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Old School 80′s Reese’s PB Cup Ad is Strangely Sexual
Sep 7th
This old school Reese’s Peanut Butter cup is strangely sexual…the way the two of them so casually share each other’s chocolate and peanut butter. The way the old dude is watching them partake in this blissful moment. Mmmm. Creepy goodness.
UPDATED: Wait. I watched this commercial again and noticed the mention of crunchy PB cups?! What the heck is that all about? It was topped with chopped peanuts? I don’t remember ever seeing that as a kid…and I don’t recall them ever adding that option since. That sounds awesomely delicious- PB cups topped with chopped peanuts.
Why the iPhone, Though a Cool Gadget, is Ultimately a Joke
Jun 9th
I bought an iPhone about 2 months ago. I had never touched one before, I had never seen anything but some online videos and some information about the phone. My old phone was crap, had no features, couldn’t connect to the internet, and it got shitty reception in the area of my new apartment. So, I knew I had to get a phone. I thought, since I saw refurbished iPhones for $99, I’d pick one up. I like it. I like it a lot. I can do all sorts of things I could never imagine doing with my old phone.
I wanted to go with a Rhapsody-capable phone from Verizon, as I have a Rhapsody music account, and I could listen to my music anywhere. You can do the same thing with the iPhone, but iTunes is crap- when software can turn deleting music into a confusing ordeal in itself, you know you have a loser on your hands. When I sync my phone, videos and songs I deleted before get added back on. It’s an annoyance to go in and uncheck everything you don’t want synced- a nice windows-like folder layout that would, I dunno, simply show the contents of my iPhone’s storage would be MUCH too easy. (ugh)
The iPhone’s application store is nice, and it’s something you can’t get on a lot of phones. People are more apt to create all sorts of applications for this phone as opposed to many others on the market. That’s a plus.
The announcement of the new iPhone today is- well, it’s a joke. It’s an offensive joke that angers me. Steve Jobs is a not only a weird looking turtlenecked geek, he’s also a jackass. What does the new iPhone offer for $800? Well, you can record video now. Well, my $15 phone from before recorded video all day long! It can also send picture messages. My $15 phone could do that as well! They will eventually roll out the 7.2gb network that will more than double the current 3g speed. Okay, fine. But after looking over the reports today, it seems the two biggest changes are the video recording and the MMS. Apple truly has some chutzpah. Jobs and his pals decide- what the hell, let’s release a NEW iPhone, charge $800 for it, and it’ll merely do what the ORIGINAL IPHONE SHOULD HAVE DONE IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!!! Are you f’in kidding me turtleneck boy?!
And AT&T is no better. The monthly plans for the iPhone are absurd. I pay nearly $87 for the cheapest plan (450 anytime mins and 5, 000 nights and weekends), with the iPhone you MUST pay for a $30 data plan, and I pay $5 for 200 text messages a month. Yes, you heard that right, text messages, in the eyes of AT&T aren’t considered “data.” You get “unlimited data,” except if the data comes in the form of a text message. Even though a text message is NOTHING BUT DATA! Yes, it is, indeed, a lowlife move that is meant to do one thing- rip the consumer off. Unlimited texting for the iPhone through AT&T is $20 a month. That means their cheapest plan with the least amount of mins, the data, and the unlimited texting will run you nearly $100 a month. Imagine if you talked on the phone a lot and were forced into paying $20-40 more per month for more minutes. $140 a month for a cell phone? Ridiculous. Especially since bandwidth and cellular network prices are going down overall!
Like I said, I like my iPhone. But, I don’t doubt I’d also like any number of other phones out there. Apple is, for the most part, clueless…which is why they will never have the market share that Microsoft, for example, enjoys. Try buying a mac laptop…when you realize you can buy any number of MS-based laptops for $500 yet a macbook will cost you three times as much, you get an idea why Apple will never come close to MS. Who wants to pay three times as much for basically the same thing just to have the desktop completely backwards? Wanna close a window? Forget clicking one X, this is a mac, you’ve gotta do ten things from left to right to get it closed! Aren’t we Apple guys clever? (ick)
So, is the iPhone utlimately a great phone? I’d say, ‘no.’ It’s a good phone, but if it takes 3 tries just to get the basics right (basics that even free phones have built in), you’re either dealing with a product that isn’t all it’s cracked up to be or pure greed on the part of a confused company that tries so desperately to be “different.” Or maybe it’s a bit of both. Maybe I’m the idiot for buying an iPhone to begin with?
Doesn’t the FDA Have Better Things to Do Than Warn Cheerios?
May 13th
Stupid of the day. The FDA has sent a warning letter to General Mills, saying that the claims that Cheerios can lower cholesterol by 10 points in a month makes the food a drug, and no drugs can be sold without the proper FDA drug application. They have given the company 15 days to explain how it will change the advertising.
They’re not disputing the claims that it helps lower cholesterol (the science seems to be on Cheerios’ side), but it’s all about making health claims. A food product maker is apparently not allowed to make truthful claims about its products!
This is what happens when government gets so big and so powerful, you get career idiots in there, living off of large sums of taxpayer dollars in posh offices, totally clueless as to how the real world works. This is why we fight for smaller government. It makes people go mad when they have too much power. This is the sort of thing you hear and you just have to ask yourself, “what on earth are these fools thinking?”
Twilight, OMG, Tehe, Rulez, Rox My Sox!!
Nov 20th
If I hear about Twilight one more time from an adult human being, I will scream.
Brain Deads on Gossip Girl: Vote McCain Or You’ll Harm Kids
Oct 16th
Liberals are clueless when they make ads like this. First off, these stars alienate possible and current fans who don’t share their views…not saying a celebrity can’t have an opinion, but these ads come off as so condescending it makes you feel icky. Second- the ad is absurd. How could voting Republican harm the country, your life, kids in general for years or generations to come?
Finally, coming from the cast of a show about bratty sluts and scumbags, this sort of thing is rich. Showslike Gossip Girl, which is aimed at children, are the sorts of things that are ruining the country. The lack of any morality whatsoever will be the death of this country…when we peddle smut to kids, I assure you there are problems. So, it’s just rich as all hell to watch the kids from the show so smutty that the ads for it caused chaos a month or so ago.
Check out the ads for the show below. Does it make any sense for these d-bags to be talking about harming the country and children? Hey kids, don’t dare let your parents for McCain, have nasty sex with everyone like we do on the TV series we peddle to you! Underage, unmarried sex is cool! All the kids ate doing it!
Lastly- the ad was produced by one of the most dangerous organizations in this country. MoveOn. The anti-American group (yes, when you attack a general during a time of war for political purposes, that makes you anti-American) who attacked Patreus as General BetrayUs. Frankly, these people are so clueless, I’m not sure even many of the zombies take them seriously anymore.
So, congrats Gossip Girl cast- stay classy. Peddle your sex-crazed smut to kids, then warn them that going against your immoral ways would lead to disaster. Genius.
Are Athletes Wrong to Participate in Beijing Olympics?
Jul 24th
Are the athletes going to the Olympics in Beijing bad people for doing so? I say, yes. Yes, they are. Going to participate in games (and that’s what they are- nothing more), while a billion people surrounding you are held hostage by a brutal communist state, is, in my mind, reprehensible. Which is why I won’t be watching a single second of any of the coverage. I would urge you to boycott the games as well, in any way you can.
Worse than the simple act of participating in some fairly useless (in the whole scheme of things, sports are, indeed, useless comparitively-speaking) is the fact that the athletes are clearly being used by the communist regime to legitimize the policies there. The govenment is using these people to prop up the idea that they’re not so bad afterall. China is a good place. It’s not the evil blight on the world some think it is. The athletes are mere pawns in this silly game. A game the IOC should be ashamed for even playing to begin with.
American companies who are supporting these games should also be ashamed. I’m all for free markets, but propping up a government that threatens the entire world is disgusting, and we should want to have no part in it. Furthermore- we should demand that governments and corporations worldwide do anything possible to overhaul that nation, and if they refuse to stop doing business with them in phases. We can’t cause a global economic disaster- such a disaster would be the downfall of all nations, not just the Chinese. But withdraw from this nation, we should.
Clearly, the tactics used to this point have not worked. It’s still a nation run by insecure thugs (most of whom probably couldn’t get women and had to make up for their weaknesses by brutalizing others); it’s still pumping out mass quantities of dangerous products that are constantly being recalled; it’s still a nation without basic rights, where freedom of expression is nonexistant, and censorship is rampant. It’s still a nation building up its military and implying threats to the US and our allies across the globe. There’s no good coming out of China, and we all know it. Boycotting the Olympics is the right thing to do.
The athletes themselves should put human rights and the very lives of the chinese people above silly ribbons and medals. Everyone taking part is to blame, no exceptions if you ask me.
Bad Internet Business Ideas? Meetup.com Fees
Jun 15th
(Note: I realize this is really old news, and I think I covered it at the time, but I came upon the issue again tonight and wondered about it…)
I was browsing a few sites and came upon a generic link for Meetup.com. I used to try to find local groups in the area a few years ago. I started a Bill O’Reilly group at one point and was the leader of a Sean Hannity group (at the behest of another member of that group), but neither one ever had enough local people to warrant a get together.
It was a nice site. You could create groups to meet locally for free. In 2005 they started charging fees. You have to pay a monthly fee to create a group, I believe. So any groups on the site are now paying groups…the leader paid up the fee or split it with the other members. It’s a modest fee, but it’s still a fee-based service now.
Dumb idea if you ask me. There’s little chance I’d ever pay for the service, so I’m basically out of that for good, when before I was ready to use it and recommend it regularly. It’s a business, and it has to stay afloat somehow, but this seemed like the worst way to go about it. I realize this is years in the past, but the site is still running, and it’s still fee-based, so after trying to create a group just now and seeing the credit card info page asking for $12, I said to hell with that and left the site probably never to return. How many people did that when they started charging fees?
According to the wikipedia page, there are currently only around 16, 000 groups nationally. 350 million people, 50 states, tens of thousands of cities, and only 16, 000 groups. No wonder my search of my city with nearly 250, 000 people turned up only one page of results with some fairly uninteresting groups meeting. If the site has only a handful of uninteresting groups in a city of 250, 000, I can’t imagine how they even stay in business. $192, 000 isn’t that much money. No idea what else they do to bring in revune, but there has to be something else they’re using to bring in cash flow.
I just have a hard time believing that some of these groups are going to pay any money at all, when it was sometimes hard to find enough people to meet up when it was free. And will a lot of people pay up to gather a mere 10 people together? Or 5 people? I haven’t been able to find any stats on how they’ve done since their implementation of fees, so who knows…
MySpace now has features that allow you to anounce groups and events. It’s not a neat format or as easy to navigate as meetup.com, but it’s free and it looks to stay that way for some time to come. I can’t imagine they’re having an easy time over at Meetup (I could always be terribly wrong, of course). It just seems they made a bad move…going from half a million groups to 16, 000. That’s a big loss. Fewer eyes on your site means less of a chance to make any money, it would seem. Sure, you have paying members now, but there’s also a much smaller chance anyone is going to pass through and stay very long when they see they have to pay to play.
Maybe the internet model of ad-based free services has spoiled me.
Of Thee I Sing (DC Tourism Video Flashback)
Jun 11th
Just a reminder of how quickly the faces sometimes change in Washington…
I always liked this video. DC is near the top of my vacation wishlist, and this sort of stuff surely doesn’t hurt the image.
Hey, Corporation, Do You Really Want Your Ad There???
Apr 14th
I watch a lot of video online. If it’s not movie trailers on IMDB.com, it’s stuff on Hulu or Joost. I’ve wondered a lot lately- do companies really want their advertisement added to just anything? Now, I understand there’s no way that companies are just buying ad space on anything, having no idea what it will be added to. But, still, it seems odd that MSN, for example, would want to advertise it’s products before the trailer for a horrorific sadist flick. I’ve seen a number of videos lately where I said to myself- “does company X REALLY want me to mentally associate their product with what I just saw?”
Pledge runs a video ad before a teen horror flick, and- “Pledge dusting spray…think of us when you think of dismembered bodies and naked teen flesh.”
Confusing.
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