The Super Bowl is the day ad men dream of when they go to sleep. After all, nearly a third of the country will be watching the game, and many of them watch as much (or more) for the ads as they do for the sport. And why not? Super Bowl ads are always the wildest, most outrageous, most controversial commercials you'll see all year, and more people will be talking about them the next day than whatever goalie made a free throw from the green, or whatever it is they do.

So why not jump straight to the meat? Head to AdWeek and watch a lot of them right now. Learn how to tell when you need a new job, watch a conspicuously non-wired man in an avatar-filled world, see how insects are plotting to steal your refreshments, discover how Danica Patrick was enhanced, and get a jump start on getting this year's annoying SoBe Lifewater CG-lizard dance song stuck in your head.

You won't get all the ads there, and some of the video clips are
"teasers" for the actual commercials, which is just weird. But it's a
great pre-game kickoff for the main event… which will be Monday
morning when everyone just watches the ads on YouTube.

That wasn’t the message? It’s the one I got.

Many commercials seem oblivious to what viewers take away, relying on cuteness or snarkiness or just a love of weird CGI instead of, you know, promoting their product. I’d like to suggest that perhaps a bit more thought would be good.

What did I learn from the MasterCard commercial where zoo animals use an ailing zookeeper’s credit card to purchase helpful medicines and soothing refreshments for him while he remains sick at home? Why, I learned that identity theft is so easy with a MasterCard that a freaking elephant can use it and no one even asks for ID. Thanks MasterCard! Good to know!

Fortunately I already had and was pleased with Bright House before I saw the commercials claiming their services were so fantastic your annoying bathrobed relatives would never, ever leave, otherwise I’d be avoiding them (and my relatives) like the plague.

I refuse to try Orbit gum. Anything that will force me to shovel dirt in my mouth to somehow enhance my enjoyment is not something I feel comfortable with on my grocery list.

Apparently using NexTel walkie talkies will make me so efficient I will be encouraged to casually lean back in my chair, get caught by my boss, and promptly get fired. Shouldn’t there be some sort of warning label provided? “Smugness over use of this product may result in your ironic termination”? Watch those sales soar!

Axe Body Spray seems to be some sort of airborne roofie, causing women who would ordinarily cross the state to avoid you to suddenly start sniffing you uncontrollably, hanging over you, and moaning a lot. I’m seeing all sorts of legal problems down the road for this. What happens if you spray your dog with it? Or the bumper of a city bus?

These items just bother me, but the ominous Toyota Yaris downright scares me. Remember the ad where it smashed the cute little piggy bank and hoovered up the cash inside? What did that mean? Does the Yaris require regular injections of cash to prevent its murderous rampages, or does it just hate toys? Then, as I’m recovering from its brutal attack on the bank – or the gas pump spider or MP3 insect — it leaps up and violently reproduces asexually. Do I have any guarantee this will not happen on I-95? Maybe they’re trying to multiply fast enough to take on the Transformer cars in the upcoming auto-war, which will inevitably happen on a Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. Mechacar race war!

I will drive miles out of my way to avoid Burger King, for fear that a creepy monarch with a Mardi Gras head will leap out and engage me in some manner. Waking up next to him would not make me think of a hot and convenient breakfast. It would make me scrub my skin with Brillo for hours.

I also fear creepy and disturbingly cheerful whackjobs dancing at me for my Starburst Berries and Cream, creepy Asian guys challenging me to video games, a creepy William Shatner macking on helpless hotel clerks, the creepy guy with the guitar who wants to help me "enjoy" my Snickers, and the Vonage folks who want to hurl a box at my head.

Ever since Cocoa Puffs popularized hallucination as a desirable effect – even as a kid I felt sorry for Sonny as he fought against his addiction only to be brought down by those little preteen pushers — advertisers have tried to convince me that I should try their legal highs just because a marketing executive had a fever dream and turned it into an advertising campaign. Opening Skittles causes colorful, localized meteorological events. Using Ask.com will get me surrounded by dancers with, for some reason, Kato Kaelin’s face. iTunes brings me a colorful Paul McCartney singing a fairly bland tune. Going to Avis will result in agents who open the mouths and broadcast that they want to rock. (I dread this, because I just know if I go to rent a car I’ll start emitting Karen Carpenter and get stuck with a 30-year old Volvo) None of these events encourages me to go shopping as much as it encourages me to hide under my covers.

You know what? I want the Sasquatch to catch, kill, and eat the beef jerky guys. I really do. I want the people drinking Red Bull and floating about to get sucked into jet engines. I want Chad the AllTell guy to wake up and realize the whiny, nerdy friends in his circle need to be beaten up. I want the monster robot ninjas to catch the pink-haired esurance girl and pound her into anime jelly. And I’m not a violent person.

Why are people kicking trees in the Wendy’s commercial? I suppose it’s to symbolize uniformity, but I can’t say I really identify with the guy wearing the Pippi Longstocking hairdo and I don’t think Dave Thomas would have, either. You go on, dude, I’ll kick the tree for awhile.

Why is a loud duck a good spokesthing for an insurance company and not, say, a meal?

Commercials are supposed to encourage you to make good associations with their product, which makes me wonder why a flea treatment company wants me to associate their product with an annoying repetitive song (“Ain’t no bugs on me!”). I can't tell you which product, because for personal protection I change channels the second I realize this song is about to start. For the same reason I can't tell you what car dealers have the best deals, or which appliance company has the best scratch and dent specials. As soon as I hear shrieking you've lost me. This is why I watch all my shows on DVDs these days.

The Visa commercials where everyone is whirling in well-oiled, choreographed movements at bakeries or garden centers everything crashes to a halt because someone dared to pay with cash? That doesn't make me want to get a Visa. It makes me want to start paying for everything in pennies.

People, please put a little thought into your commercials, because I’m putting in way too much.

"If we hear back from a life form in space today – whether NASA astronauts or a signal from some life form on Mars – we'll send up some Original Recipe Chicken," said KFC President Gregg Dedrick, quoted in a Reuters article.

Which opens up a greasy cardboard bucket of questions. How, exactly, will they do this? Has the KFC Corporation secretly been developing their own space program to enable geosynchronous takeout? What about the other franchises? Are we just now finding out about a frantic fast food space race? How far away are Happy Meal payloads? What happens when the delivery gets to ISS and the astronauts discover they forgot the potato wedges? And is this the first step towards marketing to extraterrestrials, or is this a subtle way to stop alien attacks by clogging invaders with cholesterol?

These are exciting times, my friends.

"Hello, I'm a candidate for an elected position. I believe in family, tradition, and God, whenever anybody's watching, and that's more than you'll get from my opponent if even half of the stuff I made up about him is true.

"I have served the needs of my constituents — keeping in mind that my accountant, car dealer, bookie, and mistress are all registered voters in my district — and I stand proudly on the parts of my record that I'll let you see. Big changes are necessary to bring this country around to the direction I want to go, and there's every chance that the people of America might benefit accidentally.

"Like with that bill I pushed forward that helped a lot of old people or something. I don't remember it, frankly, but I'm proud that I inadvertently helped so many people that weren't on my payroll. Vote for me, and it could happen again!

"Our country is at a crossroads, possibly. My honored opponent has made certain accusations about my character and my campaign. I'd like to refute those claims by getting indignant and working my carefully hand-picked audiences into a righteous rage, which is faster and keeps me from having to actually answer anything. Then I'll spin it like a judo master until it's somehow his fault.

"Which is as good a time as any to back away from my previous suggestions that voting for my opponent causes unemployment, hives, or spontaneous human combustion, or that the design on his campaign buttons is secretly an arcane sigil praising the glory of the Dark Lord, Ba'alzebub. Probably not true.

"Nor have I actually ever seen him, personally, eat a baby, despite the blatant hints on the campaign fliers I've been mailing out by the metric ton.

"In fact, most of what I've said about my opponent is an exaggerated and badly twisted version of something he said once in high school as a joke, which my team then carefully pulled out of context and edited into a continuous loop. We also watched over 300 hours of video to find this one horrible picture of him, where I think he's in the middle of a sneeze.

"Then we faded it to a reversed kind of scary black-and-white effect, and yow! You wouldn't want to vote for anybody that looked like that, would you? Here, I'll scribble horns and a mustache on him. Hee hee! Look at me everyone, I'm a big dufus!

"My fellow Americans, is this the face of someone who deserves your vote? I don't think so, and I hope you don't, either.

"Instead, check out these pictures of me standing near real American workers. I'm wearing a borrowed work jacket, here's me in something called a "baseball" cap, and in this one I've even got a borrowed hard hat. That proves I'm the sort of upstanding guy who will say he's working for you.

"Now I'm not going to lie to you and say that I'll perform honorably, consistently, or even legally sober. Plus there's that whole "pants-at-the-office" thing I'm still having trouble with.

"What I can promise is that I'll give lip service to whatever you think is important. I'll smile at everybody no matter what I'm thinking. I'll try really, really hard to never commit a crime when I'm physically at my desk.

"And I can absolutely guarantee you that a vote for my opponent will bring devastation, destitution and despair to the entire house I live in.

"I'm a candidate for an elected position, and apparently I approved this commercial."

Oddly enough, CG artists striving to make their creations more realistic will import imperfections and lopsided features and the result is more believable as a human being than any given Playboy centerfold of the last five years. So why bother using attractive women in the first place? Soon they'll be able to drag any person at all in front of a camera and snap a picture for later improvement into godlike status without having to deal with divas or drug rehab schedules. And thinking that led me to… this.

I couldn't help it, I succumbed to peer pressure (since, apparently, my peers consist of Ken dolls) and fixed myself. It took awhile.

The result? I now have none of those pesky skin pores, my features are more even, my hair has attained the fullness you only get with top quality carpeting, and my face can now withstand small arms fire. And I'm still not GQ-worthy, largely due to my lack of a good Depp filter. But at least now my self-esteem issues will get a good workout knowing that an idealized version of myself exists somewhere for the pleasure of others while the real me sits in a dark room somewhere and cries softly.

So, to help kill the "beauty is what they tell you it is" belief deader than Botoxed skin, I offer you the following. After you watch the Dove commercial, check out this demonstration of how magazine cover models are made, not born.
Then browse through the demo pages for this professional artist. And think about it. That glamorous goddess you're fantasizing about?

For all you know, in real life she might look like me.

Advertisers.

When you watched "Smallville" last night, while you were grumbling about the 27 minutes of commercials for other CW shows that kept interrupting you from watching this one, and all with those green construction-paper style graphics that made you wonder if they decided to save money by hiring kids to do them — you might have missed this:

Chloe and Jimmy Olson were in a car in the woods at night. They talk, there's some playful banter… and they both stop, wrapped in their own thoughts, giving us plenty of time to clearly hear the commercial for the new Toyota Camry hybrid on the car radio. Ha! Take that, TiVo!

A few weeks ago Clark fought a Batgirl-ish heroine who used Acuvue contacts, according to the carefully placed box. Last season Lois happened to be driving the same model car that was sponsoring the show and she even used its custom features to distract a security guard (guard distraction not guaranteed, see local dealer for details).

Hardly new, of course, and hardly surprising. TV shows started out blatantly sponsored, and with people buying shows on DVD and skipping past commericials with their DVRs the ad people have to do something in defense. So we get Buicks in "Desperate Housewives," Oreos in "7th Heaven," Chilis in "The Office," and probably Home Depot shovels for "Heroes."

What do you think? Annoying? Invisible? Inevitable? How long before characters in one CW show start talking about how great the others are?

It's touching, really. The little notes, the shy reminders, the e-mails. Perhaps I've forgotten? Maybe I didn't notice? They are so sorry for the intrusion but they know, with every fiber in their pages, the unbearable anguish I would surely feel were I to miss even a single issue and so they chide me, gently, affectionately, with discreet letters and whispered notices and great big honking wraparound covers with 72-point type that let people know from across the street my subscription will wither and die in just six more painfully short weeks.

I just laugh heartily and put it off another month, because that's the kind of guy I am.

It's fun to wait as long as possible to see just how far the company is willing to go to keep you signed up. I let the renewal notices stack up and measure 'em periodically against a ruler. So far EW is nowhere near the record (Science Fiction Book Club, 1982) but they're certainly presenting a respectable showing.

I already know I'll be renewing — I like EW — so the near-constant entreaties to come back and reaffirm my loyalty are just funny. It's a different thing entirely when I don't want the product or service, of course. Like the record club I finally escaped in 1984 that still sends out determined representatives to hide in my bushes, ready to sign me up again in a moment of weakness. Like the credit card that could only be canceled by traveling to a hidden valley in the Congo, defying deadly traps and mythic beasts, and bringing back the Emerald Eye of Raheesh before the month rolled over and another service charge could be added. My phone company wants my Internet business; my Internet provider wants to offer me phone service, and neither of them seems to understand the words "no," "I'm not interested," or "Seriously, I have a gun."

An even more persistent example of corporate clinginess was provided by blogger Vincent Ferrari last month when he attempted, foolishly, to cancel his unused AOL account. The recording of that attempt — long, agonizing, familiar-sounding minutes of the AOL retention rep continuing to deliver his "we-know-you-don't-really-want-to-cancel" spiel while a frustrated Ferrari was reduced to doggedly reciting "cancel my account" over and over — swept around the Internet for a few weeks and resulted in the firing of that rep, a public apology from AOL that declared this should never happen, and an avalanche of comments from people that declared it happens constantly. That's how devoted to you these companies are.

Companies love you. You're all they think about. And breakups are always rough for everyone involved.

Right now your phone service rep is lying across his or her desk, doodling hearts around your account number and hoping you'll prove your affection by signing up for more calling features. It's a true love, a lasting love, a love that can only be expressed by a 50%-or-higher retention rate.

Rather than get annoyed or frustrated, I suggest you enjoy it. I love it. It's like being the popular kid in school, in a sad, pathetic way. Suddenly everyone's after me, I'm the one they absolutely have to have, it's all about me, me, me! And my checking account, of course.

So I toy with them. I'm coy. When called, I dither about and finally say that maybe I'll renew, I just don't know… Once I even called my cellphone salesperson while I was standing in front of her competitor's booth in the mall, shamelessly flirting with a new 2-year contract, just to hear her beg me to stay. Oh, I'm a hussy, no two ways about it.

And I'm getting worse. Next time I get calls for Internet access I'm thinking of inviting the reps over to have them fight it out in my front yard, possibly with rakes. The winner, assuming one survives, can crawl inside and hook up my new service .

As long as I'm not bothered. I'll be too busy reading my Entertainment Weekly.

Both networks have been competing for the same 18-34 year-old viewers, even to the point of entering random houses at night and forcing hapless teenagers to watch "One Tree Hill" at gunpoint. But neither UPN or The WB have achieved financial success despite the brilliant, envelope-pushing marketing of, respectively, a schizophrenic Star Trek show and an animated frog.

Now with this new venture, named after the first letters of current network owners CBS (Corporation) and Wacko Warner (Animaniac), CW has the opportunity to trim back the failing shows, push the good ones, and otherwise cram everything together into a programming juggernaut of well-meaning mediocrity. It can't fail.

So, coming this fall, the new CW lineup!

"Reba Hates Chris" — Chris Rock's loveable, scrappy scamp is taken away from Bed-Stuy and placed in foster care in the Texas home of realtor Reba Hart. This transplanted child star in a strange world is sure to be a hit, especially if he gets some sort of addictive catch-phrase that will haunt him the rest of his life.

"Friday Night Sorummy Smackdown" — The sisters from "Related" have taken their convoluted card game to a new level that involves full-contact play, referees, ring boys, and bitter feuds. Watch as Marjee finally gets the approval from her family that she craves after brutally maiming all of them with a folding chair.

"One Tree Ever Seventh Beach Angst Hour" — Drama and heartache ensue in this hideously complicated morass of relatives, young love, interpersonal relationships, Christian values, bizarre plot twists, and real world events experienced in a world without, apparently, any ugly people.

"America's Next Fixer-Upper" — Random people are plucked off the street by burly assistants to be vigorously remade into stunning fashionplates. Hostess Tyra Banks selects the lucky victim, who is then treated to a forced makeover and haircut at Cuts (will Walt make a move?), squeezed into vacuum-sealed, figure-forcing lingerie designed by Arnold Undergarments (can Mitchee keep Farrah from cutting off the circulation by mistake?), and romantically analyzed by the staff of Love, Inc. The reformed, heavily plasticized, and probably sedated result will then stagger across the runway for our viewing pleasure.

"Veronica Mars" — Veronica investigates her most dangerous and puzzling mystery yet: why "Charmed" is still taking up valuable broadcast time.

"Supersmall Naturalville" (OK, they're both on the WB, but we'll need the programming space) — The Winchester brothers' '67 Chevy Impala rolls into a small town in Kansas to investigate reports of a superstrong, superfast college student who keeps being earnest at people and who seems to show up at a lot of crime scenes. Dean goes out of his way to avoid Lana for some reason, while Sam sets up a trap to try and out-hunk Clark. Next episode: a cast member dies, but not quickly enough for the viewers.

"Some Half-Hour Comedy Featuring Brothers/Sisters/Divorced Partners/Potential Romantic Leads Of The Right Ethnic/Age Demographic Who Are Forced to Work/Live Together Despite Their Differences, Plus Their Wacky Friends and Nutty Parents" — It sells itself.

Set your TiVos, you won't want to miss a moment! They really, really hope.

Soon afterwards the new season started and, fresh from our newly reawakened "Smallville" appreciation, we eagerly tuned in to the WB's Thursday night. And we hated it.

Not the show, mind you. The experience of regular broadcast television.

We couldn't click past the theme song! We couldn't fast-forward past the whiny Lana scenes! (Although Lana's getting better; we'd probably fast-forward past the Lois scenes instead.) We have to wait a whole week or more for the next one! There are so many commercials you can go watch another show while waiting for this one to come back. I'm sure there's some reason not to turn it off and wait for the DVD release but I can't think of any. And neither, apparently, can many other people.

"The Sopranos." "Seinfeld." "M*A*S*H." "Roseanne." "Chapelle's Show." "Friends." In 2000, industry analysts said the studios made more than $100 million from television show DVDs. Last year they made more than $2 billion and they're expected to clear $3 billion in 2006, probably just from "Lost." Studio execs are diving into their vaults scrambling for anything they can cram onto a disc because we'll buy it and spend hours glued to our sets watching it.

I mean that literally. Thousands of viewers are choosing to absorb months of entertainment in long weekend runs — especially such plot-heavy shows as "24" and "Lost" — leaving such quaint concepts as "social life" and "hygiene" far behind while teams of trained emergency rescue personnel break out the crane-mounted reciprocating saws to cut through solidified wedges of almond roca, Mountain Dew, and kettle chips and lever encrusted viewers out of their couches before untimely bathroom-related disasters erupt.

This is, rather understandably, worrying advertisers. If I can get my shows in a single ad-free gulp, or TiVO them, or download small ad-free versions the next day on iTunes, how are they going to get my attention?

Some advertisers like Ford Motor and XM Satellite have tried sponsoring commercial-free shows. Gabrielle's Buick on "Desperate Housewives," Subway's chicken parmesan sandwich on "Will & Grace" and half the challenges on "The Apprentice" demonstrate the growing appeal of blatant product placement. What's left? Sponsor patches on Simon Cowell's jacket? Is this the beginning of the end for television advertising?

Instead, I see it as a new beginning.

You can't inject advertising into our programs any more; we'll just find new ways to block it. But you know where to find us. We're at home watching the second season of "The L-Word" and if you show up with a tempting, ice-cold Coke we'll buy it off you in a heartbeat. Before long we'll need to.

We won't be going to the gym or the park any more, not when we're chain-watching "Lost" and Walt's just been kidnapped. Soon we'll be unable to leave the house at all. Due to our collective, obsessive need to see every episode of "Oz" without a break our bloated bodies will adapt to fit perfectly into a La-Z-Boy recliner or across a Sleep Number Mattress (even as our eyes evolve the ability to change channels by blinking) and we'll need a vast army of service personnel ready and willing to fulfill our sedentary needs.

Bring back the door-to-door salesman.

Bring us breakfast, lunch and dinner from your agencies' fast food clients. Sell us soap and shampoo even as you help us reach the awkward places. Bring your company's beer and clothing and mortgage lenders and male enhancement drugs to our houses and we'll buy them because we won't be able to go shop for anything different. Sales will go to those advertisers that can get to our door first and fastest. Throw a celebrity in your car and haul him or her around to yell endorsements through our windows.

Not only will your sales improve, you'll stimulate the economy and lower unemployment. You'll finally have the captive audience you've always dreamed of.

And, frankly, we could use the interruption to grab a bathroom break.

***

Planned Parenthood recently filed lawsuits over "Choose Life" license plates, claiming that offering only one side of an issue was a violation of First Amendment rights. South Carolina State Rep. John Graham Altman, probably only half joking, suggested that "Choose Death" license plates be issued as an alternative. Now, there's no way I'm jumping in the middle of this particular hot button controversy, but you know what?

I really, really want a "Choose Death" license plate.

Not to express any specific philosophical views, but because it's just vague and unsettling enough that people would give me plenty of room on the highway for fear I might suddenly make my choice on the I-95 overpass.

***

Why doesn't anyone use the word "android" anymore?

***

Why am I seeing more television show and video game commercials at movie theaters? Is it really in the movie studio's best interest to remind me that I could be enjoying myself at home? With better popcorn?

***

Can we get a series of pocket size guides that tell you exactly what foods taste like, so you don't have to guess from the cryptic menu descriptions? I don't want the nutritional content or calorie counts, I want to know what I'm about to bite into and how far I should spit it afterwards.

"What the Heck Am I Eating? (Chinese)" might include "Soy sauce: tastes like liquid salt, with a smoky flavor" and handy tips, such as what that weird green stuff is and exactly which part of the duck that duck sauce comes from. Other variants could include "What the Heck Am I Eating? (Mexican)" and so on for Tex-Mex, Southern BBQ, Roadside Diner ("On the Go Chicken Sandwich: contains no actual meat so it's vegetarian-friendly, if anything that tastes like a shoe insert on watery white bread can be considered friendly to anyone"), Frozen Dinners, etc. They'd sell.

***

Getting a nagging song out of your head really isn't that difficult if you have a brick.

***

When you go to see "Revenge of the Sith," again, don't bother trying to follow the plot or the character motivations. Focus instead on what the movie was clearly all about, what Lucas obviously prizes over all else.

Ships.

Ships landing. Ships taking off. Ships flying past other ships. Ships entering orbit. Ships leaving orbit. Ships filling the background of every scene like flies in the Everglades. Fully 20 minutes of the movie, minutes that would otherwise have been totally wasted on character development, were used to show every single departure and every single arrival of every single character in a ship.

Watching one scene when Anakin gets out of bed and goes to a different room, I was honestly shocked he didn't climb out the window into a ship to do it. Followed, of course, by Padme in her nightgown, and a different ship, and possibly a chase scene.

***

It is so much easier, and almost as worthwhile, to skip all the security hassles and police problems and just stalk celebrity look-alikes instead.

***

If drivers' licenses are supposed to help authorities identify you, shouldn't they be pictures of you looking guilty? Maybe running away, looking back over your shoulder? Or through an open car window, looking panicky and drunk?

Personally I think the general self-esteem of people in this country started going down after photo IDs become prevalent and everyone began carrying around a picture of themselves looking like a screenshot from "America's Most Wanted." I think the DMV should hire a glamour photographer so that for a small upcharge you could get an ID you'd be proud to whip out. More money for the state, and the benefit to the national psyche would be immeasurable.

***

Hotel heiress Paris Hilton is now reportedly engaged to shipping heir Paris Latsis. I'm trying to care, I really am, but it's just not working. So, how should we in the sensationalistic media refer to them now? Parises? Paris squared? Parii?

***

Enough for now, I need something to think about on the way home. Hmm. A pair of Paris? Would their kids be Parisites?