Not according to the jingle. Those folks forgot the last “s.” Really. They sing “one eight-hundred em ay tee tee arr-eee esssss” repeatedly.

You’d think a jingle writer would get it right. I mean, the company name is right in front of him isn’t it? On his desk, with the proposal and what the company wants.

“1-800-Mattress wants their phone number included three times, and the company name twice”, for example. But nope. He was clueless, and the end result is a commercial with the misspelled jingle and a note below the phone number.

“Drop the last S for savings.”

I can’t make this shit up.

Really. I’ve got a picture of it, though the quality is rather poor, since it was taken at night and the bumper sticker was suffering under my headlights. I’ll see if I can manage to upload it though after fixing the image to be NOT horrible.

Still, it wasn’t exactly hard to recreate from the reference photo. And it’s not like teabaggers have ever been accused of having good layouts in signs and stickers.

I say this because I keep seeing people writing U-Tube instead of YouTube or Youtube. Or even youtube.

Not only are we too lazy to type the letters “yo”, which I find astounding, we’re adding components. There’s no hyphen in YouTube. See? It’s right there. Except it’s not.

So you come out to a one keystroke difference, AND the added keystroke is one outside the normal range, so it’s one you end up thinking about or making a more deliberate motion toward. It takes longer to type U-Tube than YouTube.

And the proof is here. Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer still have careers. After the generally bad Date Movie, followed by the very bad Epic Movie, 2008 got a double dose of shit in the form of Meet the Spartans and Disaster movie. Most people didn’t seem to be aware of how bad the former would be, tricked by the movement away from the naming convention, though as a firsthand witness via video store, everyone over 14 realized it was an absolute shitpile. Disaster movie flopped, rightfully so, as people now understood how bad it would be.

Friedberg and Seltzer have 3 of IMDB’s bottom 100, and it’s about to become four. I’d say they’re the Ed Wood of parody, but a bad movie that takes itself seriously can be enjoyed for the lack of quality and heartily mocked. A bad comedy has to fight to be heard over the horrible jokes, and they drag the whole thing down. Even the Mystery Science Theatre treatment can’t make it worth the time. As Tim and Eric prove every show (intentionally, so they claim), you can’t tell good jokes over bad jokes. The pacing falls, the distraction kills it all. A bad joke can be used as a joke, but only when it’s lampshaded. You might as well perform Shakespeare in front of Grey’s Anatomy.

Just as Grey’s Anatomy can be summarized per episode easily (Tub soliloquy, medical thing, dramatic surprise, someone has sex, someone cries about having had sex the week before, the patient dies or routine operation goes horribly wrong in a way that doesn’t make sense, tub soliloquy), Friedberg and Seltzer can be predicted. All you have to do is watch trailers for big name movies (that’s all they do, as they’ve admitted), throw some parts together, add some extreme violence, and between points ripped from movie trailers, add random celebrities. Oh, and make sure to assume your audience is incredibly stupid (actually, this might be a good idea for the duo) by announcing specifically who and what every single reference is to. Name every character, celebrity, pop culture reference shoved in, and object in the background. Otherwise they won’t get it.

tl;dr, fuck Regency Enterprises and 20th Century Fox.

Yes, that’s a real sentence fragment spoken on my local Fox Affiliate. “When cougars die young, what happens to their men?”

First off, CAN cougars even die young? I thought the point was that you were, at minimum, middle age, if not old.

Second, well, their men are in their 20s or so. So either they get jobs or they get new cougars.

The real question is what happens when cougars die old or dump their now 30 year old man? Now that’s a guy to worry about.

I’ve been pointed to a new “social network” called Glogster recently. It’s a site about making multimedia posters.

Do you remember when Facebook opened up to everyone? How we all said “Oh my god, finally. It’s like someone took the actual good parts of Myspace and did something with them”?

This is the opposite. Glogster rounded up all the worst parts of Myspace, the obnoxious colors, garish backgrounds, unreadable text, diatribes written in comic sans, autoplaying sounds and videos, without anything else. It’s all glogs (as they call them), all the time. Graphic. Blog.

It’s CS4 for morons.

These are the first few glogs I ran into, just hitting the “next” button.

http://cwalk3wayboypedro.glogster.com/a-i-g-b-g/ Oh god, it burns.

http://lightningthieffan17.glogster.com/my-happily-ever-after/ Emoteen is emo.

http://saveyourbreath.glogster.com/schizophrenia-brokencyde/ See above, now with more poetry and egomania.

Everything on this site is Flash based. The images, the text, the sound, the video. One hundred percent bad Flash.

The thing that amazes me most is I’ve NEVER heard of this site in the three years it’s been up. I know I don’t see everything on the net, but this is so bad, and a social network so artificial that word of it hasn’t even spread to Encyclopedia Dramatica. Think about THAT for a minute.

There’s lots of ways to rent textbooks, and hopefully more digital options, because seriously, Coursesmart.com is awful. The online version contains intrusive watermarks and horrid proprietary formatting. You can’t copy and paste normally, when you use the copy/paste commands on the interface there’s random spaces inserted in the text, you can only print 10 pages at time, and when you click “next page” you end up at the bottom of the next page rather than the top.

To get an offline version of the book you have to use proprietary software and formats once again. Watermarked, time-limited PDFs are neither complex nor expensive to automate, so why stick with the shitsoft?

Oh, and there’s this failure of the digital medium. “Actual size” doesn’t work well particularly when you can zoom in and out of text and images. So, which is right?

Neither! Or either! Or both, if you change the zoom level and your resolution and the size of your monitor works for the demonstration!

I’m sure that’s who’s to blame, because once again, a product has an incredibly stupid name. “Crest 3D White Toothpaste.” Because, as we all know, toothpaste, teeth, and smiles are two dimensional. Life is in fact a two dimensional plane, we live in Flatland and our women are attractive but dangerous line segments.

Fucking hell, man, where do these “experts” graduate from, and why do people believe them?

Here’s another recent example. You probably don’t eat it, but you’re familiar with Vegemite I’m sure. Everyone is. So when a new version was created, mixed with cream cheese and a milder flavor, Kraft hired “marketing experts” to come up with a new name.

They came up with iSnack.

Do these people have a single original thought in their heads, or do they just clone anything they saw the name of? I’m pretty sure it’s the latter, because once in a while you see an ad series produced by a startup company that’s original and effective, then you see 500 copies of it.

Let me say it again. iSnack. Next up, iSnack 3D 2.0, just you watch.

Fuck.

Me? A big ol’ nerd slacker? Work at Hollywood Video? Oh yeah. That was the majority of the clerks at that chain, in fact. Slacker nerds who’d watch Justice League and The Lion King on the TV.

Because the company screwed us all over by withholding raises, constantly cutting hours, etc., two main things happened. One, people stole a lot of stuff. Mostly concessions, the irony being that if they paid us the extra dollar an hour they were supposed to, we’d have just bought the drinks. But they didn’t, and they never refilled the water cooler, so we just took them.

Second, we screwed off all the time. We made shit, messed with shit, and watched a lot of DVDs instead of cleaning.

One night, my friend Haru and I were bored and because the district manager was coming around a lot lately, we were limited on our viewing options. The official rule was nothing over PG, and nothing that’s not animated. We’d already seen enough Pokemon and had been watching Lilo and Stitch anyway, but we felt like a change.

“Hahaha, dude, look! Garfield and Friends! We should totally ironically watch this”, I declared. “Oh wow, yeah!” says Haru.

See, here’s the thing. As a kid, I really liked Garfield. Maybe it’s because I had the older collections, the ones with Lyman and Jon’s sad, sad life, and where Garfield was an exceptionally fat fuck who didn’t even stand on two legs. But I knew in retrospect, it was pretty bad. At least the show was. Hit or miss with the comics, I’ll say, to be nice and because hey, sometimes they were funny. Not so much these days.

And we made a sport of bad movies and TV there, because sometimes that’s all we had to watch.

Haru and I both ended up physically ill that night, so much so we almost had to close the store early. It started around 10-15 minutes in, just after one segment of Garfield and Friends followed by one US Acres. We turned it off, I got a pizza from the Little Caesar’s in the shopping center, and we were okay. Nobody else who came in that night got sick, before or after, even other employees who hung around a while, as we were all wont to do because it was a fun place when you’re not working.

Just the two of us, watchers of Garfield.

The lesson we learned is that TV really can be bad for you, but it’s the quality, not the quantity.

I was on the quick recall team (shocking, right?), and we were involved in a national tournament which combined quiz team aspects and future problem solving teams, the combined score determining the winner. In the first round, some serious shenanigans occured.

Future problem solving was a subjective event, a short presentation based on a prompt given with about 30 minutes prep time. Teams were scored in a wide amount of categories from one to three, with all twos being considered a very good score. Two judges on each side score the teams, averaging 15 points out of 30 total, if memory serves. And it may not, but that’s not important to the story anyway.

What does matter is that the total was not insignificant, enough so that the FPS team could easily be 1/3rd to 1/2 of the score total.

As you can guess, this honest judging wasn’t. The first round of scores came in, the team on my side getting 16 from our judges, 11 from the other judges. An oddly large gap, but nothing world-shattering. The other team’s scores came in. 15 from our judges, 29 from theirs. Threes, any of them, were very rare. So when the total score was 9 threes and a two, something obviously was wrong. So wrong that the other team was able to win by a single point.

The national association putting the event on decided the ruling would stand, but that because of this a new system would be implemented. The students, generally the best and the brightest of the schools, and usually the nerdiest, all agreed. Impartial judges should be picked, one from the places hosting the competitors (often the rounds were done by satellite, in a Kinko’s or such), one from the association. Three judges, all who should be impartial as they have no vested interest, and even if they were inexperienced in the judging, they’d be inexperienced in a fair way.

That was rejected.

Instead, the suggestion of my team’s coach, a woman the parents recognized for being anywhere from stupid to “fucking crazy,” was accepted. Her solution? Four judges per team. Because clearly four could never be biased where two are, certainly, right? And since they proportionally raised the scores, it could never become 60-30.

And thus, at the age of 12, I realized even the people we’re paying to be smart aren’t always going to be.