225) Kay Jewelers Commercials

Very few subgenres of commercials fall victim to unintentional self-parody so readily and easily as do commercials for jewelry. But as cloying and nauseating as Jared's commercials are, nothing quite lives up to the consistently-divorced-from-reality-and-logic parallel dimensions presented in the world according to Kay. More specifically, this world:



So, let's get this straight: This guy, who apparently doesn't know very much sign language, nonetheless knows a deaf women well enough to have established the kind of deep, personal relationship with her that two people presumably would share before one buys the other a gold watch? Look, unless they've played a lot of unusually deep and revealing games of Pictionary, this is a fucking impossible scenario.

Also, "every kiss" begins with "E". Assholes.

224) Anthropomorphic Food

Sure, people eat living things (after someone else kills that living thing for the person in question, of course), but such things tend to lack human characteristics, like opposable thumbs and verbal communication skills, which helps the individual maintain the important divide between traditional carnivorism and its more cannibalistic cousin.


I mean....(!!!!)

People also eat non-living things, such as cookies, M&Ms, and frosted mini wheats. There is absolutely no reason to suspect any of these things possess complex reasoning skills and fully-formed social personalities, and yet, presumably to tap in to the under-targeted "adults, 18-35, prone to realizing subtle, mostly animated, cannibalistic fantasies through the consumption of products high in processed sugar and children, 3 and up, who wish to develop such tendencies" market, advertising agencies have somehow devised a way to suggest that eating candy and candy-like breakfast cereal is philosophically less moral than is eating meat.

But, then, we're not the experts on the buying trends of (sociopathic, murderous) consumers.

223) The Jay Leno Show

Now old people can enjoy softball, unoffensive, obvious topical humor and inept interviews with bland celebrities and be asleep a full hour and a half earlier! Unlike before, however, Jay Leno now also treats us to tortuously drawn out "comedy" pieces from up and coming "comics" and gives Americans a brand new way of screwing over Conan O'Brien.

We'll give Jay Leno this, though: after just 24 mind-numbingly repetitive hours of national concern for the emotional well-being of Taylor Swift, he managed to pass Kanye West as the douchiest man in America


"So, Kanye, what would your recently-deceased mother think of what you did last night? I mean, assuming she weren't dead. Sorry, does talking that make you uncomfortable? Alright then, how about a song?!" (old white person clapping sounds)

222) Jeff Dunham

At last we've finally reached the end of our tireless nationwide search to combine the painfully unfunny topical "humor" of Dane Cook with the repugnant, offensively blatant racism of racists*! And all of it comes wrapped in America's long-beloved #1 entertainment format, bad ventriloquism!

*Unless you've found some non-racist way to interpret Achmed the Dead Terrorist...?


Ohh, hahahahahaha!! And look! He's wearing a turban! Just like real brown people I'm unjustly afraid of!

221) Famewhore Parents

Now that Jon & Kate are famous and their show is probably ending, reality TV executives are scrambling around to find the next wacky family who will capture America's attention and then turn into shrill, evil, baby-devouring monsters. Might I suggest two possible candidates from this week's news cycle who are evidently already to the shrill, evil, baby-devouring stage?

First up, we have "Nic," mom to an infant son and the sort of person who takes anything going wrong in her life as a personal affront. She posted a lengthy rant on her blog about how TSA agents at the Atlanta airport freaked out on her when her son's pacifier clip set off the metal detector. She claimed that she was separated from her kid, held for a long time (thus almost missing her flight), and was so stressed/agitated by being separated FROM HER SON!!!1! that she was forced to take her "emergency Xanax." [Note: you will need at least one emergency Xanax to keep your head from hurting while reading her cray cray post.] While many of us who have dealt with airport delays and incompetence felt for Nic and her situation, TSA was not amused. Their official blogger, Bob (yes, they have an official TSA blog) posted security cam video of the entire incident and basically showed that Nic is a big ol' faker.

But Nic is far from the biggest faker of the week. That honor goes to Richard Heene of Colorado. Heene, an "amateur scientist" who was building a giant balloon in the backyard. One of his kids, Falcon (yeah, seriously) allegedly got in the balloon and started flying away. Like any good dad, Richard called the media and then later deigned to call 911. The "Balloon Boy" story captivated the 24 hour news cycle. Then, the balloon came down. Then, there was no one in it. That's because little Falcon was safely at home, where he'd been the whole time. As for poppa Richard, he's apparently been trying to shop a reality show about his family to production companies and networks. Plus they were on that show "Wife Swap." Twice.

In the following clip, we learn why it always backfires when famewhore parents try to drag their kids into their retarded schemes. While being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Falcon lets it slip that the whole incident was "for the show." You know Octomom is so pissed she didn't think of this first.



[Oh, also, Falcon farts about 40 seconds into the interview. We would never tell you that and embarrass a poor child in that way, though, obviously.]

220) Baseball Announcer Malapropisms and Other Verbal Gaffes

What would expect Dennis Eckersley, Chip Caray, David Wells, and Buck Martinez to know a bunch of stuff about? If you said "stuff about baseball", then you'd be (in most cases) accurate (except Martinez, who only knows stuff about baseball as it's played in the bizarre parallel dimension known as Buck Martinez Land).



If you said any variation of the following...

-Verbal communication

-Grammar

-The organization of English language

-Word meanings

...you'd be wrong


No, seriously: the guy on the right is paid to say things to you live on national television. That's his *job*. This is the world you live in.

Take these couple of recently-uttered gems from yesterday's 10-plus hours of postseason day one coverage:

• "His heartbeat must be pounding" - Of course, most of us are familiar with the sensation of our hearts pounding. Our heartbeats, which themselves are resultant of the pounding of the heart doing the pounding-level beating, do not themselves pound.


• "Whether the Twins lose or they win this game or not..." - This is not so much the product of an inadequate grasp on language as it is the result of someone's overambitious desire to continue speaking, even when thoroughly unnecessary. Those of use with basic reasoning skills needed only to hear the first four words of this phrase followed by the eigth and ninth words in order to extract the intended information.


• "That's really tantamount among their concerns right now" - Errr...that's really the equivalent measure of...the...among...their concerns right now? Huh. Okay. I mean, I'd have gone with "paramount". Y'know...so that my sentence would have made sense? But sure, cool. Whatever.

Look to our Twitter feed for more malapropisms and linguistic stress fractures as we hear them.

219) People Who Call Champagne "Champers"

Contrary to popular belief, not everything needs a cutesy nickname. Sure, when people are little it's sweet to give them little singsongy nicknames, but they can't last forever. For example, "Paulie-waulie" may make for an adorable six-year-old, but if he's not a plain old Paul by age 12 or so you can pretty much guarantee the dude isn't getting laid, ever.

Sometimes, things are so great that no nickname is required. Shoes are just shoes, not shoesies. Chocolate is just chocolate, not chocowocko. And champagne is just champagne, not "champers." If you aren't mature enough to know that the yummy-tasting bubbly stuff in the skinny glass has a nice proper French name, then you aren't old enough to be drinking it.

Note #1: The only exception to the "It's called Champagne" rule is if you reference this classic SNL sketch with Christopher Walken in it:



Note #2: The other person who runs this blog got all married or whatever this weekend, and while there was champagne served, he is not friends with lame people who mispronounce the name of the magical bubbly candy water and this post wasn't inspired by anyone in particular. So, like, congrats and stuff, dude.

218) Twitter

It's easy to understand the unwaveringly seductive appeal of a website that allows you to know how Dennis Haysbert felt about "All About Steve" and follow the every mindless thought of your one "political" friend who doesn't really know anything about politics or having friends in the same place. Seriously, what's not annoying about the one thing that everybody who knows very little about modern technology/life won't stop talking about, from its astonishing power to break up the relationship of the two blandest people on Earth to its apparent power to save Iran or something, Twitter is to today what television was to the 40s: a pretty cool idea that won't actually intentionally do anything worthwhile for roughly 60 years.



Plus, when the thing breaks down, you get to see a, um, whale with, uh, birds. So. There's that. No saccharine-soaked annoyance there. No sir.

So we can expect plenty of Twitter equivalents to "The Newlywed Game", "Small Wonder", and "Wheel of Fortune", dotted with the occasional Twitterverse equivalent of the Moon landing and "Twin Peaks" until finally the Twitter gets its "Lost".


It's worth noting/mourning the fact typing the term "Twitterverse" did not yield a red squiggly underlining. Repent.

Also, because we want to keep up the appearance of actual work without actually doing to much of it, we now have a Twitter page/account/tweeting area/thing:
http://twitter.com/TheDailyHated

217) Gerard Butler's Agent

Gerard Butler holds Hollywood's dubious distinction of being the biggest star to have made zero (0) good movies. A sampling:

-Time Line
-Lara Croft: Whatever of Such and Such
-Dracula 2000
-P.S. I Love You (the memory of which upon typing the title, it should be noted, just caused a pixie to die)
-Gamer

Which is not that surprising, since Butler also holds the dubious distinction of both having "burst on to the scene"* in the Joel Schumacher-directed big-screen adaptation of the most overly and unjustly beloved musical of all time, "The Phantom of the Opera" and having starred in the highest-grossing feature-length Playstation1 cutscene/gay porn of all time, "300".



Thing is, unlike, say, Jennifer Aniston (with whom he is apparently in a one-shirted relationship...) , the only real problem we have with Butler is every single movie he has made ever. Shouldn't we love him? He's Scottish! And the list of things from Scotland that we love far outweigh and outnumber Butler's filmography (Craig Ferguson, David Tennant, Travis, the entire cast of "Trainspotting", transparent tape). And he sort of looks like he might be Australian, too. Like a Scottish Russell Crowe. Aren't these people supposed to make good movies? Where's Butler's "Gladiator"??

Oh, wait.


*remind us to do one about annoying Hollywood-"journalism" lingo

216) Carrie Prejean

We're not exactly sure which religion Carrie Prejean belongs to, but apparently it's built around two principles: Gays can't get married, and the first amendment of the United States Constitution protects individuals from doing whatever the hell they want. She refers to it as "Christianity", whereas other notable historical figures, such as Jesus, would take issue with this particular interpretation of Christianity.

The problem for Ms. Prejean is that she has forgotten to adequately educate herself on the inner workings of two key documents: The United States Constitution (on which the United States Constitution is based) and the New Testament of the Bible (on which Christianity is based).

As to the first point, reading the New Testament as some kind of carte blanche for gay bashing wouldn't be unlike reading "The Lord of the Rings" and surmising its central message is that select trees can talk slowly and stage uprisings against evil wizards. Getting past whether or not this is even true, it sort of overlooks the slightly more significant themes.

As to the second point, I'd like to pose this analogy: Let's say you hire me to do a job. Let's say that job is customer service for, say, T-Mobile. And let's say someone calls the customer service line and asks me what I think of T-Mobile's service, and I say T-Mobile's service is a bunch of shit and, oh, by the way, caller, I think you're a heathen. Just to top it off, let's also say I never show up for work, and happen to exclaim loudly that I don't believe my co-workers deserve equal protection under the law. Especially the Mexicans. And let's say I go on to point out that this is merely a reflection of my religious beliefs. And let's say this rubs the people at T-Mobile the wrong way. They then have the right to fire me.

They cannot, however, have me arrested. So says the Constitution.

Civics!

215) Starscream

The only bad guy in history whose primary threat arises in his unconquerable ability to be incredibly annoying. Even by the narrow standards set upon 1980s-cartoons-as-toy-commercial villainy, Starscream still stands out as a particularly thin caricature of evil; a castrated Skeletor with an anxiety disorder, with a voice that seems to be the result of a horrific accident involving the fusing of Paul Lynde and an auto-tune machine.


Megatron makes another good point about Starscream's inability to lead androids to a picnic. We totally forgot to even mention that.


It's worth pointing out that, somehow, given that even the most devout Transformers fans (like the guy who legally changed his name to Optimus Prime) wished someone would find a way to write wipe Starscream off the show out of existence and memory, Michael Bay still found a way to ruin Starscream.

214) The Opposing Team

Did you know that the opposing team only landed the totally overrated star player because of bullshit union rules that favor teams in markets that are (totally arbitrarily, btw) deemed "big market"? Did you also know that my hometown's team never even wanted to land that player in the first place, because, while on paper his season-average 33 home runs, 100 RBI and .390 OBP appear to make him a valuable asset, his lack of defensive range actually make him such a liability that, over the course of a season, he can actually be expected to allow more runs than he scores? It's true, and you're a total idiot.


This guy's never going to win a championship ring while wearing the opposing team's uniform. Fuckin' face it. Never going to happen. Not even for $23 million a year.

Your hometown team sucks. Sure, maybe if you look at the games-won-to-games-lost statistics, it would appear that your hometown team is technically superior to that of my own, but let me ask you this: stacked up against each other, head to head, do you really think my hometown team's three top starters couldn't easily win a three game series against the opposing team's three top starters? Please! That's not even debatable! Not to mention the fact that the opposing team's number two guy is totally streaky and relies way to much on his off-speed stuff. Any good, patient-hitting team would OWN that guy. The only reason he has 18 wins this season is that all of those wins have come from totally bullshit teams, like the Orioles. I'm serious. I could prove that to you right now. That guy has faced all the worst teams this season. Those numbers are deceptive!

And don't even get me started on the opposing team's park. That place is total bullshit. My mom could hit for the cycle in that place, and off the opposing team's mockery of a starting rotation, that wouldn't even be that difficult anyway. Face it, the only reason the opposing team is even winning against my area's vastly superior home team boils down to inflated salaries and a favorable schedule. Not to mention the clear bias the umpires have always had against my area's team. How do you throw a guy out for arguing balls and strikes from center field??? Ridiculous.

213) Betsy McCaughey

In case you were wondering, the second instance of Jon Stewart (who, as a comedian, is tragically also America's only responsible member of the "news media")* costing one or more people their jobs simply by rationally confronting them with that harrowing nuisance, the truth.

It took a couple weeks after Stewart's appearance on Crossfire (god this never gets old) in 2004 for that show to get canceled. Perhaps it speaks to the efficiency of conservative zealots that McCaughey lost her job the next day.

Warning to TDH readers - The following fifteen minutes is incredibly, ridiculously worth wasting.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Betsy McCaughey Extended Interview Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Betsy McCaughey Extended Interview Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

*Okay, Bill Maher **
**also a comedian

212) TBS's Strained, Inaccurate Definitions Of The Words "Very" And "Funny"

Which, when combined, apparently mean something between "moderately watchable if you have nothing else to do and aren't easily offended by bad writing and the accidental embrace of outdated stereotypes and don't mind re-runs of Yes, Dear, Just Shoot Me, and the Friends episode you've somehow already seen eight times even if you never watched Friends" and "The Bill Engvall Show", which, due to some kind of vast cosmic oversight, is somehow entering its 3rd season.



Hahahah! Get it? Oh, heavily-censored Sex and the City episodes. What delights you bring to my basic free cable.