Main Page	THE RIKONIAN RANT
	What's Up With Ads?			February 20, 2000
				Current Column

I thought the menace had passed. I thought the evil was gone. But last night, as I watched some forgettable movie on one of the lesser basic cable channels, it had returned with a dark vengeance. I can no longer remain silent about this dark threat.
Of course, I speak of those shitty Old Navy commercials. I can only surmise that when the Village People sing about being "in the Navy" it is Old Navy to which they refer. When it was that stupid dog and that creepy old chick (Dame Edna?) it was lame enough, but they quickly added a menagerie of forgotten and forgettable semi-celebrities like Sherman Hemsley, Morgan Fairchild, and the chicks from Sister Sister (how many seasons did that show last, 1 one and a half?). I guess these poor schlubs had nowhere else to go now that Hollywood Squares upped its standards. And what's up with those twin morons they have now? It's almost like Kato Kaelin paid them to go on to make him look smarter. Pamela Anderson's twins are smarter than those two guys, even after they removed the silicon from them (you see, they make computer chips from silicon and, oh forget it!).
I have a question. Just exactly what the fuck is performance fleece? And why is there such an annoying ensemble of idiots on my television telling me to get it? Is it something you use while performing? Do street mimes wear it in the winter? Probably, mimes are damn annoying too.
And then they're trying to get me to buy cargo pants. What the fuck are cargo pants?! I thought all pants were part of a cargo at some time or other. Or are these the pants that those cargo cult guys wore? Somehow I doubt it. Cargo cultists are cool, Old Navy isn't.
The gap is annoying too. If I wanted to hear Vanilla Ice, I would buy his album. Vanilla Ice is annoying enough, but when you alternate back and forth between Vanilla Ice and christmas songs, it's even worse. What's next? They gonna have Billy Ray Cyrus sing Auld Lang Syne? And what the fuck is that song about anyway? "May old acquaintance be forgot?" What does that mean? Wait a second, I was talking about the damn Gap. They are opening a Gap in my local mall. After several years of holding out, they finally were corrupted. At least they don't have a Starbucks yet.
Commercials are out of control. I'm even getting sick of seeing Tom Green (and I'm a huge Tom Green fan). I've got to watch William Shatner sing an Unplugged set of Age of Aquarius so he can tell us about Priceline! And when I listen tot he radio, he's there telling me how Priceline got him a good rate on his flight and hotel. Hey Bill, you're a fucking multimillionaire! Fox could have a game show where people try to marry you! You don't have to be cheap about your frickin' airline ticket! And if it's that big a deal, just have your friend Scotty get you where you need to go. Since he conceived a son, we know he's capable of "beaming."
But the ones that piss me off the most are the local ads. The idiot store owners who think that they are good on TV just because they run a furniture shop. And the damn local news ads. If they're not hyping their gung ho investigative reporting (yeah, without Woodward and Bernstein over at Channel 12, we never would have found out that Joe Bob Baker in City Hall took 50 bucks from petty cash to buy his girl a new stove), they're hawking their fucking doppler radar. Every one of these ads is the same. They show a few ominous clouds, then you hear an announcewr who obviously dreams of the day that he can move up to the prestigious monster truck rally announcer circuit yammering on about how great Doppler rader is, and how station such and such has the best damn Doppler guy around. The most shameless I've seen is the Channel 7 ad where they go on about Bill Schubert, who is "the only man trained to use Doppler radar!" What worries me though, is that they have a picture of Bill in their ad, and he is pretty old. He will probably die soon, and I can only hope that he has found a worthy successor to the arcane knowledge that is, Doppler radar! I would hatew to see this awesome power fall into the hands of commies, or even worse, that secret cell of the Reich which hopes to one day make Channel 7's Doppler theirs and use it to take over the Earth by, er, predicting rain and stuff (hey, I never said these were smart Nazis). Anyway, I know it's kind of a roundabotu way of saying this but, Doppler-Lad, if you are reading this, please use your mighty Doppler powers to smite those frickin' Old Navy people. It should be easy. They're a navy, so they should be seaborne a lot. You could just give them false weather info and trick them into going into storms and getting sunk.