I'm at a loss to explain the advertising acumen behind the brilliant new Ford Motors campaign slogan: "If you haven't looked at Ford lately... look again." So, what you're saying is, "Our cars over the last twenty or thirty years have really sucked, and we know that any sane person would have no reason to patronize our sucky company, but it's probably been so long since you've even considered us an option, maybe you've forgotten how bad we suck and are ready to check out our same substandard product." This is the worst idea I've heard since... since the Pinto.

Or the ever-so-unsteady Bronco II...

Let's hope this isn't the big move Ford is making after firing their CEO in the wake if the Firestone tire disaster. If the website of Ford's advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, is any indication, things may only be getting worse.

"Hi, I'm William Clay Ford, Jr. and I'm beggin you to take this piece of shit Ford off my hands. What, do you want to give money to the Japs or the Krauts? Be a fuckin' American and buy one of my cars. Every dollar you spend on those superior foreign cars is a dollar for the Taliban or some other terrorist group that will just end up bombing your home or adding your virgin daughter to a its harem. So, buy a Ford... unless you love terrorism. Thanks."

Okay, I'm a complete geek, but I was watching C-SPAN a couple weeks ago--well, I was flipping by C-SPAN a couple weeks ago (I'm not that geeky), and I ran across what appeared to be a well orchestrated Saturday Night Live skit. British blowhards in all manner or stuffy dress were sitting in a gallery with constipated looks on their faces, booing and frowning. Suddenly the camera cut to Prime Minster, Tony Blair, who stood and read from a great book something about the trash pick-up in Ulster. A man with a three-piece suit and broken capillaries throughout his face popped up out of the crowd and demanded the Prime Minster recognize the mail carriers and their dedication to the delivery of parcels in the UK. Blair stood and declared that he recognized the great work of these people and their never-ending patriotism.

Suddenly a man with a James Bond accent stood up and asked Blair some impossible question (impossible in that it was unanswerable) about Britain's involvement in the Iraqi situation with the US. Boos rang out, and a bunch of "bo-bo!s" and harrumphing ensued. Blair stood up and wriggled out of the award situation, drowned out by the peanut gallery.

It took me a few minutes to realize that neither Chris Kattan nor Darrell Hammond was in the room. This shit was for real! This was the best C-SPAN show ever! Well, that's not saying much, but... I was just amazed at how well scripted the thing was. Blair was so good playing the Prime Minister, and the Scottish guy had the brogue down to a science. The haughty man in the checked jacket complaining about the treatment of tea-takers in the suburbs of London was especially moving. I loved the drunken, working-class woman with the cock-eyed haircut and the dowdy dress telling the Prime Minister that he needed to stand up and recognize the contribution of the Cheese Union in Southern Lancashire. I love that he did just that.

This was nothing like the US Congress with their filibusters and their sleepy ancient Southern Klan members. This was the House of Commons; a fun place where you're allowed to hiss and yell of somebody says something you don't like. You're allowed to grill the leader of your country, and needle him with stupid questions and lame tirades about rubbish pick-up. This was the best thing I've ever seen having to do with Democratic government. This was politics at its best. This was Prime Minster's Questions. Go check out some clips from past shows, and you'll be hooked. It's hysterical.

I'm just trying to imagine Bush going through this rigorous grilling. I think it would go something like this:

TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE

So I bit the bullet and actually attended a play. Granted, it wasn't one of those Andrew Lloyd Webber, Broadway pieces of crap with singing and prancing and flying and shit. There were no elaborate costumes, dudes in Kabuki makeup or dudes in tights. There was a bit of dancing, but it was just some wacky eighty-year-old-guy-in-a-cardigan kind of thing. None of the lines were delivered in rhyming meter or bellowed at the audience in operatic Italian. Nope, the play was what a play is supposed to be: a couple guys on stage acting out a script written without a thought as to how they were gonna jam a five minute musical interlude in between battles of the French Armada or dancing Puerto Rican gangs.

I know Tuesdays With Morrie was originally a book, and then a television movie, but I managed to be one of six people on the planet Earth (including Freddy Prinze Jr., Britney Spears, Anna Kournikova, Hitler and that retarded kid Corky from Life Goes On) who missed the whole Mitch Albom phenomenon. I always thought he was the little prick from The Sports Reporters, not some sensitive soul who gave up a couple months of his busy life to hang out with a dying professor. Now he's a man who has made millions selling his story about being a sensitive soul to the masses. And here's the proof (although he probably made sixty bucks and change on the off-Broadway play part of the deal):

The funny thing about the play is the casting choice they made for Mitch himself. The guy is a midget (sorry, little person) with a bad haircut and a serious Napoleon complex (or, as we called it in college, a broadcast journalist complex).

So, they get the six-foot-one Jon Tenney to play him. The guy could fit the real Mitch in one of his legs, and has probably had pimples more attractive. He managed to imitate the awful Boston accent pretty well, but there was no fooling us that he was not the loser in the social department Albom must have been (despite his claims in the play that he got laid in college--for the first time). Here he is with his wife, Teri Hatcher:

Anyway, I won't pretend to know anything about the theater, but I did take quite a few English classes in both high school and college in which we read classic and experimental plays from throughout playdom. Amazingly none of these had singing and crap, but... It would be especially stupid of me to review this play given that it has now closed (we saw the second-to-last performance), but I'll say that it has inspired me to try to get out and get some more culture in the near future. Yeah, it's not the first play I've ever seen, but it's the first I've seen in quite a while. Was it great? No. Did it make some interesting points about life, death and the fact it's great to write autobiographical material in which you make yourself look like the world's most selfless person? Sure it did.

Of course, it would make things a whole lot easier on all of us if the damn tickets weren't $65 a piece. And this is off Broadway. It was sad that on a Saturday night this play couldn't even fill the place. Time for a wake-up call: lower ticket prices and maybe somebody besides sheiks and Kennedys could afford to watch your stupid plays!

One more note: it's really hard to keep your shite together when two guys tell each other they love each other (in a father/son kind of way) while sobbing and hugging and dying.

I fuckin' hate snow. This is a recent phenomenon. I used to love snow. Growing up in a warm weather state, snow was never a hindrance or something heavy that had to be shoveled off my walk. Snow was something I only saw when I was shooshing down slopes in one of many awesome ski resorts like Heavenly, Mammoth, Alta, Solitude, Park City, and Snowbird. I even enjoyed the snow while being brought down in a toboggan after tearing knee ligaments at this crappy ski "resort" when I was in fourth grade (or maybe it was this one). Point being, snow is fun when it's an activity, but a complete fucking nightmare when you have to deal with it in your everyday life. I don't know how you East Coast freaks handle it.

Granted, I lived through the Blizzard of '96 in Manhattan (and the Superstorm of '93 in Syracuse), but this recent stuff is completely insane and annoying. Why am I so put out? Because I have to shovel my own shit now.

There's no super in his mesh shirt with a cigarette dangling from his mouth mumbling in Spanish about how he never should have moved from The Dominican Republic to shovel snow for stupid Upper East Side kids and their dumb poodles. Now I get to shovel this stuff myself, while buried up to my knees and sweating and itching in my wool sweater. I'm starting to understand how healthy 30-year-old guys have heart attacks in their driveways while lifting the white stuff and end up looking like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining. The thing that pisses me off more than anything is that there's been like two total inches of snow between '96 and '02, and only now do I move to a place with no super, a lot of sidewalk and neighbors who actually give a shit whether or not their walkways are clear. It almost makes me miss macro-apartment living.

THE BLOGGER BASH

Don't ask me why, but I went incognito to The 14th Annual Big Apple Blogger Bash last night. Well, incognito in the sense that everyone else had nametags and I walked around sans identifier, and only introduced myself using my first name (kinda like Roseanne or Madonna). When asked if I had a blog, I told the honest to God truth--and looked the person straight in the eye--when denying having anything even resembling a blog (whatever that is, my expression said). I was there to support my buddy Paul in his quest to find NYC's hottest blogger. I saw right away that this was going to be a tough job.

Let's back up, though, shall we? I was a little wary about going to this thing to begin with, and my fears were only amplified when I showed up to the bar and my chaperone was nowhere to be seen. I looked around wondering what a blogger looked like. I always imagined your typical blogger to be swathed head-to-toe in kitty clothes, or maybe donning a spiffy Deep Space Nine uniform. Honestly, I had no idea what to expect, but I knew I was scared. Then, I got my first look at a real, genuine blogger! Unfortunately he approached and asked me if I was Aaron (I assume this is the Aaron to whom he was referring.) I nicely informed this little blogger man that I wasn't Aaron and that I'm sure his blog-date would be there soon. He took his seat, and I looked for a corner in which to hide.

My tour guide to this twisted little land of criminally obsessive typers finally showed up and escorted me into the side room that was filled with a strange breed of sticker-bearing minglers. I passed on the tag and sidled up next to what appeared to be a group of small effete Asian men. They were fiddling with what looked like the most expensive digital camera ever produced on this Earth, and chirping about blogginess (to coin a phrase). My escort decided this was the time to drop the "I'm just looking for the elusive hot chick blogger" line. He then introduced me as the man who was going to baby-sit him in his inebriation and disallow any after-hour canoodling of any non-humanoid creatures. The cold wind blowing through the bar at that point had nothing to do with the fact another emo kid in horn-rims had joined the crowd from frosty 9th Avenue...

Needless to say, it seemed it was time to move on to some folks with a little better sense of humor. I literally turned and ran into a guy who has the same job I did in a different division of Random House. This threw off my whole game. It was like running into your boss while exiting a Hooters in Wichita. You know, it's not as if you're doing anything wrong by being there, but it's kind of hard to explain why you're walking out of a misogynistic wing joint in the middle of city you have no business being in.

As it turns out, I only spoke to one other blogger in my short time there, and she (despite being younger than the James Worthy t-shirt to which I often refer) was a pleasant, charismatic character. I elected to skip talking to the few Lisa Loeb look-alikes and UUTV rejects to concentrate all my efforts on not bursting into tears at the humanity of it all. Seriously, I wish I had the stamina to keep up some sort of daily writing ritual, but I have this wacky thing called a job that takes up a large portion of my day (a problem I have a feeling more than a few of the blog constituency doesn't have to worry themselves over) and I really don't think anybody wants to hear about how my cat threw up its Tender Vittles or how the gob of ear wax I pulled out of my head last Thursday kinda looks like James K. Polk.

My luck, some dude who attended the bash will take my light-hearted ribbing the wrong way and will start the "I'm Gonna Kick Mr. Hipster's Ass" blog, where every day he will document a different way he's gonna kick my ass. Come and get me blogboy!

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