Author Archives

Telephone Tips from RadioShack

These Christopher Guest-directed ads have been running for a few months, but the lessons are important and under-appreciated.

Liveblog: LOST Finale

Spoiler alert: I’ve never seen this show, but everything I’ve overheard about it makes it sound like an experiment conducted by ABC to see how much nonsense a really devoted audience will tolerate. I haven’t heard anyone say a good thing about it in months, apart from a lot of “Watch it from the beginning [...]

Inverse relationships

This commercial makes me laugh every time. The worst companies have the best ad wizards.

Suggestion for criminal HR departments

Email scammers in the developing world have had tremendous success at relieving Americans of their money, but there’s much room for improvement. Checking my spam filter just now, I found an attempt from “PayPal” that began thus: Due to our last days online problems, many phishing attempts and identity-theft, we need to verify our members [...]

Summer Vacation Photoblog

Clarissa and I went to Seattle for a long weekend recently, and at the car-rental agency I learned why the U.S. automobile industry is in such bad shape: it produces offensive, humiliating machines like the Chevrolet HHR: