Respecting the roll and getting more cash

I would like to acknowledge Jay Leno's brilliant deconstruction of the Cottonelle "Respect the Roll" ad campaign on TV. Those ads are practically begging to be nitpicked and lampooned, but Jay Leno has beat me to the punch. The one he chose to focus on is one in which an elderly black couple spies on the bathroom of some neighbors across the street. Why are they spying on their neighbors, why does the neighbors' house have the toilet facing a window, and most importantly of all, how does it show "respect" to a roll of toilet paper to cover it up prior to using it for its ultimate purpose and denouement?

Another ad campaign that deserves a similar treatment is Capital One's "more cash" ad campaign with Jimmy Fallon. Everyone likes more cash, with the exception of a grumpy little baby, who expresses wordlessly how most grown-ups feel about Jimmy Fallon. It's bad enough we make our infant children compete in beauty pageants, now we must expose them to the evil, corrupting power of money as early as possible? But more importantly, and why hasn't this occurred to anyone else:

If you really want more cash, cancel your credit cards! And maybe get rid of your debit cards, too.

So we are supposed to feel grateful that the credit card companies, out of the exorbitant interest rates and fees that they charge us, return to us a tiny, trickling bit of that in the form of what is euphemistically called "cash rewards"? If you are not too ensnared in credit card debt, it is time to pay them all off, cancel them, and keep more of your hard-earned cash where you want it: in your wallet. What exactly have the credit card companies done that they deserve any cut of our hard-earned paychecks? Exactly!

Back to the pilot

When I read the entry for last night's episode of Family Guy in TV Guide, I thought "Oh brother, they're really running out of ideas." But the Good Wife was about a death penalty case, so I decided to give the Family Guy episode a chance. It was... alright.

Brian pretends to want to travel back in time to retrieve a tennis ball he buried back in 1999, but his real reason is to tell his former self about 9/11 so he can become a hero by preventing it. Naturally, this has unforeseen bad consequences. Next thing you know, there are dozens of Brians and Stewies on the Griffin lawn trying to untangle the Gordian knot of causes and effects all their time traveling has caused.

Any time travel story is bound to have some confusing aspects. One of the Stewies acknowledges this, admitting to being confused. But some other questions naturally arise: why is Stewie still a baby? It has been fairly clearly established that Brian is now 8-years-old, and he was 7 when the show started. But now this episode cements the notion that time on the show is concurrent with real-life time: since Stewie's first birthday, Bush the Lesser has served two terms as President of the United States.

Also, what would be the true, unintended consequences of preventing 9/11? Wouldn't George W. Bush simply have asked his good buddy Osama bin Laden for another attack?

Take a shower and get a job... how exactly?

So a lot of conservative pundits are saying that those Occupy Wall Street kids need to go home, take a shower and get a job. It sure sounds easy when you put it like that. But, just for the heck of it, let's nitpick those instructions.

First, "go home." Most of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are young adults. If they have a place of their own, it's most likely a rented apartment. But, for reasons we'll get into later, some of those young adults have had to move back in with their parents. For the most part, though, they have somewhere they can call home and go to it.

Second, "take a shower." This is perhaps the easiest one. If you have somewhere to go home to, it's almost a given that you can take a shower.

Lastly, "get a job." I feel like I'm repeating myself here: the conservatives love to bitch and whine about how high taxes are, and they say that without tax breaks, the private sector can't create jobs. Well, the rich are now taxed at very low rates compared to just a few decades ago, so where are the jobs? With all that dough rolling in, what is the excuse for not creating jobs?

The bottom line is that getting a job these days is not easy at all. And if you manage to beat the odds, you find yourself overworked and underpaid. Rich people feel that just for doling out a few pennies, the working poor should be bending over backwards with gratitude, ready to do absolutely anything that is asked of them.

Next time some conservative jackass tells the Occupy Wall Street protesters to take a shower and get a job, they ought to tell him to create some jobs first.

Justice fantasies

Legal dramas give us nice fantasies of the right thing happening at the last minute after it looked like a gross miscarriage of justice was completely unavoidable. The Good Wife is no exception. On last night's episode, Alicia Florrick's (Julianna Margulies) pro bono case has her defending a white man identified by a black eyewitness (Sterling K. Brown) as a convenience store robber. It isn't until close to the end that it is revealed that the black eyewitness is in fact the perpetrator of the crime, and the innocent man is set free.

Meanwhile, Diane Lockhart (Christine Baransky) decides that the firm must stop doing pro bono cases, and urges those attorneys with pending pro bono cases to plead them out. Diane goes to visit the legal aid clinic to tell them in person, but instead winds up offering them office space at her firm when learning that they're going to get kicked out of their current office.

That's nice, but I wonder how many law firms are actually doing that in real life. Another difference between real life and this particular episode: In real life, the black eyewitness would have been treated like a suspect from the get-go.

White cluelessness

Let me preface this by saying that I am white. I need sunscreen to go pick up my morning paper. So I can say things such as the fact that white people are clueless about many race issues. Really. I can read all of Maya Angelou's books and watch all of Spike Lee's films, it doesn't make me an expert on the black experience.

But, clueless as I am, I do know certain things: for example, if I am the coach for a basketball team, I know enough that I shouldn't call my players by a certain word even if they use that word amongst themselves completely casual. This has actually happened, the coach was on the news. Also, I know that if I am an art photographer, I shouldn't take a picture of a white man in blackface. Taking a picture of a black man in blackface is also taboo. But what about taking a picture of a black man in whiteface?

Apparently, white artist Nathaniel C. Shannon thought that yes, that is okay. Last week I went to an art show near Detroit's Eastern Market. Nathaniel there had a whole series of photographs of a black man in whiteface playing golf in unlikely locations around the city. It was titled "Detroit Community Golf Course," if I recall correctly.

Maybe the whiteface wasn't the most offensive thing about those photographs. Maybe it's the idea that Detroit as a setting for photographs is only good for pictures of urban decay and poverty, what is sometimes called "urban porn."

Now, I will confess that I don't know much about art. Why should I pay ten grand for a large canvas painted with a uniform shade of green with a red dot in the corner if I can drive to Home Depot and hire someone to produce something exactly like that for a fraction of what the artist is asking for? Art photographers are usually not much better. At another show, I think it was at CCS, there was a very blurry photo that looked like two men having sex. The tag said $500. A lot of these modern artists, it seems to me, are just using bold concepts as a means of compensating for weak technical skills.

Going back to Nathaniel's photos: the man has technical skill. If I had been at his side with my Canon Powershot taking pictures of the man golfing, my pictures wouldn't look anywhere near as polished as his. But, if he has skill, why does he need to resort to race-baiting to sell his work? Alonso Delarte wrote a very short article on Examiner.com about Nathaniel's work that prompted quite a few white people to bash the writer, spilling far more ink on the topic than the original writer.

If you had any doubt that Alonzo's Jewish, this proves it: Mark Penxa remarked, at the end of a long diatribe: "I hope you enjoyed the free food and drinks, you *seemed* to be having a great time the entire night." You can just imagine one of Adolf Hitler's friends in 1917 pointing out that the Jewish critic at his art opening last night ate all the mini burgers yet had the gall to write a negative review of Hitler's paintings.

Alonso was also taken to task for not asking the photographer about the meaning of his work. But why should he have? So that Nathaniel could spout off some clueless rhetoric pretending to understand what black people go through in Detroit? Or so that he could admit that it was just a ploy to sell off an entire series of photographs?

He did ask black men for their opinion (and they were tough to find in that gallery, at most there were five black men among three hundred people or so packed in there). But there is only one man who would have anything meaningful to say about those photographs, and that is the black man who agreed to have a make-up artist put him in whiteface so he could be photographed around the city playing golf.

So in summary, I won't be expecting an invitation to speak at an NAACP event any time soon. Neither should Nathaniel C. Shannon.

Really, Director Vance?

It must have been a couple of weeks ago that I got back into watching NCIS: Los Angeles. They've been rerunning the last few episodes of Season 2. In the season finale, "Familia," we learn that NCIS director Leon Vance (Rocky Carroll) backs up all his critical files on his Microsoft SkyDrive. He asks Nell Jones (Renée Felice Smith) to disable the keystroke recognition software on her computer before he types in his password—

Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! Director Vance, head of an American intelligence agency, keeps his critical files on the Web just like that? Are you kidding me? Does this make any sense to you? It's one thing to hide things in plain sight, but this just seems idiotic to me. I don't keep critical files on the Web, and I don't even have a security clearance.

I don't know if this is true or not, but I'm told that at some places that deal with issues of national security, they remove the hard drives from the computers and store them in a vault at night. This on top of the fact that the janitors have to have security clearance: so, if one of them were to steal a computer, they would still not get any sensitive info out of it. Also, CIA and NSA employees can't even take cellphones, flash drives, etc., into the CIA or NSA Headquarters. I imagine similar measures are in effect at other intelligence agencies.

This takes the cake as the most ridiculous, stupid and awkward product placement I have ever seen in a TV show.

Family drama on Family Guy

Do you still watch Family Guy? Last episode I saw, Meg stood up for herself when the other family started members their usual, boring use-Meg-as-punching-bag schtick. As boring as that shtick is, it is nowhere as annoying as the shrillness of Meg standing up for herself. Well, thanks for making it very easy for me to change the channel to CBS to watch The Good Wife, a show that now comes on on Sunday nights.