Animal Rights and Wrongs...

                                     Image courtesy of deviantart.com

  

   I recently watched a commercial that among many images featured a snail. Snails? Me no likey. Me no likey at all actually and the less I see of snails, the better I am. Some people eat them. Well… some people marry their own sister but that doesn’t make it kosher. I remember when I was a little girl. I was outside at school for recess and this slimy little snail was just hanging out on the stair- railing that led back into the school. I was terrified to get close to the snail. When the bell rang for the end of recess, while the other kids ran back inside, I stood near the swings, dumbfounded.  I knew there was absolutely no way I was going back into the building so I just stood out there, contemplating walking home to my mommy. I decided to walk through the front entrance doors all the way on the other side of the building. As I arrived late to class, my opinion of snails had solidified. I hated them.  I got in trouble that day with my teacher and the snail on the commercial brought up all that bitterness against him and his community again.  

Drugs are bad, mmmkay.

I’m sure by now every comedian working the circuit has told their own variation of this very joke:

   “I’m sick of all of these prescription drug commercials trying to get me to take an Rx that has side effects that are worse than the original ailment”

This joke has been beaten to death like a dead horse by so many people out there since the 90’s that it has kind of become its own punch line every time a commercial comes on. And no matter what you are watching, they’ve got a commercial for you! If you watch a lot of CBS, you know like Two and a Half Men and 60 Minutes, you’re likely to see an ad for Cialis and Boniva and other drugs targeted to the baby boomers and Studio 54 crowd.  If you watch a lot of MTV Jersey Shore, I suppose they would show a lot of ads for herpes drugs with people kayaking and rollerblading and such. Beyond the humor of it all for me is the fact that these ads are thrown up so easily on primetime television that we as a country have become desensitized to them. The commercials ask you if you have been feeling a certain laundry list of symptoms, some of which every human being has felt at some time or another and then it proceeds to show you a different version of yourself. A happier version, a version of you that can go kayaking.

Clever Ad Campaigns

I may be wrong…but I doubt it

 My love for Sir Charles Barkley and all things civilized and un-civilized extends back to when I was a little girl. I’ve always been a fan of organized sports and while today I can count football,  or more specifically, the National Football League,  as a favorite sport of mine (With basketball and baseball placing silver and bronze, respectively)  in my childhood years basketball was my one and only. I can remember receiving my first piece of basketball memorabilia as a young girl, a Doctor J activity book. The book contained pages to color; cool paper-doll cut outs of Julius complete with Sixers uniform and business suit. That book was awesome. And just like that, I had found a sport I could get on board with. I remember watching Charles back in the day; he was a little wilder back then, a little scarier. Today, besides an occasional crazy outburst between Charles and Kenny, he’s been down-graded to George Foreman status on the black men that make America nervous scale where Malcolm X signifies ten and o let’s say Nick Cannon stands for one.  I don’t mean this as a bad thing by any means but more along the lines of Charles has matured and people in grandpa status aren’t really scary to us anymore. {See: Robert Deniro}. So it came to no surprise to me that Barkley has been stealing the spotlight lately from Dwayne Wade in those cool T-Mobile commercials. If you live under a rock (or in Canada) here’s a sample of the commercials to get you up to speed…

It's the end of the world as we know it!

It’s the end of the world as we know it…

… On a recent trip to the Downtown hipster section of Philadelphia the most lovable of homeless man thought it apropos to grab me by the hand and inform me that the damn Mayans had it right all along. As he escorted me to my destination, he schooled me on the ends and outs of his end of days playbook. Whiskey-breath none-withstanding, he was actually making a lot of sense and was starting to scare me. Or maybe I’m just extra receptive to the powers of suggestion. 

Isn’t this how cults are manufactured?

I realized as the homeless guy began to break it down to me, (tsunamis, radioactive catastrophes, mud-slides, wild-fires, civil un-rest), that the melodramatic, creatively ridiculous, John Cusack starring Blockbuster 2012 had it right all along. If it was to be the end of the world, there were a couple of things I’d like to do to get my house in order before the Doomsday clock ticked down to zero. Such as…

Three Life Lessons- The Zack Morris Edition

Image Courtesy of Photobucket.com

Three Life lessons- the Zack Morris Edition

So I recently battled with a bout of insomnia. After two back-to-back bottles of sleeping pills I decided to try and go to sleep on my own, au natural if you will. Bad idea. After taking a sleeping pill to rest every night for over two months straight my body had built up such a dependency to the drug that I couldn’t remember how to naturally fall asleep. To be honest, back when I had been dosing I didn’t even give much thought to if I even needed  the pill or if I was just going through the motions as I prepared myself for bed every night, brushing my teeth, removing my clothes, chasing a sleeping pill with a shot of vanilla-flavored Rice Dream. I was so used to it in fact that I didn’t see anything wrong with the fact that I was pretty much knocking myself out every night. And who cares if I resembled an extra from AMC’s The Walking Dead the next morning. I had my seven hours a night and that’s all that mattered.  Or so I thought. So those first couple of nights without my old pal Ambien went by pretty uneventfully, more than likely because I had jam-packed my day with lots of work and activity so I’d have no other option than to come home and pass out on the couch. A couple of nights in,however,  I found myself in that unwelcome vortex. That point in the night where it’s too late to try and get a full night’s sleep but too early to try and get up and just start your day. For most people, I’ll just refer to them as the early risers, this time is somewhere around 4:30-5am. For me on the otherhand it was a little after seven in the morning.

 I tossed and turned and hummed the theme song from Austin Powers aloud to myself in an attempt to drown out the birds chirping outside my window. Their song led me to my ominous conclusion: it was now morning. Unwilling to disrobe and jump in the shower just yet I opted to watch a bit of television. Surfing through the channels I caught a rerun episode of Saved by the Bell. It was actually my favorite episode. You know the one where Jessie Spano (played by 1995’s biggest punchline this side of the dancing judge Itos, Elizabeth Berkley) in all her mom-jean wearing glory over-doses on caffeine pills? The same caffeine pills they sell at the register of any convenience store right beside the gum and the condoms? Yeah that one. I don’t think the writers over at Mad Men or even Robert Greenblatt himself could have produced such a stirring episode. The highs, the lows… the acid-washed jeans. There was so much to learn from this fondly remembered childhood show. Such as…

What my parents and t.v. forgot to teach me.

   

           
Image Courtesy of Collider.com


    It's a lazy Saturday night and cable t.v is running a promo ad for its comedy weekend dedicated to gods and goddesses of the comedy world. The network is trying to tell me that I need to be there for the debut of the remake of the Nutty Professor starring Eddie Murphy (Eddie Murphy plays a fat guy, isn't that funny?[answer = kind of] Eddie Murphy plays Richard Simmons, isn't that incorrigible? [answer = not really] Eddie Murphy plays a fat family and makes over half of America scream 'Hercules', isn't that hilarious? [answer = get out of my office!]. This is sad to my soul, unacceptable for you see, I just watched Coming to America last night. Not for the first time or even my fifth. More like my thirtieth time. I.love.this.movie. Coming to America has more potent quotables than I think any other movie in Murphy's set list. Don't believe me? That's okay, it's a free country. But please know that you are wrong.