My sweet wife has earned a place with her "Quote of the Blog"
We were watching the march of anarchy in the streets of Boston, and she asked:

"How can Anarchists have a parade?"

Gad, it's been an awful, scary, maddening, overweeningly stress-filled month so far.

...But enough about ME...

I continue to be fascinated and alarmed by current trends in TV & Radio adverts.
I mean, they are REALLY awful. The most troubling angle from a business sense- and I was nurtured by the Freberg school of advertising- is that which is typified by the Progressive Insurance commercials. The template works like this:
***********
Customer has a catastrophe.

Customer calls repairman.

Repairman stares disbelievingly at the scope of the problem, and wants to get to work.

Customer demands a quote from the repairman, including a quote from 3 competitors.

The catastrophe worsens.

Moral: OUR customers expect competitive quotes from their inquiries to us. They are SMART.
***********

NO. The ULTIMATE message is: Our customers are STOO-PID.
That's what I get. AND, I do not wish to be lumped in with the cretinous rabble which apparently comprises the Progressive customer base.

Hello, little lizard...

Toyota has jumped aboard with THEIR latest ad campaign, with a Typical Married Male
who went out for milk, and was beguiled into buying not one, but TWO Toyotas, a sporty red car, and a black SUV. He proceeds to angst over how to tell his wife, when his REAL problem is how to get the two vehicles home. The helpful Toyota salesman has clearly NOT offered to assist by driving one vehicle for him, so the
hapless dupe must leapfrog the cars home: Milkboy drives the Red car a few yards beyond the Black SUV, then the SUV a few yards beyond the Red car. And so forth.

This commercial is an infinite sadness. I could go all Dobson on their keisters and decry the typical stupification of the American Husband on TV, but that is not my issue. The message I get is:

Toyota customers are STOO-PID.

The list goes on...

There was an interview years ago with the actor Ricardo Montalban. At some time
during the discussion he was asked (being the symbol of the early, Latin leading men of Hollywood), "How would you describe a great lover?" To this he replied, "A great lover is not a man who continually goes from woman to woman, for any dog in the street can do that.

No, a great lover is a man who can captivate and nurture the love of one woman
her entire life."

God bless Ricardo Montalban. I know that he is a believer in Christ, and that he is a man of integrity, besides being one of the three best things to hit the Trek franchise in its history.

My wife and I are headin' towards our 27th year. Thanks for giving us something concrete to shoot for!

Stupid Blight CommunityStupid Blight CommunityStupid Blight Community


My youngest, Loen, said something that inaugurates our "Quote of the Blog".

"We need a white Bill Cosby."

Now, to be clear, ours is a VERY conservative household, and one in which ANY hint of racism is abhorred. When I was growing up, I autonomously arrived at the idea that the "N" word was as egregious a "cuss" word as "G--D---", and thus was not to be used. Period. Paragraph. BTW, I grew up in South Carolina.

It is from this background that the youngest son o' mine issued his pronouncement. We were discussing Cos's NAACP comments admonishing the black community to watch its collective mouth. Huzzah! God bless Bill Cosby.
Well played, Sir.

Hence my son's "Quote of the Blog".

And y'know...he's right.

So where does "Blight Community" come from?
It's the white kids who have learned their parents' liberal White Guilt, and have chosen to pretend that they are black by their dress code, mode of speech, and popular inattention to education. Yo, yo.

We need to be who we are, and be the BEST who we are that we can possibly be.