BrokenJPG

I had a whole post ready to go so that I wouldn’t have to worry about it after watching the ads during the super bowl. And then I realized: I clearly have to post about the ads that ran during the super bowl. Oh well. Here we go:

Things I do not want to see in next year’s Super Bowl:

Talking babies. (E*Trade)
It was cute at first. It was. But we have YouTube now. And you are essentially a YouTube meme that has run it’s course. Stop now and I won’t have to make fun of you as badly as the others on this list.

Clydesdale (Budweiser)
You’re done. It’s been a good run, but I think you’ve run this campaign into the ground. It’s gone lame. Stop beating it. Your ads hurt more than these cliches.)

GoDaddy
I hate you. I have always hated you. You have never given me a single reason to not hate you. I will continue to use you for hosting. Please understand that this is IN SPITE of your shitty, misogynistic, ads. May the people responsible be caught by angry feminists during their time of the month.

More of this please:

Google
I seem to be one of the few people on the planet who was aware of this campaign before tonight. It wasn’t new, but it was great. And one of the few ads with great writing (more on that later).

Denny’s
Your commercials are utterly retarded. Completely stupid. Infinitely infantile. And I laughed at almost all of them. Don’t ever change.

Doritos
At least a few of your spots were UGC (User Generated Content, for those of you who aren’t in the biz). That’s a powerful thing, because it meant that once you picked it, it was done. Your corporate office couldn’t come in later and alter a line, add a scene, re-shoot the whole thing. What you pick is what you get, and I think that makes your Super Bowl spots better than a lot of the others. That doesn’t mean you should chuck your entire ad staff and just have consumers produce your ads. It does mean you should let your ad agencies create an entertaining spot and then get the hell out of the way so they can do their job.

The Dorito Gym Ninja was possibly my favorite this year. Because it was just fun. I think most of the Super Bowl spots are suffering from taking themselves too seriously. Any spot where someone gets a snack chip shuriken to the neck is clearly above such problems.

In Closing
Overall, this year’s offering was pretty crappy. Particularly from a copy standpoint. A few spots had good writing- Dodge Charger, Emerald Nuts/Pop Secret- but this is the Super Bowl. They should have had great writing. And much, much better tag lines.

Listen corporate overlords: it is not enough for your Super Bowl spot to be in the Super Bowl. Things are harder now. The stakes have been raised. You’re competing with YouTube. Just because you spent a hojillion dollars and sacrificed three virgins to a two-headed goat in order to get your media buy does not mean it’s automatically a great ad. It also has to NOT SUCK. The Doritos Ninja was like a 30-second comedy bit. The Google spot was essentially a tiny movie. They weren’t just ads. They were entertainment. That’s what you all need to be.

What I want for next year is less suck. More sense. Better writing. Get on it.

Kick-Ass is a comic book written by Mark Millar. If you don’t already know why that is awesome, I could explain it to you. Or, I could show you the red band trailer for the Kick-Ass movie. Which appears to follow the comic so faithfully that their own lawyers reflexively tried to sue themselves for copyright infringement.

This was originally intended for a micro-story contest, under 250 words. The theme was “troubled superheroes”. Then I read further and discovered they didn’t want “caped crusader” style heroics. So instead, I’ll post it here.

When Adam (aka ATOM ADAM) woke up that morning, the first thing he did was reach for the glass of water on the bedside table, and take his pills.

Setting the glass back on the nightstand, it shattered into a million splinters. It took him three tries to put on a pair of pants without tearing them in half.

Once outside, he caught a glimpse of Kevin (aka KING KEVIN). “Hey!” he called out “Hey KING KEVIN! Over here!”

KING KEVIN turned, and charged across the street at a dead run.

ATOM ADAM went straight at him.

The two closed the gap in nanoseconds. As they ran, their feet cracked the pavement. The pressure burst fire hydrants and flipped manhole covers for blocks. The speed of their passing created shockwaves that hurled squirrels from trees and trees from the ground. KING KEVIN raised a mighty hand, and ATOM ADAM met it with his own. The resulting thunderclap collapsed an entire block of sky scrapers.

“You know” said ATOM ADAM (aka Adam) as he lowered his hand from the high-five “the trouble with these superman vitamins everybody has now is that we don’t have a superworld to go along with it.”

THE BIG ONE sighed heavily. Which flung a nearby high rise apartment complex 50 feet in the air.

Ninja-like copy at the top of the page here.

Some things are just too damn awesome to be fictional. So I knew, the second I beheld what might be the greatest shirt in the universe, that there had to be an actual unliving, non-breathing ninja who inspired the design.

ZombieNinjaPirate cannot speak of course, because zombie’s don’t talk much. But since he’s a ninja, and they never talk anyway, he long-ago mastered sign language.

So- now you’re a zombie ninja pirate. What came first?
[Ninja, of course. Your average zombie doesn’t have the coordination to become a ninja. And pirates are way too noisy as a rule. All that “Yaargh” and “Aye” and “Where’s the rum gone?”]

Ok, so you were a ninja. How did you become a zombie?
[I died. This was a couple hundred years ago, and they had just invented gun powder. I thought this guy was waving a chair leg at me and then “boom”. Dead Ninja. I was pretty disappointed, I can tell you. But thanks to the unspeakable Ninja arts and my voodoo priest cousin Fred, I got a second chance.]

Voodoo priest cousin? Japanese voodoo?
[Naw the real stuff. Fred’s really more of a second cousin, I guess. But he’s a solid guy that Fred. He’d have to be to find my corpse and reanimate me.]

Ok. So you’re a ZombieNinja. Why become a Pirate?
[It just happened after the zombie thing. It was sort of natural. See, I was on an assassin mission when, right in the middle of this sweet swordfight with the ghost of a long-dead samurai, my left hand fell off.]

Damn. Really?
[Yeah. Just decomposed, dropped right off. So I figured I’d put a hook there. Good for climbing, good for killing. It just made sense.]

I see. And the eyepatch?
[Well, I don’t actually see out of my eyes anyway, but I figured it went with the hook.]

So how well can you actually fight as a myopic, decomposing, one-handed master of stealth?
[I'm a zombieninjapirate. I can either rip off my own leg and beat you to death with it, or I can rip off your leg and beat you to death with it. Your choice.]

Point taken.

Context for today’s Friday Feature:

Some of you have heard me boast of my foosball skills. Despite the fact that I haven’t played since I moved from Miami, I will not hesitate to face a single one of you in battle. Find me a foosball table, name the stakes, and it’s on.

You think I’m just playing around. You think you’re good at foosball. “Oh yes,” you say “we have a table in our agency too. We play for [insert stupid stakes here]. I bet I can take you.”

No you can’t. You think you can, but you can’t. You don’t know where I’m coming from. Where I come from, we play for real. Oh sure, we have a prize-

-but that’s not our motivation. You play hard when you have something to win. You play for real when you have something to lose.

Where I come from, if you lose 10-0, if you get shut out- shit gets real. You spin the Wheel of Misfortune, son. Respect the Wheel. RESPECT IT.

Because it will tell you if you get banned from the foosball table for a week.

Or that you’ve become the office coffee bitch- making two runs a day for weeks at a time.

And it will tell you if you’re about suffer the harshest penalty of all- Marmite. A product so foul that it’s own manufacturers have seen fit to mock it.

BEHOLD:

This shit is for real. So don’t tell me you’re good at foosball. It’s life or Marmite on the streets where I learned to play. That’s where I’m coming from. You ready to accept the challenge?

Went to a free creative writing seminar tonight, just to see what it was like. They had us do an exercise where we wrote about some “miracle machine from the future”. This is what I scribbled:

The Carrier Pigeon 2.0 was hailed as a marvel of robotics and artificial intelligence. Merely tell it what you need, and it would fetch it for you. Certainly the masses praised it for it’s usefulness around the home- finding keys or TV remotes. But what really set it apart was it’s ability to interpret the requests it was given. This capability was famously displayed on the day when Jonathan Pembleton, a struggling writer, crumpled up his latest screenplay and screamed “I need an idea!” within range of his Carrier Pigeon 2.0. Whereupon the device flew out the window and returned three hours later with a full manuscript. Sadly for Jonathan, it was the property of one George Lucas, and detailed the soon to be released prequel to Indiana Jones.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now: I don’t dance. Not well, at any rate.

I am such a bad dancer that- during the 90s- I used to get compliments on my dancing. Actual, serious, compliments.

During the 90s.

This has always been fairly upsetting to me because I have no problem finding the beat. And I know what good dancing looks like. It’s the opposite of whatever I’m doing.

However, at some point I learned to breakdance. Well, actually, I learned how to do one move. There is a whole golden-age of comic-books style origin story behind this. How I discovered the hidden lore in an unlikely place, my subsequent discovery of my natural aptitude for it, and how it took me from obscurity to 30 seconds of being the coolest kid at the middle school youth group dance.

That is a tale for another time.

I’ve been randomly throwing this single move out there for about 12 years now. I literally didn’t know “the move” was a real b-boy technique until I went to wikipedia just now in the hopes that I could find the nearest equivalent. Turns out it’s an actual step, called (depending on who you ask) the helicopter/coffee grinder/can opener.

When I busted it out at the office Holloween party a few years ago, my ex-b-boy coworkers laughed appreciatively/uproariously and dubbed it “the dreidel”.

Please understand, I haven’t done this seriously since I was 14. Now it’s all for a laugh. If I bust it out at an office party, it’s good for a round of collective gasps, a lot of “wait- he did what? DO IT AGAIN I MISSED IT”, and then everyone gets to watch as two or three other people proudly show off just how long it’s been since they did The Worm or a Backspin.

But among Jews “the dreidel” has an entirely different effect. At my best, I knew two moves (one of my ex-breakdancing coworkers taught me a “baby freeze”, which I proudly pulled off at my wedding and have never bothered to attempt since). But over the years I’ve attended lots of Bar Mitzvahs. And Jewish youth group dances. And, more recently, weddings. And dear reader, let me tell you: to a room full of white, middle-class Jews, a single helicopter is the equivalent of an olympic gymnast doing a perfect 10 floor routine in your living room.

They absolutely lose their minds.

It’s fairly embarrassing. The whole thing should be a joke. But these people scream. They demand I do it again. And again. And again. They bring the professional videographer over so they can get it on film (no I don’t actually have a copy or I’d post it up.) Kids would trail after me like I was some kind of choreographic mastermind. I’ve lost count of the number of times I wound up slightly to the side of the dance floor at a Bar Mitzvah, teaching a bunch of 10-13 year olds how to jump over their own leg. It’s reached the point where I get requests at family gatherings.

I should point out that every time I do this, The Wife threatens to divorce me. She’s gone so far as leaving the room on several occasions. “Do you ever consider how badly you’re embarrassing me?” she cries, as she picks up the nearest item in preparation to hurl it at me.

Which of course is practically the only reason I do it anymore.

You might wonder why I’m suddenly mentioning this now. This past Saturday, I attended The Wife’s Grandmother’s 90th birthday party. It was a lovely catered affair at a country club, with all of her side of the family (ie-people I had previously seen at weddings and Bat Mitzvahs) in attendance. It was not the sort of affair one should “bust a move” at.

Which was why I turned down the first three requests.

The fourth one came from The Mother-In-Law, along with a surprisingly hard shove that propelled me into the center of the circle. At which point, I busted a dreidel. During Hava NaGeila.

My Jewish readers understand how utterly ridiculous this is. For the rest of you, the closest parallel I can think of would be performing a flare in the midst of a country square dance.

DAMN.

In other news, BrokenJPG turns 2 today. I was going to do a whole bunch of things to commemorate 730 days of being ignored by the internet, but I didn’t. Instead, I’m just going to re-post my first…um…post. Here it is:

SCOTTISH TOURISM BOARD MAKES ME LOOK GREAT

After a quarter million dollars and 6 months, Scotland unveiled a new slogan: (the faint of heart may want to sit down for this one)

“Welcome to Scotland.”

More than most people, I understand how hard it can be to sum up the entirety of a product, service, or (in this case) country in a few simple words. Still, this is just amazing. I wish I’d been there to see the final pitch. I imagine it went something like this-

”Ladies and gentlemen, we feel this tagline communicates every nuance of the tourism board’s noble task. It successfully lets the world know that they are welcome. In Scotland. Also, I got the copy off my doormat.”

If you say the above in a Scottish accent, it’s twice as funny.

That was my first post, and I still think it’s pretty good. A shame the whole blog went downhill from there.

Thanks for reading everyone.

A week ago today, CNN.com ran an article stating that thousands of people were depressed after seeing Avatar. Because real life couldn’t compare to it.

Let me say two things to start with.

First, Avatar is a beautiful movie. Visually, it raises the bar for film. It is our generations’ Star Wars, replacing Cinnabun hairdos and walking shag carpets with elongated Smurfs and braids that have planetary ethernet cables.

Second, this article might very well be a hoax. A piece of marketing specifically calculated to get everyone talking about the movie for an extra week. If so, bravo sirs. You managed to get me to blog about it. But not before looking into gene splicing as a way to forever separate myself from the vomit-inducing shame-spiral of deplorableness that is humanity.

Even if it is a hoax, I am fully prepared to believe it’s true. That’s the sad part. It almost doesn’t matter whether it’s real or not. (I say “almost” because if these people do exist, they need to be rounded up, escorted into spaceships, and shot into the sun as soon as possible.) Regardless, the fact is that our species has sunk to a level where the statements in this article aren’t even a stretch.

What the very existence of this forum thread named “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible” means, is that there are thousands of people on our planet right now who feel that sitting in the dark for two and a half hours is a more vivacious experience then taking a walk. It feels more real. Some advice for these people, and I mean this in all seriousness: please consider all the sensory impressions you get walking from a dark theater, through the parking lot, back to your car.

I really want you all to try this. Listen to the crunch of the gravel and broken glass beneath your dirty white tennis shoes. Inhale deeply, and smell the heady aroma of I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Called-Butter popcorn coming from the theater behind you. Feel the way your spine twists and shatters as I run over you with my car. Take it all in. That’s reality you’re feeling. In a second you’ll feel some more of it as I back up over you.

Humanity claims to rule this planet, yet damn near none of us could survive without a roof over our heads for more than two days. And I mean in the middle of New York. If you air-dropped us Bear Grylls style into the Amazon, we’d make it just long enough to discover our iPhones didn’t get wi-fi before tripping over an exposed root and impaling ourselves on poisonous tree frogs or something. So why should I expect those same masses to be able to distinguish between reality and some bright lights?

Always before I’ve blamed Hollywood. They have mocked my childhood by building multi-million dollar, 200 minute-long dildos to shove up the ass of every 80s show I ever loved. Repeatedly. And I screamed at them. I ranted. I refused to pay even one cent to see these reborn abortions. But perhaps I owe Hollywood an apology.

If there are really are thousands of so-called people who feel that a Ferngully remake is more real than my fist hitting them repeatedly in the face, maybe I should give Hollywood a break. After all, there are millions of idiots who pay for this crap. They make it profitable. Perhaps Hollywood isn’t really to blame. Maybe, just this once, I should apologize.

Of course, those fucktards got in a bidding war over the rights to the Atari game Asteroids. A bidding war.

I’ll agree with those azure-obsessed, movie-masturbating, mouth-breathers on one point. I fucking hate this planet.

I find it comforting that there is at least one meme besides LOLCATS that the internet never tires of:

And, because it’s only fair to listen to all parties before taking sides, I grudgingly (not really) post NBC’s perspective on things: