More TV ads I hate

I was thinking last night while sitting on my balcony reading, summer’s not like it used to be. Used to be we’d spend all night out either playing Kick the Can (as children) or drinking (as college students).

The one thing we didn’t do, really, was watch TV. TV sucked during the summer. Except for the chance to catch up with the episode or two of you favorite show you missed way back in February, who’d want to be watching re-runs when you could be outside playing/drinking.

That’s changed a bit in this new millennia with shows like Eureka, Saving Grace, True Blood and Weeds making their season premiers when the sun is high in the sky. All of these are shows worth watching but, again, are they worth giving up playtime for?

One that that hasn’t changed about TV, whether it’s during the summer or deep in the winter, most of the commercials you see suck. Seriously.

I’m pretty much the guy networks hate. I divver most of my shows and watch them the next day, just so I can fast forward through the horrendous commercials. And there are some really bad ones out there, ones that need to go away. For example:

Anything involving insurance and our evolutionary ancestors. Those fucking Geico-caveman ads are no longer funny. They haven’t been funny since, oh, about five minutes after the first one aired. That one, the one with the spokesman apologizing to the cavemen in the fancy restaurant for saying “Geico, so easy a caveman can do it.”? That one was funny. None of them since have had the slightly element of humor in them.

It’s time for the caveman to fall in a glacier. Maybe, when he reappears in 10,000 years, we’ll have figured out how to yank his Actors Guild card.

Any of the ads showing people shopping for a PC and then getting money to pay for it. (Disclosure: I own a Mac, and love it.) These “You find what you want and we pay for it” ads are so contrived I dive for the remote to change the channel every time I see one. You know? For a grand I could find any number of computers that would suit my needs. The most annoying thing in the ads are the people who seem smug and happy about “not being cool enough for a Mac.” Yes, Macs cost more than PCs. There’s a simple reason for this, they’re better computers. Just about anything a PC can do, a Mac can do better, faster and with fewer chances of the machine crashing.

The fact that PC makers revel in the fact that they sell cheap, crappy computers is enough to make me never want to own one again.

That Enterprise Rent-a-Car commercial with the couple packing for a get-away. In Ghostbusters, Gozer the Gozarian asks Ray if he’s a god. Ray answers truthfully, “No” and the team gets spanked. After they dust themselves off and are girding their loins for another try at Gozer, Peter says, “The next time someone asks if you a god Ray, you say YES!”

I always think of this line when I see this annoying Enterprise commercial. Scene: Man and woman in bedroom packing for a couple’s getaway. Woman comes out carrying a red negligee in one hand and a black one in the other.

“Red or black,” she asks with a seductive smile.

“Both,” answers her lover with a look of anticipation on his face more extreme than the one I wore that special, special night with a girl named Debbie. (Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge say no more, eh?)

Here’s the point, “The next time your girl asks you if she should bring a red or a black negligee with her on a romantic weekend, you say NEITHER!” This way there’s fewer things to get in the way of the sex.

This ad wins the prize because it has two really annoying parts. The second is that, yes, Enterprise will pick you up, but why the hell do they have to deliver a giant SUV to the front of your house with a driveway and a two-car garage? Are you really living in the ‘burbs without at least one car in the garage? How hard would it have been to film this scene outside a condo building?

To sum up: cavemen need to quickly become extinct again; when PC makers try to be cute like Apple they will always fail; and your wardrobe for a sexy weekend away should consist of a toothbrush.