The weird mixed message in this TurboTax Commercial

 

Marcus is not a "connoisseur of anything free."  He's a hoarder of other people's garbage.  If you throw it away, Marcus will snatch it up.  He doesn't care about quality, he doesn't care about taste, and he doesn't care if what he's picking up off the street is practical or useful.  If it's free, he's going to lug it home and find a place for it amongst the rest of the rubble he's retrieved from every street corner, dumpster or Facebook Marketplace Please Take This Awful Thing Away I Am Moving And Don't Want To Pay To Have It Removed post he can find.  If Marcus can lug it off on foot or jam it into the back of his car, it's gone.  No questions asked.

But Marcus takes this obsession with free junk to his approach to tax preparation services.  I use TurboTax every year, and have since around 2010.  I think it's an easy-to-use program and because I don't own anything and don't have any kids or one of those spouse things I can do my very simple taxes in about an hour using their basic package.  But the "free" edition is free of pretty much everything you want in something as important as a tax filing- you can't e-file, Turbotax will not check or back up the accuracy of your numbers, and no electronic copy will be saved outside of your own computer.  It's basically just a word processing program that allows you to do all the work yourself, including printing copies and mailing them by hand- and hoping your refund doesn't get sent to the wrong address or stolen from your box. 

In other words, the "free" edition is every bit as much trash as that ugly ceramic ice cream cone or fire-hazard ancient lamps or mold-infested recliner Marcus dragged home because he's an ill person.  Is this the message you wanted to send, TurboTax?  "As long as you like free trash, here's some more?"

In short, it's a really bad way to save money.  I put it right up there with using a third-party company to book important plane tickets instead of going through the carrier or regularly flying Stand By- it's a really penny-wise, pound-foolish gamble that I'm not going to take, ever.  It costs me about a hundred bucks every year to do my taxes with TT but I know some program has looked them over, I haven't missed anything, and my past returns are saved forever if the IRS ever decides that because I'm not very wealthy or very poor they better check to make sure I'm paying my fair share.  You get what you pay for, and accurate tax prep, e-filing and direct deposit are worth paying for.  Stop being an idiot, Marcus. 

Pringles. As with all successful illicit drugs, once you pop, you can't stop!

 

As near as I can figure, the guy in this ad is the very last white person on the planet to become acquainted with the artwork on a can of Pringle's.  And he's staring at it wondering if he'd have a shot at winning a settlement in a lawsuit against Kellogg's for Unauthorized Use of Likeness. 

Personally, I'm more perplexed at the popularity of greasy pressed potato and rice flakes and corn starch stacked in an oily can, designed to be eaten quickly (before that anti-Capitalist Full Feeling can catch up to the very pro-Capitalist Dopamine centers of our brains.)  Maybe it's all that salt?  Only the evil chemists who developed this crap know for sure. 

That Stupid Buffalo Wild Wings Commercial is Stupid.

 

All I get out of these Buffalo Wild Wings Commercials is that eating at  Buffalo Wild Wings is a dirty, noisy, unsanitary and uncomfortable experience in which one can expect to get jostled and interrupted while getting fur in one's food and probably getting one's overpriced beer spilled over everywhere because a stupid CGI buffalo is roaming around causing havoc everywhere it goes.

Oh, and that YouTube commentators continue to be the saddest mouth-breathers outside of the average Trump rally. 

This Weird Honey Bunches of Oats Commercial.

 

Yeah, don't just eat oats.  Eat oats drenched in sugar.  I guarantee that if you are the kid who gained fifty pounds of adipose tissue and is on insulin before the Senior Prom, she'll notice you.*  I do NOT guarantee that the attention you get will be positive, however.

Seriously, I've checked out Honey Bunches of Oats.  They taste really, really good.  That's because they are really sweet.  Sugar tastes good, in case you were born on another planet and weren't aware.  It has absolutely zero positive impact on your health, however.  I suggest that this kid finds some other way to get the object of his attraction to notice him that doesn't include taking on crap eating habits.  

*actually, I shouldn't guarantee this.  If this kid goes to a typical American high school, it's entirely possible that morbidly obese kids already on insulin are depressingly common.  

Just a few quick points about this DraftKings Commercial

 

1.  I can't imagine anyone thinking that there's anything funny about watching a multimillionaire go on and on about an addictive gambling app that certainly ruined lives in 2023 and will continue to ruin lives in 2024.

2.  I really, really hope that the posts in the comment section are all bots.  Because this....this is beyond sad.  "I died when I saw this."  "This is a Superbowl ad, this is so funny, screw watching the game..." etc. etc. etc.  If these are actual human beings posting these responses I weep for our nation.  You people need serious help. 

Gentrification.com

 

So an elderly black guy just trying to play chess with himself (I guess) in his neighborhood park finds himself harassed to distraction by some privileged white woman who wants to know if his neighborhood is good enough for her to move into and ruin.  No doubt she wants to know if there's a Trader Joe's, Whole Foods and Starbucks within walking distance, not that she'll ever actually walk to any of them, and if most people in the vicinity are as, um, coffee-colored as he is. 

Eventually she's reminded that she's rich and white and there's this company that is perfectly happy to do all of her searching for her- a company that's going to land a helicopter practically on top of the poor black man she's been condescending to talk to and whisk her away to Just The Right Neighborhood - that is, a neighborhood that has enough minorities to allow her to Virtue Signal but not enough to make her feel nervous as she walks from her BMW to the front door of the Brownstone she got a great deal on because the previous owners got hit hard by Covid and a lack of generational wealth. 

Uber Eats "Solves" a problem nobody has

 

The bottom line to this typically overproduced (it was, after all, a Superbowl ad) idiocy is:  don't forget Uber Eats delivers food so you don't have to get up off the couch except to go answer the door, ever.

Don't worry, Uber Eats.  Americans are well aware that it's never been easier to be immobile.  First there were restaurants.  Then fast-food restaurants.  Then drive-thrus, because who has time/energy to walk into a building these days We Are All So Very Very Busy After All.  We've had pizza delivery for more than fifty years.  And now- with a special boost from that Disease That Shall Not Be Named- we have Door Dash and Uber Eats, so when we "don't feel like" cooking and also "don't feel like" driving to a fast food place and "don't feel like" just going to sleep instead of eating AGAIN and "don't feel like" doing without ANYTHING EVER, we can just swipe an App on our phones (we always feel like doing that) and strip ourselves of even more disposable income by making an impulse purchase of empty calories so we don't get distracted from Netflix or that video game we are NOT addicted to so Shut Up.  

Oh and these two people were on some inexplicably popular Seinfeld rip-off from the 1990s.  One of them has had something of a career since then, though not much unless you compare it to the other guy's.  Remember?  Me neither, actually.