Worst Ad in America

When the Consumerist website asked readers to choose the worst television ad in America, there was no shortage of contenders. I was pretty certain the Summer's Eve campaign would be the winner, since its spots featured talking vaginas speaking in the stereotypical accents of black, Asian, and Hispanic women. Kudos, in other words, for being both vulgar and racist.

The winner, though, is equally revolting: a Luv's disposable diaper ad in which babies compete in a sort of Olympic shitfest for the fullest diaper.

I've known enough new parents to understand that they tend to cope with the exhausting prospect of childcare by finding some humor in the constant stream of baby poop, spit-up, and urine. But the commercial actually shows the babies inflating their diapers with feces and speaks to the specter of diaper "blowout." Call me old-fashioned but there's nothing cute or amusing about explosive elimination.  

There was a time when brand spokesmen like Charmin's Mr. Whipple and commercials for women's sanitary products needed only to allude to the uses of their offerings. That allowed them to focus on other issues, like convenience and comfort and cost in the context of an ongoing concept, without veering into the scatological. Now that ads revel in feminine napkins displaying red dots of menstrual blood, while bears crapping in the woods are concerned about toilet paper shreds adhering to their fur, the mystery and magic of advertising are in the toilet, too.

Not a People Person

A high-concept television spot is a tough sell. The idea has to be so bullet-proof that the viewer gets the point immediately, but even if it is, the client needs to be convinced its customers don't need to be pandered to. So in the case of this "People Person" commercial for Prius, Toyota must have simply put its faith in Saatchi & Saatchi's reputation for brand leadership. Blindly, it would seem.

It's a strange approach to a very significant announcement: that Prius now offers four slightly different models -- one for each type of person. The spots start off with a "human" comprised of a dozen or so contortionists clinging together to form a grossly suggested humanoid face and its body parts. Despite the upbeat jingle ("Got To Be Free" by the Kinks), the effect is so monstrous that small children all over America must be cowering in corners whenever the spot runs -- and I'm not saying that just because of my irrational fear of monkeys dressed in clothes. I'd be offput if I saw this trick performed at the Cirque du Soleil, but in the context of a car ad you might encounter ten times a night it's eerily frightening.

Then, once the interlocked gymnasts uncouple and are revealed to be different types of consumers, the idea that there's a car model for each of their needs comes through. But why were they all jumbled together as one "person" in the first place? It's the line of cars that are a family, not the people.

I suspect that this was a case where a creative director wanted to utilize what he thought was a cool effect, and shoehorned it into a marketing message. It doesn't work, it's inordinately creepy, and if I'd been planning to buy a Prius, I'm certainly not going to now.

Petty Bureaucrats

In one episode of the animated Comedy Central series South Park, Eric Cartman's delusions of grandeur morph into the misconception that he's a highway patrol officer. As he peddles his Big Wheel down the Colorado highway in mirrored sunglasses, he demands that everyone he encounters "Respect Mah Authori-tah!"

The idea of how easily a tiny bit of power snowballs into petty authority run amok was driven home to me recently during a Saturday hike with my friend Carol. It was a beautiful Indian Summer afternoon, and we had arranged to do a seven-mile loop on Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. As the trail we were on led higher up the mountain, we crossed into land owned or managed by the Water District Authority, one of those shadowy agencies that governs -- what ...forests? Alpine lakes? I'm really not sure. But as we walked along a fire road with spectacular views of Richardson Bay and the towers of San Francisco in the distance, Carol suddenly realized that she had left the dog's leash in the car -- and dogs are required to be on leashes on all Water District fire roads.

"That's alright," I reassured her, "we're not likely to run into any rangers up here."

Which meant that immediately a large white truck containing two Water District "rangers" came around the bend and stopped where we stood. A fat man with white hair and a brown uniform of some kind got out and immediately asked Carol for her information. Inexplicably, she gave her real address but not her correct last name or date of birth (I later told her that if you're going to lie about your birthdate, use it as an opportunity to shave a few years off your age, not add them).

The ranger said he'd check her name against a list, and if she'd been warned before, she'd receive a $200 fine. He also told us that we needed to return the way we'd come, but since we'd still be walking on the fire road for a distance he would give us a rope to use for the dog.

"Well, since I'll have a leash, can't we just keep going in this direction until we connect with the trail?" Carol asked, quite reasonably.

The man shook his head. "Oh no. Because then there would be no consequences for your actions," he said solemnly.

"So this is a morality lesson, then," I said, amazed that an elderly man in a cheap brown uniform in the middle of a forest had taken it upon himself to issue a life lesson to two middle-aged adults. He looked at us like he was considering some additional punishment but got back in his truck with his fellow "ranger" and drove off the way we'd come.

That's when it struck me that we didn't have to obey him, and could continue the loop we'd planned. Pulling the dog along by the makeshift leash, we scurried up the road until we got to our trail and made our way down the mountain.

Noah's Lark

Somewhere in Kentucky (where else?) on 800 rolling acres of farmland, plans are being put into place for a $155 million religious theme park called the Ark Encounter.

The showpiece among such cherished biblical icons as the Tower of Babel will be a full-scale model of Noah’s Ark. “The message here,” says project manager Mike Zovath, “is, God’s word is true. There’s a lot of doubt: ‘Could Noah have built a boat this big, could he have put all the animals on the boat?’ Those are questions people all over the country ask.”

What people, I wonder, are asking this? Not people like me, who dismissed the story of Noah's ark as an engaging but unlikely parable some time during childhood. And certainly not, on the other end of the belief spectrum, people like presidential hopeful Michelle Bachmann, who takes the Bible as the spoken word of God and who’s given her life over to Jesus – along with a chance at the White House. I suppose that makes sense, because Bachmann hasn’t demonstrated an affinity for facts of any kind. Stumping in Waterloo, Iowa, she said she was glad to be appearing in the hometown of American film legend John Wayne – when actually it had been the home of scary clown serial killer John Wayne Gacey, who tortured and murdered 33 young men and boys. Yesterday at a rally she opened with a birthday wish for Elvis Presley, and the crowd shouted back that it was actually the anniversary of his death. And then there’s her husband Marcus’ occupation: a flaming repressed homosexual in a shocking pink polo shirt, he runs a Minnesota practice that “prays the gay away” and inflicts untold psychological damage on men forced by society to “go straight.”

Bachmann will be right on board with the Ark project, which Zovath says will feature “old world” details like wooden pegs instead of nails, straight-sawed timbers and two to four thousand stuffed or animatronic animals – all to "demonstrate" that Noah’s ark was an historic reality.

“When you get to walk through the boat and see how big this thing really was, and how many cages were there, and how much room there was for food and water…our hope is people start seeing that this is plausible,” Zovath explained.

Given that there are perhaps 50 million different species of mammals, reptiles, birds and insects, and that Creationists don’t believe any of Noah’s saved creatures could have evolved into our current animal kingdom, a bunch of cages filling a barge will serve only the tiniest, most uninquiring of minds. (Let’s not even try to consider a primative environment that could serve the climactic needs of both penguins and tigers, while preventing the latter from eating the former.)

But expect more cramped, backward insights like these if Bachmann ever actually makes it to the Oval Office, because these days even an atrocity like that is entirely possible. After all, she manages to make a self-serving nut job like Sarah Palin look stable. As Zovath says, “The ark is…really not about creation-evolution, it’s about the authority of the Bible starting with the ark account in Genesis.”

In other words, the Islamic fundamentalists we’ve been warring with for the last decade are not necessarily the biggest threat to our freedoms or way of life. 

Getting Jacked

Here's a revelation: the older a man gets, the more he turns into Jack Lemmon in The Out of Towners (forget about the horrible remake with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn). Or maybe Spencer Tracy, in his last film role in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, when going out for a simple ice cream cone turns into a near-calamity.

What I mean is that simple tasks that you never gave a second thought to suddenly become fraught with obstacles and obfuscation, turning you into the penultimate existential everyman.

Case in point: last week I was filling my gas tank at a station near my home -- Twin Peaks Petroleum, actually, located at 598 Portola Drive. I go there only because it's nearby, and I'm a creature of habit. I knew that my tank was fairly empty but also was aware that there had to be at least a half-gallon of gas left. Imagine my surprise when the dial on the pump rolled over to 10.065 gallons -- because my 2008 Honda Fit holds only ten gallons of gas.

Thinking there must be an error and not having time to fully deal with the issue, I resolved to check this out on my next fill-up. So during the past week I paid careful attention to my mileage, noting that, because I'd been driving mostly freeway miles, I was getting close to 30 mpg and would get 300 miles to the tank. The gas tank light is supposed to go on when there's one gallon left but seems to be actived at about one-and-a-half gallons, so when it turned on at 246 miles, I drove an additional 20 miles, knowing there was at least a gallon left. I returned to Twin Peaks Petroleum and the same pump I'd used last week, where the dial indicated 10.222 gallons (see photographic evidence).

In the past three years I've filled that tank more than 100 times, and even when I've pressed my luck and had only a few molecules of fuel left, it never exceeded ten gallons at any of the dozens of stations I've visited. So I went in to the cashier's office, where I explained to a young Middle-Eastern man that this was the second time in a week this had happened at his station. How did he explain this?

"Maybe you have a leak," he said, looking sheepish and guilty.

"Yeah, maybe the extra gas is in the back seat," I said. "Maybe I'm out here making Molotov cocktails."

I asked to see the manager and was told that the owner was not present. The cashier dutifully wrote down my cell phone number on my receipt and promised that the owner would call me. "Yes, I'd really like to hear what he has to say for himself," I said, "because anyone who fills up with that pump is getting screwed out of about $4 every time. And who knows if the other pumps are miscalibrated, too."

Of course the owner never called me back. But I did file a claim with the California Department of Weights and Measures. Isn't that what Jack Lemmon would have done?

Jingle Jangle Junkies

My downstairs neighbors Tristan and Elle
(I know, but let's get past that) are the kind of young couple I really admire -- they sign a rental agreement and then just do whatever the hell they want with their apartment. They've ripped out the cheap sixties-era pasteboard shelving, installed lighting that activates when you trip the sensors, put in metallic splashback tiles, replaced the nightmarish kitchen linoleum with terracotta tile, and painted an entire room in black chalkboard paint so Tristan can cover the walls with formulas and theorums that have something to do with whatever it is he does for a living. I even heard his footsteps on the roof the other night when he was installing some sort of antenna up there. Sure, they'll never get their deposit back, but in the meantime they're getting the most out of their living space.

So I was talking to someone at one of their cocktail parties one Saturday evening and overheard something that made me like them even more. "What did you say about wind chimes?" I asked Elle over the jumbled noise of music and voices.

"I hate them," she said, then proceeded to tell us how a neighbor had hung a particularly jangly set of chimes on a nearby balcony. "Is there anything more intrusive in a crowded neighborhood like this? I put a note on her car that said 'Please take them down,' and she tore it up and put it on my car."

As a lifelong foe of the imbecilic wind chimes, I could appreciate Elle's dilemma. Sure, if you live in the wilds of the Santa Cruz mountains and you enjoy listening to a metallic cacophony that sounds like the onset of a schizophrenic episode, hang your wind chimes and your Native American dream catchers and your silk-screened gecko banners to your heart's content. But when you live in a densely populated hillside neighborhood in the middle of San Francisco, the wind chime that soothes your simple, babylike mind as you drool your way to sleep is the aural toothache of a hundred neighbors.

"So what did you do?"

"I put a hundred dollar bill in an envelope and slid it under her door. The chimes came down that same day."

Who says kids today don't know how to get things done?

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

I've never had much interest in watching frat boys attach baby alligators to their nipples or detonate Port-O-Potties, so I was only marginally aware of the key players in the Jackass franchise. So when a more obscure cast member named Ryan Dunn --whose most infamous prank, apparently, was cramming a toy automobile up his colon -- fatally crashed his Porsche at an alcohol-fueled 130 mph and claimed the life of his 30-year-old passenger, Zachary Hartwell, it reminded me of a few other people who were unfortunate enough to become cultural footnotes simply because they hitched their wagons to an unstable star.

Late one hot evening in August of 1969, an 18-year-old boy named Steven Parent stopped to visit a casual friend who worked as a caretaker at an estate in the hills above Los Angeles. As he was about to activate the electronic gate to leave the property, he encountered a man who slashed at him with a Bowie knife, cutting the band of his wristwatch, and who then shot him four times in the face and chest. He'd had the incredibly bad luck to stop by the same night as the Manson family, who proceeded to viciously murder eight-months-pregnant actress Sharon Tate, wife of director Roman Polanski, and three others. Parent wasn't carrying identification, so he was initially listed as homocide victim "John Doe" while the vastly more famous victims became part of a media storm. Parent's father, a contractor, complained that his son's murder was treated as an uninteresting detail in the deaths of a prominent actress, a Folger's coffee heiress and a celebrity hairdresser who was the inspiration for Warren Beatty's character in Shampoo.

Here's another one that's just as tragic. Imagine your good friend phones you and insists you meet this incredibly amusing painter she's having an affair with, so you decide to go out to Long Island for a fun weekend of mild bohemian mayhem. The next thing you know you're standing up in the back seat of a 1950 Oldsmobile with a monstrously drunk Jackson Pollock at the wheel, screaming to be let out of the car. That's what happened to poor Edith Metzger, a 25-year-old woman who had managed to escape Nazi Germany but couldn't elude the self-indulgence of a mid-century art star and enfant terrible. The car flipped, crushing her and killing Pollock, while her friend Ruth Kligman survived (she died just last year, 54 years after the tragedy). Thanks a lot, tortured artist.

As for Ryan Dunn, the joke goes: Ryan Dunn died the way he lived -- with car parts up his rectum.

Too soon?