209) Calling Anything Besides A Human Infant "My Baby"

Some noted examples of non-babies

Unless, of course, you actually spent countless painful hours forcing a Lexus out of your vagina. In which case, uh...it has your eyes?

208) Taco Bell Commercials

The vast and storied history of fast food advertising has its share of high points (Ronald McDonald and his cadre of acid-trip and/or tainted "meat"-inspired companions; Harold and Kumar's 90-minute magnum opus celebration of cardboard-based burgers; absolutely any and every Jack in the Box commercial) and low points (delusional Wendy's commercials featuring well-adjusted upper-middle class happily married couples dining at Wendy's, with actual silverware; the ungodly marriage of Paris Hilton and Carl's Junior).



But no institution has ever achieved as perfectly proportional a level of quality of food to quality of advertising as Taco Bell, whose commercials lead one to the inevitable conclusion that Taco Bell's marketing department must either a) be clinically insane, b) high, c) clinically insane due to having consumed whatever Taco Bell passes off as "food", or d) all of the above.

Take the mid-90s, for instance, when Taco Bell decided the best way to declare its hipness was to name Little Richard, a man whose popularity peaked a mere 40 years earlier, as the public face of its franchise. The reasoning seemed to be something along the lines of this: "You know what all the kids like these days? Grunge music! And you know what grunge music is? Rock n Roll! And you know who used to be considered a rock n roll artist?? See where I'm going with this??"

Or take more recent advertising, which saw Taco Bell introduce the world to the non-word "melty", which is every bit as cringe-inducing and stomach-churning as the very thought of consuming two bean "burritos" and a large Mr. Pibb. Or, better yet, Taco Bell's false and unfounded claim that anything containing what once could have been described as "lettuce" presented in something vaguely bowl-shaped "technically" constitutes a salad!

Still, all of these ad campaigns lack the poetry and head-slapping inanity of the Taco Bell chihuahua. Chihuahuas! Chihuahuas are Mexican (probably)! And Taco Bell is supposed to also be Mexican (in a similar way that Olive Garden is Italian, or that Madonna is British)!

And so Taco Bell unleashed a seemingly endless series of advertising on us all, with the soberingly honest message , "Taco Bell: Well, dogs seem to like it."



Fair enough, Taco Bell. Fair enough.

(In Memorium: Taco Bell Chihuahua - 1994-2009)

207) Saying "Literally" When You Actually Mean "Not Literally"

Take, for instance, this claim about Sarah Palin by her spokeswoman Meg Stapleton, that "the world is literally her oyster!"


(Advisory message: in order to sheild your brain cells from trauma-related induced mercy-suicide, you can skip to the 3:30 mark for the comment in question)

It's worth noting that Sarah Palin and many of her loyal followers
already have some inaccurate beliefs about the world, notably that it's roughly 6000 years old and that it was created over the course of 24 hours by a morally ambiguous superbeing with strikingly similar attributes to those of Fantastic Four nemesis Galactus, it is nonetheless a demonstrable fact that "the world" (defined as "the earth or globe, considered as a planet") is not literally the same thing as "Sarah Palin's oyster" (defined as "any of several edible, marine, bivalve mollusks of the family Ostreidae, having an irregularly shaped shell, occurring on the bottom or adhering to rocks or other objects in shallow water belonging to the allegedly corrupt former governor of Alaska")

The error here might be easier to understand through illustration:




Special thanks to Mark Russell

206) Fergie-era Black Eyed Peas

Sure, Yoko Ono is a grating presence who still takes a lot of shit for breaking up the Beatles, but at least Yoko Ono didn't join the Beatles and make them terrible*.



*We were going to make the point that they are also both physically unattractive, but we're professional journalists and we didn't think that would be fair. To Yoko Ono.**

**(Fergie is hideous)

We-sa Back!!-

That's right, Everybody's Favorite Star Wars Character Jar Jar Binks: we-sa sure are!

The economic downturn has been tough on a lot of businesses, which is why a couple weeks ago The Daily Hated decided to mark our one-year anniversary by firing all our paid staff and replacing them with unpaid interns/former Wall Street bankers, packing up our spacious office overlooking Central Park, and upgrading to a vacated 4000 square foot waterfront property in the Financial Blogging District!

But, alas, moving does tend to come with its hassles, which explains why we've been offline for a while. Seems a certain internet provider that shall remain nameless (HINT: it's an anagram of "Time Warner", if you swap one "e" and one "r" for the other) can't get its shit together, and thus caused us to go dark for much longer than we anticipated. But the good news is that several weeks and a lucrative out-of-court settlement later, we are ready to go!

So for today we'll leave it with Time Warner...um, we mean "unnamed internet provider"...as our honored hatee. Please direct all complaints to their "customer" "service" line.

205) Kellie Pickler and Kid Rock? Sure, okay. Whatever.

We were actually in favor of this sort of thing when it involved John Mayer and Jennifer Aniston. After all, when the two blandest* (and, for some reason, two of the most ubiquitous) people on Earth got together, it made our lives a lot easier. Like consolidating debt: sure, you don't want it around at all, but at least this way it only irritates you in one lump sum.

But for some reason, while this makes perfect sense to us, the rumored year-long-to-date secret union of Kellie Pickler (former American Idol loser; is to county fairs and anything sponsored by Sean Hannity as Carrie Underwood is to the Grammys; not smarter than, nor even remotely as smart as, a fifth grader) and Kid Rock (former 2nd place runner up to Pamela Anderson's standards; best known for whatever the hell he does; pretty much what most people who don't live in America think of when they think of America, hence all the resistance to being invaded) somehow makes both of the worse. It's like having a stupid blonde tumor on your brain, only to find you've developed a stupider, blonder, 15-year-younger tumor right on top of it.

And sure, it makes it easier on us, since we don't have to write about them separately, but that's like saying it's easier to explain to that orphan why you accidentally killed his puppy (and only companion in the world) and not-as-accidentally now have to knock down his orphanage to build a condo for wealthy families (dog friendly) in the same form letter from your secretary. Either way, it's still going to make our veal taste a little less tender.




*They broke up because of Twitter, people. Twitter! A website where people just say whatever the fuck comes to mind for no particular reason was more compelling to John Mayer than was Jennifer Aniston. Poetry.