Radio Commercials

I have a car. It's awesome. As a result of its being so awesome, I spend a lot of time driving it. Actually, it's also (coincidentally) very convenient when I need to get somewhere. But I digress.

Whenever I drive my car, I listen to the radio. I understand that radio stations, just like all other, less necessary businesses, have to make money, and I have no issue with the number of commercials played or the time allotted them over the music. I have an issue with the quality. If that sounds ridiculous, it's because it is. I don't care. If the radio station I listen to is going to bombard me with commercials, then I have every right to say what I think of them.

Some commercials (a few of which I just heard today, actually) make claims so ridiculous it should be criminal. The people in charge of advertising these companies should be fired, because they failed even to leave me remembering the name of the company, or sued for "false advertising" or the like. Among these redonkulous (yes, I did just use that word) claims were these:

A good haircut is the key to male happiness.

A deck is like a living room without walls.

And finally, wireless internet is like a water park.

I don't know about you, but it's hard to believe a good haircut is the key to anyone's happiness, my deck in no way resembles a living room, and water parks and computers don't seem like a good mix to me. But maybe that's just me.

But of course, you cannot have one extreme without the other. Some commercials make statements that are so believable that they become obvious. For instance, ninety-nine cents is "not even a dollar," just in case you were wondering. That was a Coke commercial, so at least they succeeded on the memorability front.

There is a third category. It spawned from my inability to categorize one statement I heard. Cupid.com is "newer that new." Now, "Cupid.com" is the worst possible name for a website, regardless of its purpose, but that's beside the point. At first I thought it was so redundant it had to belong to the "obvious" category. But how can anything be "newer than new"? What does that even mean? It doesn't seem like it should be possible. It means absolutely nothing, that's what it means. It means Cupid.com wasted sixty-or-so seconds of my life on that advertisement, and far more than that given the amount of time I've spent thinking about it. That's what it means.