Author: MacPhoenix

Fast Food Patron: I’d like the fish sandwich value meal, please.

Voice in Ordering Box: That’ll be $5.43. Drive up to the first window, please.

FFP: Okay.

(Fast Food Patron drives up to First Window and hands Cashier at First Window a $20 and a $1.)

Cashier at First Window: That’ll be $4.99, please.

FFP: (confused) What about tax?

CaFW: Yeah… (pauses) What?

FFP: What about sales tax? You said $4.99. There’s tax, too.

CaFW: Yeah. (studies register, then nods) Yeah. That’s $4.99.

FFP: (resignedly) Okay!

(Fast Food Patron reaches through First Window and grabs the single out of the Cashier at Front Window’s hand, to avoid further confusion.)

There was an ad for I, Robot that, mercifully, hasn’t been shown in this market for a couple of days. The voice-over said, ominously, “We designed them to be trusted with our children, our families, and our homes, but did we design them to be trusted?”

The annoying sound you hear is the venting of my eternal frustration at copywriters that are that dumb. And that entry is my vote for the second dumbest thing ever written for an advertisement.

The first, and I hope you don’t ever see this commercial, is for a company called Vital Basics, which is a stupid miracle vitamin that boosts your metabolism, keeps you alert and awake, and cures dropsy. These guys are so confident you’ll love their product that they are giving it away for free. And so says an unscripted man-on-the-street testimonial from a woman with the shrillest voice imaginable. She shrieks, “They’re giving it away FREE? It must be good.” When she cackles the word “free” it sours milk and causes grown men to weep. It breaks teevee tubes and my glasses. It keeps me up at night with cold shivers. But besides all that: What type of logic is that? Surely I could ask, “They charge thousands of dollars for that? It must be good.” Or even, “They charge $5.95 for shipping and handling? That must be how they make their money.”

I’m on a mailing list at Don’t Amend, a group dedicated to stopping the hijacking of the Constitution by the idiots against same-sex marriage. It’s a fine cause, and all I had to do was sign a petition, not the hardest thing in the world. But the poor folks at Don’t Amend found themselves the target of a malcontent, who hacked into their mail server and opened their bulk email list to anyone. I’m not sure if this caused me, and others on the list, to get more spam, because I get over to two hundred spam emails each day, so another dozen or so in my junk mailbox would go unnoticed by me. What it did noiticably do was spawn one of the most hilarious and goofy responses from several dozen of the users on the list. If I were going to make my own bulk email list of suckers and newbies, today would have made my work far, far easier.

Instead, I just deleted the emails. But not before I read through a quarter of them to get this jist of the responses to a mailing list gone amuck. The innocent response was, “Remove me from your list,” one of which started the whole mess. The first sender of the remove-me email was doing the right thing. S/he clicked a link that opened up a new blank email with the remove-me subject line, and sent it, just like s/he was supposed to do. But, like an avalanche or a mudslide, it only takes one pebble to start the whole thing rolling, and soon there were three needless angry and terse emails telling this first innocent, and everyone else on the list, that they didn’t set up the list, and don’t tell them to take you off the list that they have nothing to do with, and what the hell is a list anyway, and, by the way, go to hell!

Why so tense? These could have been chalked up to before-the-first-caffine-intake email, since they took place so early in the morning, but these same nasty, clueless emails kept coming in. The first one started at 8 a.m. EDT and the last trickled down at noon, when Don’t Amend finally fixed the hole. A few people took it upon themselves to send the nasty, curt response several times throughout the day, along with requests to take themselves off the list. That’s good thinking.

Still, I understand the impulse to try to control things that are out of one’s hands. But spitting against the wind? Not my style. Apparently, though, there are a large portion of the Don’t Amend mailing list that believe themselves to be of a higher authority, because these people “helped” by telling everyone else to stop sending emails to the list, over and over again. I do believe they failed to realize that the greater majority of us on the Don’t Amend mailing list were not, in fact, sending emails to the list, so more than half of the email pollution was coming from these know-it-alls who were telling us to stop replying to all, as they, themselves, were replying to all.

In order to make their point as annoying as possible, they spread as much ALL CAPS and weird typefaces in their emails. This is something that only friends should do to each other in emails, but never, ever to strangers.

A couple of my favorite responses were the one that basically said, “I don’t get that many emails, so this was a lot of fun to read through. Relax and enjoy it people,” which I did, and the other, verbatim, “I have been receiving mass emails from member of Dont Amend with weird “remove me” dialogue….please dont remove me.” Sweetly insecure.

And, yes, YES, all I wanted to do was respond to each of these people and tell them that they were being so stupid. And I wouldn’t have sent the email to the list, either, because I know how to use email, unlike the woman who insisted she has used email a long time and knew how to reply to an individual, as she emailed everyone on the goddammed list! I would have wasted a large amount of time to teach these people a valuable lesson by copying and pasting my rant into several dozen emails. But, but, I thought, that would be pointless. No one learns lessons via email. And, besides, I have a blog! I’ll post it there! Yeah, that’ll learn ’em.

As both readers of my blog know (Hi Mom! Hi Uncle Frank!), I try to stay away from current events, because by the time I write about it and post the article, the event has all but faded from the public view. But when breasts are involved, I try to keep timely. Of course, I refer to the shocking and civilization-collapsing baring of Janet Jackson’s right breast on national television.

I didn’t see the actual live performance, for the same reason that I do not gawk at traffic accidents—I find no pleasure in watching other people’s pain. That sums up halftime shows, beauty pageants, and other reality-based television. I just don’t care. So I missed what is being billed as the most-replayed event on television. I have the Internet, however, home of twelve-billion boobies, and Janet’s shame was on display before the Monday morning news-cycle. I laughed and laughed and laughed, when I first read the news on CNN shortly after midnight after the Super Bowl. CBS, MTV, the NFL, Justin Timberlake, and thousands of others were denying any responsibility. The breast was not meant to be exposed! There was red-lace under there that was meant to stay on. Oh, the humanity!

I thought, that night, naively, that this was a non-story, because she quite obviously had a pastie on her breast, a silvery, star-shaped pastie. (Initially, I thought that the photo was being censored, because the pastie is so big and doofy-looking!) I thought that the pastie kind of proved that the stunt was carried out as planned. Why wear a pastie at all, if not to hide the real indecent part of the breast, the scary and evil nipple? And that’s where I was so wrong. See, the floppy flesh around the nipple is just as bad. I didn’t realize this. Apparently, the bad part of the breast is the outside, the part that faces the arms of a woman. Because the inside, where Wonderbras and silicon have pushed them up to the chins of the women in television and magazines all accessible to minors, the cleavage, that’s just fine. The outside part? Only a suckling child should be able to get that view.

Sensibly, no one is offended by the young White male molesting and ripping the clothes off an older, shorter Black woman. Sensibly, no one is upset that women are used as commodities by the recording industry and Hollywood. Sensibly, no one cares that the talented Janet Jackson has to sex herself up in order to move CDs, because her talent has nothing to do with her marketability. Thank God, we’re all so fucking uptight that we can’t deal with a perfectly fine boob because it was shown to tens of million children who were watching a pro-football game, where advertisers spent hundreds of million dollars on telling American men that they have erectile disfunction and are not pleasing their American women. Hey kids! Buy beer! Don’t smoke pot! Drink beer! Trade stocks with this company! Get a stiffy! And drink more beer! And then back to the game where men are men, son.

Still, it was a stupid stunt, and I have no sympathy for the puppets that were strung along and will be hung out when the Inquisition is over. It is just a shame that real destroyers of our culture and community, MTV and the morally outraged, will both win, and the poor, maligned boob will lose.