Everyone One Deserves a little MAYHEM!

ok, so recently, you have to have seen these commercials: A guy, dressed in a suit, claims to be something, that distracts you from driving, or causes you to file an insurance claim, and says get allstate. its an insurance commerical, fine. but they have done something that very few commercials have done lately: NOT MADE ME BORED AFTER JUST ONE VIEWING!!! these commercials are great! i think the blend of cockiness followed by simulated bodily harm, really hits a nerve in the human pleasure center. and now, they've come out with city specific radio adds (well, i don't know if it happens in your city, Allstate actually started in Chicago, so it may just be here, iono, comment and tell me!), that are also genius. so i guess i'm just saying, way 2 go allstate, you found what worked and you're sticking with it, unlike geico, who's got 3 different mascots: the gecko, the caveman, and that face vincent price, (though the vincent price about wood chucks and a few of those new gecko ones are pretty funny, but PICK ONE AND STICK WITH IT!). THAT IS, whoa sry, left caps lock on there for a second, that is all, good by for now.

try and keep up.

ok, television is getting into a very BAD habit. i dont know what to call it, so i'll just call it "Plot Line ADD". there are some shows out there, that skip from scene to scene to scene to scene, all in the span of 10 minutes, and you're expected to assimilate a large amount of information very quickly, or to understand a small amount of information, even quicker. i'll give you 2 examples:

Better with you: a sitcom about 3 couples, all in various stages of their lives/relationships, 2 parents, married for a long time, the 1st daughter and her bf, who've been 2gether for 9 years, and the 2nd daughter who is getting married and having a baby after knowing a guy for like...3 weeks or something. but the premise is irrelevant. the problem is, the scenes go back and fourth so quickly, you can hardly keep up. the scenes only last like a minute or two, before changing to the next scene. for those of us who are older than lets say.....me, who can't operate a stove or print pictures or work a tv without the help of.........a millennial baby, i can see how one could easily get left behind in the speed of the show. (dont get me wrong, the show is hilarious, and i'm really glad to see that someone other than ashton kutcher still has a career after that 70's show, Debbie-Jo Rupp!) it's just fast paced thats all.

THE EVENT: SIT UP AND PAY ATTENTION! cause if your not, you'll be more lost than lost fans after the series finale. this show switches scenes after about 45 seconds, and each new scene has a new location and/or time period, so you have to mentally catalogue things, not only in local episode storyline terms, but also in overall, over arching terms. now lost started this trend of ridiculously large casts and plot lines (with a scifi twist i guess i have 2 stipulate, b/c soaps do the same thing, though they don't shift near as fast, or as often!), but THE EVENT ups the ante, and forces your brain to work harder than that college math final where you went out clubbing the night before the test (nobody else did that?). i read a book a while back that basically stipulated that the more pop culture evolves and pushes boundaries, the smarter we get. dramas went from the single plot of drag-net, to the double plot of starsky and hutch (they were always doing something at the begining and end of every episode), to the multiplot episodes of NYPD Blue (now this book was written just before Lost came out, so, that would have been the next evolutionary step, where as the Event is simply picking up speed on the same concept).

so is tv giving us ADD? are we being forced to thing quicker and in differening directions from minute to minute b/c of what we watch on tv? who really knows, who really cares? tv is for turning on, tuning in, and droping out. thats all i know.

Katy Perry needs to be Unplugged!

ok, don't take the title the wrong way. i really enjoy Katy perry's music. i like message of "firework" and the mental imagery of "teenage dream". and how catchy/addictive was "California Gurls"? i mean really! what i mean is, katy perry needs an acoustic album. now granted i've never seen her in concert or anything, but i did watch when she was the musical guest on SNL a few weeks (maybe months, my timeline is......relative these days) ago. and while it sounded a little weird, i understood why. because the songs that she sings are all modded, or electrified, or w.e. in a studio, with backup singers and echos and all kinds of tweaks and electronic sounds. now, theres nothing wrong with that, any good artist can appreciate all other forms of art for what they are and what reaction they're trying to get from their audience. so i see/hear the appeal of techno elements in bubble-gum pop music like that. but the reason it sounded so weird is because she was trying to recreate that sound in a live setting, which is foolish at best, and embarrassing at the worst (right ashley simpson? jk. (but not really)). so at the beginning of her songs, when its just her and the microphone, she sounds amazing (and i'd be willing to bet she actually has a really great voice, and then she would have to be exiled bc no one is that pretty, with that great a voice, and not a cylon. jk, again). so i think she needs to work it out with mtv, get unplugged back on the air, (part of a movement to bring MUSIC back to MUSICtelevision), or get in on that crossroads vibe over on CMT, with somebody like, sugarland, or little big town, or even a classic like reba or somebody, how awesome would that be? so, Katy perry, not that you'll ever see this or read this, but on the astronomically small chance you do? get unplugged, do an acoustic album, and show the world that your not all bubble gum pop. that you have a killer voice too.

What's in a Name?

OK, no seriously, WHAT IS THE EVENT!?!?!? this is a tv show that calls itself, "the Event" and yet, wont even tell you what it is. I mean, at least "Lost" had the decency to tell you how'd you feel when it started and when it ended (and pretty much all the time in between!) but "the Event" is a useless title. Unless i guess if you view it as a meta sort of thing, in so much as "the Event" is the event of everyone watching the show, or perhaps its a lesson in appreciation on the events of everyday life, saying that every moment is a big deal. i dont know, it's just annoying.

Not everything on here is gonna be me pontificating or me bitching at the universe. its my "online journal," ya know?