why the show doesn't retire with Bob. I may not be his biggest fan (because, let's face it, there are some weirdly crazy Barker fans out there) but Bob Barker is The Price Is Right. If they do end up selecting one of the people on the currently rumored lit and continuing the show, I can only hope that they decide to just go as absurd as possible. After all, one of the people on that short list is Mario Lopez. A mid-day game show with A.C. Slater? Yeah, I'd watch that.

A Preponderance of Ponderables

I spend a good portion of my life wondering about things. As my thoughts flit from one subject to the next, they occasionally pause long enough for me to wonder why things are the way they are. A few things I've been pondering recently:

I wonder if I really should have used the word "flit" in the second sentence in this post. Obviously, I've been pondering that one very recently.

I sometimes wonder how a word for rendered chicken fat, schmaltz, ended up in our vocabulary as a word for something that is overly sentimental. For that matter, how is it that another seemingly out of place food-related word, cheesy, can sometimes be interchanged with it? If rendered fat has something to do with being overly sentimental, do you think that anyone would understand if you left a movie talking about how "lardic" it was?

When I see icicles on the roofs of houses, I wonder if I am the only one who broke them off as a kid and pretended they were crystals in Superman's Fortress of Solitude.

I wonder if one of my coworkers is actually a robot. He doesn't talk much and seems to have a number of preset phrases which he can use to respond to people. I once heard him try to crack a joke. It didn't really help his cause. One day, I'm going to try to confuse him with a logical paradox and see if his head explodes.

I wonder why, as soon as the first snow falls, people lose the ability to park inside the painted lines. One inch of snow and it's Lord of the Flies. Bunch of savages.

Since I saw an ad for Glade candles earlier, I've been wondering if it's really a good thing to have people in your commercials be so ashamed of your product that they have to lie about it to their friends. That just seems counter-productive to me.

When I see the woman wearing the huge, animal print (faux?) fur coat, I wonder if she's just trying to stay warm or if she has a few ladies that work for her and she's trying to maintain the right image.

How about you? What important issues have been weighing on your mind?

Missile Command

Is it wrong that I really want to buy this?

Before you answer, think of the uses:

At home, I could keep it at my computer and if the dogs want to play, I don't even have to look up, just launch a dart and tell them fetch.

Or I could take it to work and have it my office. It will come in handy when that annoying coworker comes into the office and never stops talking (Come on, you know what I'm talking about. You've got one in your office too. Unless, you are that person in your office.) If they won't shut up and leave, all it takes is a few clicks of the mouse and missiles are being launched at their head. You can even make a game out of it and try to see if you can get a dart to go through the flapping gums.

Unfortunately, the more realistic side of me keeps saying that the net results of these suggested uses would be a choking dog and a visit with HR, but you can't blame me for dreaming.

Apropos of Nothing

I had an all-day training session yesterday. We have to do this thing once a year, and I'm pretty sure it actually gets worse every year. This year, we changed venues to a smaller auditorium. However, we could still fit the same number of people in, because the seats were half the size. Even the people who weren't as fat as me had a hard time wedging themselves into these seats.

We got to sit in these too-small seats while enjoying a movie that we had apparently put together ourselves (we, meaning people who worked at our site). I can honestly say that it was the worst movie I've ever seen...and I've seen Spice World and The Master of Disguise.

On other work-related subjects, we often have people telling us what to do if there is any sort of chemical spill at work and explaining what constitutes a "reportable" spill. They give us guidelines like X amount of liquid or Y amount of any solid. I pride myself on not laughing (out loud at least) when they say that any release of gas into the environment, outside or in a building, must be reported. I bet they hate it when people go to Taco Bell for lunch. The phone must be ringing off the hook.

It snowed again last night. I know I'm picky, but I like for things to be a certain way and to be done at certain times. I have a specific set of rules when it comes to the Fall/Winter holiday season. You can't decorate for Thanksgiving until after Halloween (unless your Canadian, but that's because the celebrate things backwards), you can't play Christmas music any earlier than the week of Thanksgiving, and you can't have snow until at least November.

Save the cheerleader. Save the world.

I first heard about Pandora from Invisible Lizard, but I didn't look at it right away. Once I started listening, I realized that I love this thing. Unlike many streaming music services that will recommend or play music based on comparing what you like with what other people like, it actually compares the features of the music you like to features of other songs. What does this mean? Instead of hearing what other people might recommend, you hear things that have a sound similar to what you like. I realize that this makes the music player smarter than me, but I'm ok with that...as long as it doesn't try to take my job.

If everything goes the way it's supposed to, we'll have a new car on Friday.

Finally: Via Melissa's blog, and through the magic of YouTube, I present evidence that Chewie has gotten huge, but that he just refuses to learn from experience.

Perhaps More Aptly Named "Baby A Little Too Alive"

I saw a commercial for the new version of Baby Alive about a month ago during Saturday morning cartoons (leave me alone, it was early and College Gameday wasn't on yet). Since then I've been searching YouTube for the ad, but without much luck. The reason I've been looking for it is that I actually had to ask Melissa later if I had dreamed it, because I couldn't believe someone really made the doll and then advertised it on TV.

The commercial describes the doll as realistic and talks about the things she can do. She talks to you and tells you when she wants to play or nap. She even eats some sort of disgusting pretend baby food and then informs you that it's time to change here diaper by saying, "Uh oh, I made a stinky." They then showed a child changing the doll's diaper which now had what can, if we're being honest, only be described as a skid mark in it, because the pseudo-food had passed all the way through the doll and into its diaper. Hopefully, you see now why I wasn't so sure that this was real.

As if to confirm that I am not insane and imagining that we are currently marketing defecating dolls to children, we came across a display of these dolls in the store a few days ago. Fortunately, we had the cameraphone with us to capture proof.

First, Baby Alive herself.

Now, a closer look in case you couldn't read the label on the first picture. Note that the packaging tells us that "She really 'EATS' her doll food & 'POOPS'!" I love the use of all caps and the exclamation point.

Finally, the back of the box, where we see Baby Alive saying "Uh-oh, I made a stinky!" while a child gleefully changes her diaper.

What does this say about us as a society? I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that I don't want to think about what it says about me, that I felt the need to take pictures and tell all of you about it.