All In...digestion

In a small moment that shows you how the economy is still brutal, consider this: your lead sponsor for the 2008 World Series of Poker was Milwaukee's Best Light. Admittedly, not exactly the brew I'm associating with millions of loose dollars, but on the other hand, it's all good for desperate gambling and soul-crushing defeat.

This year, it's... beef jerky.

No, seriously.

I'm just hoping they make the bracelet winners choke down some celebratory jerky when they get the cashish.

And the last people in American to have money for a brand marketing campaign, please turn out the lights...

Strangely Recyclable

Is the head kept hot, and the feet cold?

Blogrolling Will Fight, Scream, Pinch Nipples, and Stop Crime

Sign of the Apocalypse #3006 -- guys running around in superhero outfits for real, working to stop crime. Call me when you get costumed adversaries, boys, so that I know when I've got even bigger losers to mock...

Howard Eskin is now pinching nipples. No, wait, actually worse: stealing them. And dressing up as a Star Trek nerd. Oddly, it doesn't really change the way I feel about him.

Nick Underhill does the Manny thing better than most.

Your hero and mine, with, QUITE FRANKLY, the most important site on the Web. Everything he blogs is important! (And it must be, considering he's posted five times in the last six weeks.)

And finally, presented without undue comment, the top-ranked story on Ballhype this fine day. Hockey Fan sure does like it when the guys with the most pads throw down. Every mention has a video clip, and the blogger feels much shame.

Don't Hate The Pasta Dude

Dominos Pasta DUDE!


Thirty second of surreality from a bygone era. I especially like the whitest kid ever informing us that this is tight. (H/t, Deadspin/Leitch)

205 Drop: Top 11 Questions After Watching The NBA Playoffs This Weekend

Today's drop over at Editor Scrap's House Of Tits (admittedly, a less useful URL than what he uses) contains at least 30% new material from the omnibus NBA posts you've scrolled over this week, and it's short, so by all means, go and click. But I'm going to poach the #1 question here for a little more grist for the bloghole. (Oh, and longtime site readers know there's an extra Easter egg moment in the names of the photos. Today's is very nice for people who have suffered through enough Philadelphia media, and amuses me like no end when it creates site traffic for searches like Pervert Howard Eskin. But I digress.)

1) Why does Burger King want to sell kids' meals with cardboard asses?

There are, of course, reasons for this. Brand marketers want to do anything that gets them free impressions, of which both this post and the 205 drop are guilty, guilty, guilty. Whenever you can get people scolding you in public, that's almost always a plus in the long run, as it gets more young eyes thinking cool things about you. And finally and most regrettably, what they are doing with this campaign is perfectly in the wheelhouse of something that's made money in this country for my whole damn life: making us all think and buy (buy, buy, buy) like we're teenagers.

What is grafting sex on top of Spongebob, really, but a mocking teenage-style graffiti, maybe in a notebook or a school desk? What is adding tits and ass where they don't belong, but a nodding snigger to the back of the room?

I've got daughters, nine and three, and the speed in which people want my kids to grow up is astonishing, of course... but only to a certain point. If you get them to think about things to the point where they see the flim-flam show going on (and that's not a constant thing, but hopefully she's a little more aware of the con game than most), I think you're doing your job as a parent... rather than, say, keeping them totally isolated from this nonsense.

But there is, finally, this. I don't want my kids to see the ads that come on during my games (not that I really want to watch them either, but that's another matter). So on a very easy level, I don't really want my kids to watch games with me. So they don't. Despite liking Spongebob, and Burger King, and having parents that are not perfect when it comes to nutritional choices, and having a franchise within a mile of the house with a big damn Spongebob on the top of it that my youngest waves at when we drive by...

Well, we drive by. Nice brand marketing job there, asshats.

And Now, A Word From Our Content Provider

To keep me in gumball money, I've added another ad provider to the mix here at the site, because I just haven't been exploiting you people enough. ('m not going down the pop-up and screen takeover path, mostly because no one's made me an... um, because I feel it would be a bad user experience. Yeah, that's it.

Now, go click on some ads, buy some T-shirts and just plain give me your money via the Paypal button, because if you don't, I'm going to hold my breath for a really long time, then blog about it. And you'd rather see me blog about sports, right?

And now a word from our sponsor

When I watch the following ad, I'm reminded in a powerful way of the Bobby Hoying Era in Philadelphia. And yet, this time, it's kinda funny!

These networks and their filty, filthy ads

The day job salmonella peanut butter keeps mixing with the melted Kit Kat blog hobby, kids. From an industry PR news letter...

Common Sense Media recently released a study on the content of ads shown during NFL broadcasts. The report, Broadcast Dysfunction: Sex, Violence, Alcohol and the NFL, reviewed nearly 60 games, more than 180 hours of coverage, watched nearly 6,000 commercials and concluded that "it was impossible to watch a single game without coming up against sex, violence, or Viagra."

The researchers reviewed 57 pro football games and

• Evaluated 5778 ads and promos

• Found 519 ads and promos with violence

• Saw 242 violent promos for network programs

• Found 80 ads and promos with sexuality

• Discovered 26 which were sexual promos for network programs

• Viewed 300 ads and promos with alcohol

Now, a few points.

> Only a 4 to 1 split for liquor over sex? Dammit, I feel cheated. Whenever I get to three drinks, sex is happening. With something.

> By the numbers, less than 10% of the ads has violence. See, doesn't that feel better than the gross count? It's even nicer when you realize that 283 of those ads had Liam Neeson's daughter getting Taken. Between her and that contagion green-screen thing from earlier in the season, this was clearly the year where horror was equated to rug burn. As an exercise, the reader is asked to ponder how this reflects on the society as we near the 10-year-mark of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. And now, back to our program.

> Only 26 ads for sex in network program ads? No wonder the networks are failing. And how are they counting these, really? Because I'm pretty sure that you can get an ad with sex, violence and alcohol in it, even if it's just a particularly on-target beer ad, or a local spot in the Phoenix market for a weekend getaway to Kurt Warner's Jebus Jamboree. (Ask for Brenda. She goes farther.)

And now, on to the really awful part, especially after that last bit of casual libel and blasphemy... the god-squadders are right.

As many of you are aware, the Shooter Family is blessed with daughters who, for the most part, leave Dad the hell alone when football is on, because they are well aware that they ruin the luck. (That Cardinals drive in the fourth quarter of the NFC Championship? I'm throwing the eldest under the bus for that one.) But independent of their mystical ability, learned during all of those secret Female Only Meetings, to cause my team to lose in the clutch, there's this... I'm really, really relieved to not have to explain the ads to them.

And it's all, well, silly.

We have the technology to skip ads. We also have the technology to narrowcast them so that my local cable provider can get in the fun with lucrative local spots.

So why, really, should every household see the same ads?

I'm the kind of guy who hated SUVs from the word go. My cars are usually low to the ground and sporty, which means that they are in the perfect position to get blinded by those storm trooper lights. And for years now, SUV and truck manufacturers have been paying ludicrous rates to tell me about their products that I will never, ever buy.

If I had the ability to choose my ads -- and, perhaps, even just pay extra to do without them at all -- I'm taking it. The NFL gets a more effective advertising environment. My kids get to watch the games with their dad. Meathead teens get nothing but crotch shot beer ads. Everybody wins.

Everybody, that is, except for the ad agencies who get a 15% agency cut on the media buy, and the big networks that sell inefficiencies for a hefty markup...

Backstage

(Lead blogger DMtShooter has been interrupted in his daily filling of the bloghole by a notice that an advertiser is less than pleased with their FTT placement. He has been informed of this by a site toady.)

Shooter: Kick your f!@#$%^' ass!

Site contributor Tracer Bullet: Shooter, Shooter...

Shooter (to toady): I want you off this f!@#$%^' blog, you prick!

Bullet: Shooter...

Toady: I'm sorry.

Shooter: No, don't just be sorry, THINK for one f!@#$%^' second! What the f!@# you doing? Are you a professional or not?

Bullet: Shooter, Shooter.

Toady: Yes, I am.

Shooter: Do I f!@#$%^' go to your blog and rip down...

Bullet: Shooter, Shooter, Shooter...

Shooter: No, shut the f!@# up Bullet...

Bullet: Come on.

Shooter: No! NO!

Bullet: We can talk about it. Come on!

Shooter: Don't shut me up!

Bullet: I'm not shutting you up.

Shooter: Am I gonna walk around and rip your f!@#$%%' ads down...

Toady: No, I...

Shooter: In the middle of a recession? Then why the f!@# are you doing this now? Ah, duh-duh, duh, duh, like this in the email. What the f!@# is it with you? What don't you f!@#$%^' understand? You got ANY f!@#$%^' idear...

Today: No, no, no...

Shooter: About "Hey, it's f!@#$%^' idiotic!" having somebody walkin' up behind Bullet n the middle of the f!@#$%^' POST! GIMMEE A F!@#$%^' ANSWER!

(Silence)

Shooter: Seriously man, you and me, we're f!@#$%^' DONE professionally. F!@#$%^' ass.

Blogrolling: Fear The Steamy Swede

The Onion Sports Network debuts. I am ready for the intense heat of The Final Sweat... and deeply covet their production values. It looks like they took over the Lemur.


Tom Coughlin Retires From Family To Spend More Time With Team

Next link is behind a firewall, so let me just clip the relevant bits here.

Google's global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer and three other executives are expected to appear in court in Milan on Tuesday to face criminal charges stemming from an offensive video uploaded to the company's site.

Fleischer and the other company officials are accused of criminal defamation and failing to control personal data, according to the International Association of Privacy Professionals. The executives face a maximum penalty of three years in jail.

The case stems from a 2006 incident in which a high school student posted a three-minute clip of himself and three others bullying a 17-year-old with Down syndrome. The clip, which went live in September, was taken down Nov. 7, within 24 hours of Google receiving complaints about it.

Consequently, for the health and safety of the blog, I'd like everyone from Italy to close their browser now, since your government is, um, completely freaking batshit. Can't you people get to work on hanging the prosecutor from his heels in the public square?

"Slapshot" is being remade, not as a straight to video sequel that can be easily ignored, but as a big budget monstrosity that Variety compares, favorably, to that Adam Sandler turdmake of "The Longest Yard." Just kill yourselves already. Please. For the children.

NESW is all over Gatorade's remake of "Monty Python and the Knights of the Round Table." This moves a sports drink.... how?

Prophet Fighting gave some love to a recent post of ours, so here's the give back. If you're down with the fisticuffs, this should be on your short list, and their profile of the late great Ingemar Johansson was nails. Ah, for the day when the world feared big Swedes.

Blogrolling: Paying the rent with skunky beer

The Hater Nation roasts Tony Dungy. It's crude, rude, and necessary on many levels.

The Moondog weighs in on how Congress shouldn't get involved in a college football playoff in a reasonable, though chalk, assessment of the situation is this... this is the *perfect* situation for Congressional intervention.

It's something with bipartisan support, since no one in their right mind wants to defend this abominable system. Even the statheads hate the BCS, because it promotes bad sportsmanship and takes so much control of the situation away from the individual teams. (Honestly, when you schedule a well-regarded opponent and beat them so badly that they mail in the rest of the year and wind up being seen as much worse than they were supposed to be... how is that your fault?) Colleges, of course, receive some aid, in the form of students getting Pell grants and local institutions getting help and/or clearance for construction and expansion efforts. So there's influence there, too. And since the athletics department is such a cesspool of corruption as it works as a de facto minor league / expansion system for all of the parts of the country that don't get enough major-league action to satisfy the market, it's rife with vulnerability for oversight.

Frankly, I'm a little amazed that the system hasn't been taken down before.

So go, Congress Critters, and afflict these comfortable parasites. Because government oversight is, really, akin to having a labor union show up in your industry. Independent of the merits or vices of the individual union or action... if you have one, you probably did something to deserve it.

So, Cub Fan, the most powerful man in the Free World prefers your rival, to the point where he's grilling the troops. Can you use this to crank up more self-pity?

Pay that rent, John "Joey Knish" Turturro. You're doing the Lord's work.

Cardinal Fan goes down for the McNabb lawn burning. Gents were 28 and 37, and might not have even been drunk. This will do wonders for Arizona Person's PR, especially seeing how the state still doesn't recognize the Martin Luther King holiday. Oh, and the fact that burning a guy's lawn with gas is a *misdemeanor* will, I'm sure, make sure that no one ever does this again.



And finally, one of my favorite songs ever. First time I've seen it as a solo acoustic piece, rather than with the full Golden Palominos production. And here's a fun fact... the French word for orgasm loosely translates to "the little death", or, perhaps, suicide. (Yes, I am goading certain members of the audience. Listen to the song anyway; Carson's fantastic.)

Blogrolling Without Relevance

Bill Baer at Baseball Daily Digest doesn't care about baseball's Hall of Fame anymore. It's a decent read, but the bigger question is this... why should anyone care about any sport's Hall of Fame? Quick, name me the best eligible NFL player who isn't in. Or the best NBA guy. (Hell, most of you won't even be able to tell me where the latter is located -- and by the way, NBA, feel free to throw Springfield under the bus and put it in New York already. There's no rule that your sport's hall has to be in some bucolic little town; it's not hitting the same audience.) Anyway, go give it a read.

I have readers (honest!) who think the blog should cover the NHL more. You know what the real trouble is? I just haven't been paying enough attention to the hockey lines. No, seriously, there are NHL Handicappers, lots of them, with over/under bets that seem to go all the way from 5.5 to 6.0 goals per game. Sadly, there's no over/under on how many defensive "Hockey is great! You just haven't given it a chance!"e-mails I'll get from daring to question the sanity of hockey over/under lines...

The great David Roth previews Steelers-Ravens in a column that, I'm sure, is the only one of its kind to use the word "doofily." I approve with the whole of my heart.



And finally, this fairly humorous long form ad from Kobe Bryant and Nike; I especially like the pointless horse. Though, given Mr. Bryant's past history, a broken ankle is not the body part I'd be worried about...

Top 10 NFL Playoff Ad Questions

10. If Sprint is so concerned about the economy that they had to film their CEO in black and white, why are they advertising at all?

9. If I'm supposed to eat at Subway to lose weight, why are all my buttons exploding off my pants?

8. Aren't you glad that people who got a Lexus this Christmas were also irredeemable douchebags as children?

7. Why does Dodge think my truck buying decisions are made solely by which make and model works best in explosions?

6. Is a gasbag making pictures that only he and his friends can see, combined with the fact their beverage is in fact drinkable, really a good enough motivation to allow Bud Light inside your body?

5. Is anyone else wildly amused by the fact that Prilosec threw old spokesman Brett Favre under the bus for some nameless eyesore?

4. How did Burger King make McDonald's "food" for all of these unfortunate third world people that it "fed" in their taste test, and shouldn't this kind of thing be stopped by international law?

3. How does Verizon make enough money to pay not just the jerkoff engineer, but also the dozens of tools in matching uniforms that follow him around for no good reason at all?

2. It's nice that Hyundai is willing to let me return the car if I lose my income, but what about the loss of tail from, well, driving a Hyundai?

1. Is there anything on God's green earth that a Manning won't sell?

A few questions for NFL advertisers

> When Roger Ebert calls a movie "the best in the 'Mummy' series", do you suspect that he was being less than straight forward?

> Why does the only African American Packer fan bleed paint?

> I understand that NFL game coverage has a contractual obligation to show fans dressed in costume, but why do they need to be in commercials now?

> How much gold does Beyonce Knowles have to suck until she overcomes her self-esteem issues?

> What was the Jane Seymour media buyer high on?

> Did anyone else miss, kind of in a "Stockholm Syndrome" way, the Toyota "Save By Zero" and DirecTV "Chevy Chase" ads today, and do you think their absence has anything to do with the Eagles' resurgence?

> Do people really buy cars if they have different colored tags on them, if Denis Leary does some of his usual schtick, if it's got a big bow on it, or if it's being compared to some noxious childhood memory?

> Has anyone ever made a purchase decision based on which company has provided the blimp coverage?

> Does the NFL Network only broadcast on phones?

> Has anyone ever bought their own electric razor, or have they all been gifts?

Why Andy Reid Eats

THE MEAT IS TALKING TO HIM. MUST.... STOP..... THE MEAT.....

Beat Your Wife Over Bad Coffee

Or, failing that, make perform degrading hand signals over her head. IT'S A CRIME, YOU WHORE! I'LL KILL YOU IF YOUR COFFEE DOESN'T IMPROVE!

We Hate Expensive

Does this make you want to buy some piece of consumer electronics? It might to the Germans, but then again, they also probably got into that creepy Heineken Keg Girl thing from a year ago. (The blog title is their tag line, translated.) Perhaps if Futuristic Borgish Chick is available. There's always things around the house to do...

And Now For Something Completely Australian

According to Ad Age, 90% of women name their plumbing. Which is only slightly more astounding than this ad, really. (The Shooter Wife, for the record, calls it "Property of My Sovereign Patriarch and Master.")

MLB should put his logo on the bases, too

WASHINGTON (AdAge.com) -- Major League Baseball has moved back the scheduled start time of any game 6 of the World Series so Fox can also air the half hour Barack Obama spot on Oct. 29.

A network spokeswoman confirmed the buy and said MLB had agreed to the network's request for the delay.

Fox now joins CBS and NBC in airing the half hour program, whose content the Obama campaign has declined to describe. The decision means that the Obama campaign is now spending close to $3 million to air the program from 8 to 8:30 p.m. that night on at least three networks. ABC didn't immediately return a message asking whether it too has now agreed to a buy, a move which would create an unprecedented roadblock of the nation's biggest commercial networks.

What's notable here, really, is that Barack Obama seems to be the last company in America to have money to spend on ads.

Say it with me, folks... Land. Slide. Land. Slide. Land. Slide...

The Economy of the Big Ten Network

So today I watched the Iowa-Iowa State game, broadcast nationwide on the Big Ten(+1) Network. I couldn't help but notice a pattern to the commercials:

(1) At least a half-dozen ads for the University of Iowa. None for Iowa State.

(2) At least four ads for the Big Ten itself.

(3) At least four PSAs from the Ad Council promoting a web site to tell parents how to use the V-chip in their televisions.

(4) At least four repeats of a fairly long ad for a mail-order over-the-door chin-up bar.

This high a proportion of house ads, during what SHOULD be the network's top programming slot--noon to 3PM on a football Saturday--is I think rather surprising.

Conclusion: (almost) No One Is Paying For Ads On The Big Ten(+1) Network.