Thursday, April 24, 2014

Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down

Some people think I'm crazy for still watching TV commercials. For reasons too boring to go into, I disagree. I think they can accidentally reveal plenty about how we see things and ourselves.
 I like, for instance, the BMW commercial featuring one little add-on feature which allows people to send a message from their computer to the auto. A little girl and a dog share the back seat of the car. The girl asks her mom the meaning of the message showing on the car's PC "Mommy, what is 'nu-ter-ing'?" This takes the mom by surprise, and in the brief moment she takes to compose an answer in her head, the dog somehow figures it out that this is not good news for him. He quickly jumps out of the car window and takes off at full speed. Well, you can't blame the car's system. It did what it was supposed to, right? It's funny.

On the other side of the scale, there's the now tiresome series of ads for the Mexican beer Dos Equis featuring the "World's Most Interesting Man". There he is, seated at a restaurant between two lovely women whose combined ages are about half of his. He makes a little crack about Sinco de Mayo that includes the term "dos", which the two women find amusing, then he delivers his sage stock advice, "Stay thirsty, my friends."
This guy needs to go somewhere to shave, then grow up and give us something that's really interesting instead of something that sounds like it came from a college kid. Who can say when he was the "most interesting"? All we can say for sure is that it isn't now. 

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