"So it's rad, literally?"

I have a love hate relationship with television; combined with the inability to turn it off once it's on. Sometimes I just turn it on for background noise to keep my delusional thoughts at a dull roar. This results in marathon Law and Order CI and SVU viewings when I've already seen all of them a bunch of times or certain USA channel marathons (same), or How It's Made (same), Dirty Jobs (same), plus soooo many other shows. And now that we have HBO, who offers a bunch of great films along with a bunch of terrible ones, I've sat through some of the crappiest movies ever made; movies I certainly had to intention of ever seeing.

This was my status update on FB a while back: "Dear HBO, thank you for offering such great movies as 1990's I Come in Peace wherein 'an alien policeman and an FBI agent hunt for an alien hulk which kills for heroin in Houson.' Obviously every time this hulk kills someone, he says, "I come in peace." Yessss!" Another classic? The House Bunny. I've seen it 4 times. I'm not kidding. Obsessed? Twice. Two times too many. And the list goes on...

Matt likes to point out that I'll watch a terrible movie on HBO just to avoid watching commercials. (Right now I'm watching Lakeview Terrace and I hated it the first time.) The reasons I skip the commercials is that a) they're louder than the show which throws me out of whatever I'm doing and ADD sucks!, b) 90% of them are abhorrent and c) they get repeated and repeated and REPEATED. They drive me INSANE! So, yes, it's true, I'll watch something bad to avoid them. Of course, I could just turn off the tv, but then I'm right back where I started with the background noise. Hey, this is just a small glimpse into my scrambled mind! So fun to be me! La la la la!

But because I do see a bunch of live tv, I can’t avoid the commercials. And although I can't stand most of them, I really really love a few of them. I even get my hopes up that I might see them. Nerd, I know. The beauty of a commercial is that it's less than a minute long but if it's awesome, you can watch it over and over again. If there's a part in a movie that I really love, I'll get to the end of it and go back and watch something again, but it kind of loses its context. The whole build up is missing and what happens next gets lost. Plus you have to find the place, fast forward etc. But a commercial is so short that you can go back to the beginning in a matter of seconds and it gives you its complete story.

Now that YouTube exists, you can search for anything and see it in all its unencumbered glory. But there's something about watching the images on a big screen. It’s like a short film! A really short one! And nothing looks the same when it's uploaded to the internet. So, again, love/hate tv.

My love for commercials goes back long before the handy interwebs existed (though it was nice to be able to search through YouTube for my favorites from the past and find a commercial that I have been searching for to no avail for years). Back in the early 2000s, VW aired a Beetle commercial that I only saw once. It featured "Little Fluffy Clouds" by The Orb, a song that I thoroughly love. I remember paying attention to the commercial almost too late and when it was gone, I watched tv in hopes of seeing that commercial and never saw it again. My memory had combined it with another Beetle commercial that I did see frequently where a green beetle goes firing around the screen in torpedo like ways. I was surprised that I actually found the commercial a couple of weeks ago as I've searched for it within the last year. When I found it, I was so excited it was like receiving a present. Ironically, the melded commercial in my head was more intriguing than the actual one, but it's still cool. Here's the link:



Career Builder had a series of monkey commercials that I'd wait to come on tv as they were also pre-dvr for me. They eventually posted them all on their website, but they were best on a bigger screen: Bigger Monkeys! I have always loved monkeys (no, really?) and these gems combined the little munchkins and hilarious story lines. Greatest combo! They even came out with a second series of them before moving on to other topics that were still great but never matched the monkeys for me. I would post every single one of them, but I'll let you seek out the rest yourself.



I am not sure why SportsCenter only advertises on espn because they are crazy not to show their awesome commercials EVERYWHERE. This is one of my favorites featuring Scott Van Pelt, who is full on hilarious.




There is a reason why I started writing this post. A new Sears ad has caught my fancy and when I started writing this a few weeks ago, I couldn’t find it. Now it’s FINALLY online!!! This is where the whole having to watch all the commercials to get to one applies. The new commercial addresses the E.P.A. and appliance recycling and coins a new term, R.A.D. (Responsible Appliance Disposal). Just researching this commercial was crazy. It wasn’t posted anywhere on the internet and it took multiple different Google searches to even get answers on RAD. When the commercial made a rare appearance on tv, my excitement was visible. Matt would call me in if I was in the other room and rewind it and we’d watch. Sometimes more than once.. If I was by myself when it came on a good three or four viewings were in order. Matt thinks it’s funny, but not as much as I do. Today, I did another YouTube search and voila, it’s been posted! Now that I've built it up to epic proportions, please enjoy the refrigerator delivery guy and two sardonic teenage boys. I know I have…about 40 million times.



I can’t wait till I see it on tv again!