Where would I be without commercial posts? Nowhere, that's where. This one's a couple months old, but I still can't get over my bizarre obsession with it.




The “main character,” the father/husband walks in to the house and declares that the family can now talk to their friends and family as much as they want, to which his wife responds, “like vivian” and the husband replies in the affirmative. Then the commercial gets a little stranger. (Well, already strange is the man's choice of dress. For what job could the dress code possibly be wearing an ugly brown sport coat, shirt and tie, and jeans? Or does he just leave the house that way casually? Odd, either way.) The middle son suggests they could talk to “skinny pete.” Who is this “Skinny Pete” character? Some sort of hoodlum? Who has a friend named skinny pete? And why is he so skinny anyway? Maybe he should eat more. No one reacts, and subsequently the youngest son suggests the father could call the woman he's always staring at in the boy's soccer practice, creating a classic commercial awkward moment, for which the father stares dumfounded for about half a second. The daughter then chimes in, asserting she could now call “derek” who her father refers to as “derek with the mustang and the mustache,” and tells her that there's a no dereks with mustaches clause in the fine print. The two particularly noteworthy things here, aside from just the bizarre combination of mustache and mustang are one, that when he tells her about the clause she steps forward and leans into him, as if she actually believes such a clause could exist and she wants to read it for herself and two, that the father calls his daughter “dude.” Who does that? Isn't that weird? I feel like it would be a little weird maybe to call your son dude, but your daughter? What a drag.

I can't explain it. There's nothing that jumps out about this commercial. I just like it.

I follow a lot of sports, and I like a lot of teams. Yet amongst these sports, my fandom of college basketball is unique in some ways. In fact, two ways in particular that I can think of at the moment. First, my following of college basketball as a sport is more predicated on the success of my favorite team, Syracuse, than any other sport. If Syracuse is having a down year, my following will slack off, and after a bad Syracuse loss I sometimes will avoid reading about college basketball for a few days. With regard to baseball, on the other hand, even if the Mets are having a lost year, I'll play close attention to the goings on in baseball. Second, for as long as I can remember, I am the only Syracuse fan I know. Almost everyone I know are Mets fans, and I know plenty of Knicks fans and Rangers fans, and even a couple of Bills fans, but no other fans of the Orange. In a way, I think I take the team's performance more personally than I do the success or failure of my other teams. It's almost if - when the Mets fail, they're speaking to all the fans I know, myself included - we can comisserate together, complain about the player acquistion and the poor defense, and everything else, and pretty much share and spread out out bitter feelings.

Syracuse losses, on the other hand, are mine alone. I have to deal internally with the suffering. Of course, if you're not a sports fan, suffering sounds like a ridiculous overstatement for feelings based on something that you have absolutely no control over. And it's true, it is ridiculous. And by no means am I comparing to real suffering of poverty and hunger and disease. But it is suffering, be it of a much lesser, and different degree. After a loss, I don't want to talk about it, or want to find another subject to talk about, like a husband who doesn't want to talk about a bad day at work. It's difficult and it's frustrating and by now I'm probably talking about all sports but it really is inherently irrational to stake such a significant amount of your mood on something over which you have no control. This is veering on pop psychology, but it's probably something about being part of something, and you know, can't get the joys of victory without suffering the agonies of defeat. That, and each sport has their own individual charms, but that's something else entirely.

Anyway, to sum up, I'm pretty bummed that 'Cuse lost, and more over got killed by Oklahoma. Let's hope Johnny Flynn comes back next year. Go Big East anyway.

Finally caught up on Friday Night Lights - all three seasons and 50 episodes. Following, some comments.




- first off, general things - I like it a lot, it's a good show - essentially a soft relatively realistic for TV primetime soap with football, with really good characters, and attempting to make everyone human - and by the time I got about halfway through every season, I wanted to power through the rest which is always a good sign - it's not the best show ever but it's good and I hope it comes back for the two seasons at least NBC is talking about

- no one is completely in the wrong on the show as a general rule - for example, one coach who is forced to share quarters with Dillon, due to who his school being destroyed in a tornado seems like a total jackass, until just before you see him for the last time he tells Coach Taylor that his wife has cancer - this show would never let you get away having unequivocal hate towards any character

- most ridiculous subplot is about Landry murdering Tyra's rapist. FNL, unlike, say, the Wire, is TV left and right, no doubt about it but usually they stay within the bounds of fairly normal human drama - boy-girl troubles, school problems, parenting issues - throwing in a murder was way beyond anything they had thrown in before, and after - totally out of place - like the reverse of if Jack Bauer tried to start cracking jokes during 24 - the whole plotline just felt like the writers had stretched the bounds of the universe in which the show takes place

- the other most obvious TV thing is of course, that during every game, the player who seems to have been the subject of the episode seems to be the one making the plays - this may be the wrong place to do this as I don't want to insult FNL as much as credit a show like The Wire, but if FNL was The Wire, we would know far more players' names no matter how important characters they were, and what happened in the games would have nothing to do with the rest of the episodes - it's fine, it's not a big deal, I just wanted to make a point out of it

- the most ridiculous occasional character is the meth dealer who Tim Riggins lives with for a couple episodes - the hunting and driving conversations between the two of them, including the Patrick Swayze lovefest are some of the most utterly surreal scenes in the entire series and just made me feel weird and confused while watching

- myself having an insane obsession with opening credits related comments: third seasons, no more smash and street - makes sense, they're only in a couple of episodes - why not replace them with Buddy Garrity (Brad Leland) and JD McCoy (Jeremy Sumpter) Both are just about main characters in the third season, getting as much screen time as anyone else. Buddy has really moved above the other recurring characters, like Matt's grandma and Billy Riggins in terms of prominence and JD McCoy is a way to shepherd the show into a new era after the majority of the cast graduates high school (though somehow finds their way back in Dillon, maybe?)

- one thing probably both liberating to the writers and highly unsatisfying to the viewers is that this high school show, unlike most high school shows (ie. Buffy) covers just the fall rather than the whole school year, and thus huge events can happen in the second half of the year that are unexplained, as seems to happen between the 2nd and 3rd seasons. ps. I wrote this before I realized there was an episode 13 of the 3rd season, which I then watched, and is sort of a "everything stays the same for five months" until things start happening again.

- it's kind of ridiculous to anyone watching the show that Lyla, Tyra and Tim Riggins were sophomores in the first season - they had the run of the school, everyone knew who they were, and the general impression I got is that, while watching the first season, they were all seasons and maybe at absolute reach, juniors - my guess and this is based on absolutely nothing is that they were not designed to be sophomores but were changed to them later on to keep them longer when the show got extended

- one nice thing FNL does is show a whole range of functional families - it sounds silly, but while there is plenty of hackneyed TV encounters and dialogue on the show, the relationships within the different family units, from the Taylors, to the Riggins, and Saracens, Collettes, and the rest really do seem authentic, and that is a credit to the show - one of the shows strongest traits I think

- the series also should have been adding characters each year so that when characters graduated they'd be easily replaceable if necessary rather than having to worry about finding a way to keep them in Dillon

Well that's all for now - I probably have a lot more thoughts, but if I wait for all of them, I'll never put this up

Like the Edwin Hawkins Singers said, Oh Happy Day - I finally have a new computer (well, they didn't say the new computer part). Anyway, it's about fucking time, and I am thrilled about it, though I am still working on getting all my stuff set up the way I like it and attempting to figure out Vista.

How else to make the first post on a new computer, than about commercials.

Just like there's a special place in the universe for things they shouldn't be funny, but are, there's a special place for things that should be funny but just aren't.



I like Conan O'Brien. He's a funny guy. I like H. Jon Benjamin (his agent). He voices McGurk, the best character in Home Movies, and is generally a pretty funny guy. I saw them and I wanted it to be funny, I wanted to laugh. It's meta, which of course could be good or bad; Conan doing a commercial about doing a Bud Light commercial in Sweden.

I wish I could just say it's not funny because it's a bud light commercial, but that would be too easy. Worse products (I know, there aren't many) have had better commercials before (for example, I do not like Subway, but am mesmorized by the original five dollar foot long commercials (the ones with Godzilla and the Japanese news reporter and such, not the new garbage ones with people dancing in a subway store)).

Someone I talked to suggested it's possible that it's not funny because Conan is so self-depricating, and doesn't take himself seriously - maybe that it would work better if Conan was replaced by someone whose image makes you think they were be more outraged by the in-commercial commercial being aired in America. While that's a possibility, I don't think that's it. Another thought is that the foreign commercial idea is just outdated - the audience for this commercial is familiar with weird foreign commercials - and Conan's commercial is not suffieicently ridiculous based on what we've already seen to be funny.

While these may play a role, I don't think any of these explanations really cover it all. The creators of the commercial have simply accomplished the moderately difficult - making funny people, and an inherently funny situation not funny, just weird. It's almost like it's an ad made by a firm attempting to act like someone trying to start a youtube phenonemon but not really understanding how it works, or what's funny about them. Alas, an opportunity lost, for both Conan, to make a funny commercial, and for Bud Light to rebound from their absolutely beyond awful drinkability campaign.