My son – and I’m not making this up – actually rewinds and plays commercials on Tivo. of course, these ar commercials for sugary breakfast cereals, elementary school weaponry, and movies, but whatever. I’ve seen him pause commercials so he can take a bathroom break.

This is the future of America, y’all.

Anyway, there are a couple of commercials that are annoying enough that I’m going to write about them. Yay.

Chevrolet has one where they show their (car, truck, whatever) and then run a couple lines from American Pie: “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie / Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry”. This is cute because somebody used “chevy” in a song! And it rhymes with levee, which we all know worked so well in New Orleans a couple summers ago. Now, General Motors apparently they bought into the “classic rock will sell cars” idea years ago. Who can forget the ’24 Hour Test Drive’ where they had snippets from Paradise by the Dashboard Light (“will you love me, will you love me forever”), which is of course the quintessential song about pre-marital sex (I’ll say whatever I have to (lie) to get in your pants, all while in a car. How American!). In this case (we’re back to the Chevy commercial now, try and keep up) they leave out the next two lines – “Them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye, singing this’ll be the day that I die”, which is really the demographic they are trying to reach – hard drinking good old boys with a death wish. That thing got a Hemi?

The other commercial is the one where all the brightly dressed people are bopping along, buying their consumer goods with their Visa cards, and then along comes some fool with – GASP – cash, and it stops the whole merry-go-round. Because the clerk, having trained for years in American schools, cannot possibly count change. In another commercial in this series, the party is brought to a halt by someone who dares to write a personal check. Oh my! And of course, the message everyone should get from this is how easy it is for a thief to spend all your money in your Visa check account, because at no time do you see the clerk ever check an ID.

I like this Visa commercial much better.