The inconsiderate dirty man

Have you seen those commercials for Viva paper towels in which a very dirty man shows up to his parents (or grandparents?—I'm not sure) and he dirties everything in his path? Luckily, the old folks are ready with Viva towels to clean up the mess. But why should they have to?

The inconsiderate dirty man even has the gall to touch a single piano key and get that dirty, too! If you come to my house all dirty and unavoidably soil only those things directly on your path from the front door to the shower, maybe I can forgive that. But if you deliberately dirty other things you didn't absolutely have to, then maybe I should never again let you come into my house.

Ad guys, go back to the drawing board with a better scenario for needing your product.

Whose rights are being violated, and under which Amendment?

I served in the Marine Corps to defend ideals like citizens' right to defend their homes against invading forces (whether that be British redcoats or escaped convicts). But I sure as hell wasn't doing it to defend a child's right to kill himself playing with a gun his parents forgot to secure. Nor to allow special interest groups to interfere in how doctors interact with their patients.

Have you heard about an idiotic new law in Florida that bars pediatricians from asking whether patients' parents have guns in their home, and if so, are those guns properly secured? Supposedly, the National Rifle Association is concerned that such questions invade patients' privacy. If that's the real reason, then they have completely missed the whole point of doctor-patient confidentiality. But just in case, let me state it: it isn't so doctors can blab your personal information to their friends; it's so they can ask questions directly relevant to treating or preventing diseases.

Or maybe this is just the NRA flexing their muscles to see how far they can take things. I don't see the pool manufacturers' lobby demanding that doctors don't ask about pools at home. Nor the bike manufacturers' lobby. And so on and so forth.

Another consequence of the new law might be that now pediatricians can't suggest parents turn to the NRA for information on securing their guns. However, the bill is not actually a law just yet. If you live in Florida, let Governor Rick Scott know what you think of this law before he signs it.

Stewie the Creator

When I read TV Guide's description for last night's episode of Family Guy, "The Big Bang Theory," in which Stewie unwittingly winds up creating the Universe with his time machine, I thought to myself, "That might actually be a good episode." And it was a good episode. It was funny and riveting, and the dumb, racist non-jokes were kept to a minimum. Also, the writers deserve props for managing to reference both Back to the Future and Star Trek: The Next Generation at the same time.

However, any episode of any show that deals with time travel is certain to have holes in the plot and nits to pick. This latest episode of Family Guy is no exception. Let's say that we buy the whole notion of the temporal causality loop and predestination paradoxes in general, and specifically the one that threatens to destroy the Universe in this episode.

For an evil genius, Bertram (Wallace Shawn) doesn't seem to fully think through the ramifications of snuffing Stewie out of existence, even allowing for the fact that the former doesn't at first know that the latter created the Universe, and conceding that Bertram understands that he can't kill any of Peter's ancestors since he doesn't want to delete himself as well.

One way to delete Stewie from the time-space continuum is to kill Lois before she gives birth to Stewie. But even doing that is fraught with the danger of consequences that could also prevent Bertram's birth. What if Peter is so grief-stricken by the death of his wife that he kills himself? Or, less melodramatically, what if Peter never goes to the sperm bank and his seed is never implanted into the woman who turns out to be Bertram's biological mother? Bertram's idea of killing Leonardo da Vinci (who is presumably an ancestor of Lois) has the danger of far more unintended consequences than killing a more recent ancestor. (And anyway how did Bertram trace Stewie's ancestry so far back?)

Bertram does succeed in killing Leonardo da Vinci. Stewie sends Brian back to the present and somehow "injects" his DNA into Leonardo's girlfriend (without having sex with her). But why would this be the thing to do that preserves Stewie's maternal line? Wouldn't that introduce genetic material that was meant to be introduced later? Or is that another predestination paradox? Wouldn't the right thing to do have been to extract Leonardo's semen? (Though I can just begin to imagine the disgusting jokes the writers would have come up with if this had occurred to them). In any case, Leonardo was already quite old when Bertram killed him. Leonardo may have already passed on the necessary genetic material, in which case Stewie's "injection" is completely irrelevant.

Lastly, I wonder how Stewie had the resources to build himself a cryogenic stasis chamber and have himself deposited in what was presumably yet to be colonized Quahog but not the resources to build himself another time machine (as Doc Brown did in the 19th Century in Back to the Future Part III).

It is precisely because the episode was actually funny and engaging that it is fun to pick it apart like this. I hope they do more episodes like this and fewer episodes in which Brian is complaining about his failures with women or as an author.

Jay Leno likes gruesome screensavers

So the White House has decided not to release the gruesome photos of Osama bin Laden with bullet holes in his head. Plenty of jokes that could be made there, like maybe alluding to the birth certificate scandal and how some people still refuse to believe that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.

But the 'joke' that Jay Leno chose to make on the Tonight Show last night was this: "How many of you wanted to make that your screensaver?" And he raised his own hand as he asked that. There's no accounting for taste, I suppose. My reaction, if I ever got to see those photos, would be either:

a) "I'm convinced the bastard's dead, I don't need or want to look at that again." OR
b) "That looks fake. Let me look at it again just long enough to find the Photoshop seams."

NOT c) "Ooh, let me look at that guy's ugly face made even uglier by violence every time I leave my computer alone for more than a few minutes!"

Really, Omnaris?

Have you seen the Omnaris ad with computer generated graphics of soldiers in white uniforms with white helmets? Human soldiers. Am I the only one who finds this ridiculous?

Consider Nasonex, with its animated bee, or Mucinex with its animated, anthropomorphized mucus, or Lamisil with its cute monster. You can't quite get those to move the way the ad makers wanted them to, even though they exist in real life (the bee and the mucus, at least, I don't know what real toenail infection causants look like).

So apparently Omnaris couldn't get a bunch of men to put on white uniforms and look like soldiers. It should make you wonder whether they're spending more money on advertising campaigns than they are on "big picture" important things, like searching for a cure for cancer.