Category / funny

60 Minutes makes you impotent

I haven’t watched 60 Minutes regularly since I lived at home with my parents, but I do listen to the podcast versions while doing other things, like cleaning the gutters, blowing leaves around with my kick-ass leaf blower, or riding my bike. So I don’t really know which companies are advertising during the broadcast, but I can tell you who should be: Pfizer and Lilly. In fact, I’m surprised that some sort of erectile disfunction (ED) aid isn’t stuffing all the commercial breaks.

Understanding why is simple. Watch any broadcast and you’ll find yourself:

  1. seriously, absolutely perturbed and
  2. completely unable to do anything about it

As you can imagine, this combination has a horrid affect on men. Enter the key to sanity: Viagra and/or Cialis.

Consider the story about credit default swaps and the industry insiders who were sending emails that read, “Let’s just hope we’re rich and retired by the time this house of cards collapses.” They sent those emails three years ago. (And there’s nothing you can do about it.)

Or the story about the titans of Wall Street making $600 million a year (a figure I wish I had made up) while hiring physicists to create investment vehicles out of bad loans that could be repackaged and sold with AAA ratings. (And there’s nothing you can do about it.)

Or the story of the Delta Force that had Bin Laden trapped in the mountains (in 2004) and couldn’t go after him because someone higher up the chain of command kept denying them approval. (And there’s nothing you can do about it.)

If stories like these don’t do it to you, there’s always Andy Rooney. Yikes!

I read the other day that GM, through its employee health insurance program, is the largest single buyer of Viagra in the world. They spend something like $18 million a year on Viagra alone. I wondered if auto industry workers were just more depressed than the rest of us, but now I think they were just watching 60 Minutes.

So I got two boxes of Scabs in the mail…

Which, though gross, wasn’t all that surprising since I ordered them. Scabs are bandages designed to reflect all the grossness of being a kid (and, I guess, a Dad.) It also wasn’t surprising that I had two opportunities to use them this weekend since my kids seem inherently clumsy. I decided to conduct a little (un)scientific anecdotal study to see which design would be more in demand.

Scabs come in five designs: a zipper, stitches, eyeballs, worms, and spiders. Both times, the bandagee– (bandagie?)– ah, heck, kid with the cut, chose the spiders. These were both girls.

Grace went so far as to say, “I don’t want the zipper, Dad.” Really? I dig the zipper. I can’t figure out these kids…

Want to have some fun? Pick up some scabs of your own.

"I've been made into a stereotype."

By now, you’ve likely seen the Windows ads complaining about how Apple is stereotyping PC people. I think it’s admirable of Microsoft to “fight back,” though they seem to be missing a couple of obvious points.

First, I don’t think most PC people associate themselves with their computers like Mac people tend to. Neither good nor bad, just an assumption based on the people I know who use PCs. Therefore, without this personal association, most PC-using people don’t see themselves when they see the PC guy in the Apple ads. Thus, this whole campaign from Microsoft is kinda missing the point.

Second, since the advent of the Intel chip in Macs, most people know that you can run Windows and all of the related programs on your Mac. In fact, I can boot my laptop in native Windows mode, essentially turning it into a Windows PC. (Not that I would want to.) Thus, this whole campaign from Microsoft seems kind of… well, odd. Why not embrace all of these Mac people and sell them software, too?

Anyway, now that there’s a full stereotypical stereotyping war going on, there are a plethora of user-generated ads making the rounds on YouTube. Lots of fun stuff, but here’s one I really like (well done, Michael!)