Guys like to deal in statements, in commands, in Jen Aniston cleavage references.  We’ll be the ones asking the questions, thank you very much.  Everyone else can shut the hell up – including and especially every late night host not named Conan O’Brien.  Don’t ask us where we want to go for lunch, what we’re wearing tonight, or what time we should leave for the funeral.  If we knew/cared, we’d be doing it already.

There’s no question that questions suck, but, as with all societal ills (and Shia Labeouf movies), there are some that suck more enthusiastically than others.  For example, “Do you like it when I do my hair like this” isn’t necessarily as bad as “How come your Facebook status still says ‘single’” but it’s a far sight worse than “What day is it?”  And don’t even get me started on credibility killers like “why do guys think it’s hot when two girls kiss” or “do you think you could date a girl who was still in high school?”

And yet, even these are not the worst offenders.  It gets much, much worse.  Allow me to present, for your consideration, the worst question in the English language.

“Hey, can I ask you something?”

For starters, it’s a question about asking a question, and, as such, is meaningless and entirely unnecessary.  But that’s not the worst of it.  I can deal with unnecessary.  Katy Perry is unnecessary and I still like her.  No, the problem with this question is the specter of doom that comes with it.  It never comes alone and it never comes in peace.  No one ever says, “hey can I ask you something – are you gonna eat the rest of that?”  Or “hey, can I ask you something – how bout them Packers?”

When you hear “hey, can I ask you something”, especially within the context of a dating relationship, you can be sure that a heavy conversation is on the way.  She wants to talk about her mean boss, her hot sister, or whether or not you’ve read that Joshua Harris book she gave you.  Or maybe it’s not that.  Maybe she just wants to talk about “us.”

“Hey can I ask you something – how come you never use your ‘pookey-poo voice’ when we’re at Buffalo Wild Wings with your friends?”  “Hey can I ask you something – if I was paralyzed in a car crash that totally wasn’t my fault, would you still find me attractive?”  It’s like the 4^th Horseman of the Apocalypse – “Its rider’s name was Death, and Hell followed close behind him.” (Rev. 6:8)

This is why, when asked “hey, can I ask you something”, everything inside a guy wants to scream, “No.  NO!  A thousand times, NO!!  In the name of all that is pure and holy, please do not ‘ask me something.’”  But we can’t say that.  Saying that would be an admission of guilt.  So we say “yes” and we turn to face the firing squad.  For my money, I don’t know if there’s a more terrifying moment in human existence than the seconds that pass from the utterance of “hey, can I ask you something” to the asking of the actual question.  Maybe being buried alive.  But probably not.

And it’s all so easily avoidable!  Got something serious to talk about?  Did we say/do/drink something that’s been eating you up inside for the past month?  Just come out with it!  Skip the intro, skip the solicitation of permission – just ask the damn question. We don’t want to talk about it.  We don’t even want to think about it.   But we’re going to anyway.  This is your world; we’re just living in it.  You know it.  We know it.  The people sitting next to us at Panda Express know it.  So let’s just get it over with.

Because, honestly, can I tell you something?

We really don’t care.  Really.

Typically, this is where the Ted Haggard references and “Weinergate” jokes would begin, but this is not your typical story of clerical indiscretion.  Ben Pritchett doesn’t go to Taboo because he’s “into that kind of thing.”  He goes to work.  He goes with permission from his wife and the blessings of his church’s elder board.

Pritchett’s presence at the strip club on this particular evening is part of a ministry focus that he terms “radical relevancy.”  Within the parameters of this initiative, student ministry professionals have license to experiment with all manner of vice in an effort to reach America’s jaded and over-stimulated “Youtube Generation” for the Lord.

After a young woman who calls herself Chastity finishes providing Pritchett with his 3^rd lap dance (aka “immersion experience”) of the evening, the 27 year-old father of four offers some insight as to why his unconventional approach is necessary.

“It used to be that all a youth pastor needed to connect with teens was a pair of cargo shorts and a soul patch.  Maybe some Ben Folds glasses.  Not anymore.  Not when parents are as cool as they are these days.  Moms and dads have Facebook accounts.  They’re hosting post-prom keg parties.  They’re listening to Cee Lo Green.  And if parents are that hip, how’s a Christian Education major like me supposed to stay edgy yet approachable?  I’ll tell you how – booby bars.”

Pritchett, a 4^th generation youth pastor, goes on to say that he first attempted to bridge the generation gap through more traditional means before resorting to his current “shock and awe” approach.

“Listen, broskie, I did it all,” says Pritchett, motioning to his “I Heart Liberty City” T-Shirt to add emphasis to his point.  “I was dropping S-bombs and ‘tard’ in casual conversation.  I was re-tweeting Texts From Last Night during church.  I was watching hours of Spike TV every night.  It wasn’t enough.  I mean, honestly, how many Lonely Island lyrics can one person memorize?”

Apparently not enough.  Citing the Apostle Paul’s exhortation to “become all things to all people” Pritchett began engaging in what he calls “testimony enhancement” exercises.  It started with Four Loko’s and Judd Apatow director’s cuts, progressed rapidly to experimentation with low grade narcotics, and eventually landed him at Taboo, where he can regularly be found dumping trash bags full of offering-plate subsidized singles onto the heads of cosmetically enhanced teen runaways.

Pritchett says it’s too early to tell if his time at Taboo is having an impact on the kids, but initial signs are positive.

“The guys in my Tuesday night small group have all responded really well to my ‘tales of T&A,’’ says Pritchett as he polishes off another Michelob Ultra.  “They’re engaged.  They ask questions.  They stay afterward to discuss it in greater detail.  It’s been really cool to see.”

He also brushes off any implications that his nonchalant engagement with skin bars might be having a negative effect on his students by making morally questionable behavior seem cool or somehow sanctifying.

“It’s like my first boss at the West Orange KFC told me: it doesn’t matter where you get your appetite, as long as you eat at home.  That’s something that I think is so important for the youth of today to understand.”

You can now tell your friends that the obscure humor site you follow gets roughly as much traffic as Texts From Last Night gets every fifteen minutes.  And it only took us 21 months to get there!  We’d like to thank all of you who have been reading, linking, and commenting over the past two years – especially Mrs. Woodyard and Mrs. McCarthy who account for approximately 65% of our hits.  We couldn’t have done it without you.  Literally.

Episode 18: “God, Grills, and Girly-Men”

Finally, after three years, Elijah (aka E-Jay) gets a word from the Lord saying, “Go back and face your old nemesis Ahab and tell him that I’m about to rock his world and, if he’s lucky, I might even send some rain his way because – let’s be honest – all the trees are dead.”

So E-Jay walks his emaciated self back to Jerusa-Vegas and heads straight for Ahab’s house (picture Master P’s house from Season 3 of Cribs, but with bigger dungeons).  He rolls up to the door and says, “Wat up Ahab, you big dumbass?” (Yes, E-Jay has some stones.)

And Ahab’s all like, “Oh look, it’s the guy who ruined my life.”  And E-Jay’s like, “Psssh, whateva, you ruined your own life when you stopped praying and started letting your whore wife manage your career.”  And Ahab’s like, “Good point.”

So Elijah tells Ahab to text all the prophets of Asherah and all the prophets of Baal and everyone else who doesn’t think God is awesome and to tell them to meet him on top of this one mountain because he’s ready to make like Ron Artest and crack some skulls.

So everyone gets together up on Mount Carmel.  And my boy E-Jay get’s up there in front of God and everyone and says, “Hey everybody.  Thanks for coming out today.  I think your gods suck.”  (Like I said, the dude’s got some cojones.)

Now the thing to remember about the prophets of Baal and Asherah is that they’re pretty much the Twilight fans of 1500 BC.  And by that I mean: they’re a bunch of little bitches.  So no one says anything.  They just twitter amongst themselves about how Elijah is a hater and how he kind of looks like Osama Bin Laden.

Hearing no objections, E-Jay keeps tearing them a collective new one.  “Would you make up your minds already?!  It’s always Edward this, Jacob that; I swear, every minute I spend with you people I feel like I’m getting more retarded.”

E-Jay says it’s time to figure out once and for all which supernatural being is a baller and which one(s) is a Betty White,  so he suggests they build two grills and throw a slab of Angus on each.  One caveat: they can’t use charcoal or matches or Girl Scout Juice to light them; they’ve got to ask their favorite supernatural star to start the grills for them.

Is this your deity?

Team Baal and Team Asherah may be little bitches, but they also know enough about E-Jay to know that if they back down now, he’ll put them on blast on his next LP, with a song called “God, Grills, and Girly-Men” or something like that.  So they accept the challenge.

The Baalites and Asheraans go first.  They put on a bunch of costumes like they’re going to a midnight premier and dance around their grill shouting out to their gods.  It’s amateur hour at Mt. Carmel: half post-Prom field party, half MGMT video, all fodder for an embarrassing Facebook album.  This goes on for the better part of the morning.  As you’ve probably guessed, Baal and Asherah are about as real as the United States’ chances at The World Cup so, of course, nothing happens.

Around lunchtime, Elijah has had enough.  He starts dogging on the other prophets saying stuff like “maybe your gods are taking a leak, maybe they’re passed out on the pool table, or maybe they’re just real hungover and don’t feel like raining down fire at the moment.”  He also holds up a big sign that says “EPIC FAIL.”  Classic E-Jay

The other prophets are tired and irritable after their morning of dancing so they don’t take too kindly to E-Jay’s lip.  They say, “Screw you Elijah.  Let’s see you do better, you flip-phone-using old man.”  Like I said, they’re at least half retarded.

So Elijah goes over to his homemade Weber and says a quiet prayer his God who happens to also be the Sovereign Lord of the entire universe.  And before he can even finish his prayer, fire falls from the sky and consumes the steaks, the wood, and the entire grill. (I think this probably looked like that part in Independence Day when the laser blasts destroyed New York, Los Angeles, and Washington DC.)

Everyone is stunned and afraid and can do nothing but sit and watch as E-Jay dances around the mountaintop flexing his muscles and shouting “One shot!” like he’s freaking Ronnie from Jersey Shore. When he finishes rubbing it in everyone’s face, he rounds up all the prophets of Baal and Asherah, takes them down near the brook Kishon, and slaughters them.  Hahaha.  Classic E-Jay.

Sadly, murdering the losing team has since been made illegal.

Oh well, no sense fighting it.  We can’t all be Major League Baseball chaplains or “religion consultants” for M. Night Shyamalan movies.  Jonah wasn’t thrilled about going into ministry either and everyone at Sea World can tell you how that worked out for him.  (Note: too soon?)

But let’s not harp on the negatives.  There are plenty (i.e. one or two) reasons to be excited about your new calling.  For starters, at least you weren’t called to something really awful, like celibacy or accounting.  (Same thing, I know.)  For seconds, thanks to advances in modern spirituality, church planting isn’t nearly as inconvenient as it used to be.

Fortunately for you, heroes of the faith have spent the past two millennia planting churches in some of the worst locations imaginable (i.e. Europe, most of Africa, urban centers, the East Coast, pretty much everywhere that gets really cold or really hot).  What does that leave for you?  It leaves the only region on the planet where people still possess the requisite leisure time and sunshine to reflect on the Lord as the Bible intended: Southern California.  It seems the Judsons and Livingstones of the world, in their haste to take the Word to the ends of the earth, neglected the reprobates on the beaches and at the burrito stands.  It is to them whom you are called.

But NOT SO FAST.  It takes more than a Bible major and a soul patch to set up a pulpit in a palm grove.  What is this, Pensacola, Florida?  Hahaha! But seriously, there are rules.  There are processes to employ and procedures to follow.  It’s not as easy as you think.  But fret not my California-bound cleric.  We have assembled all the necessary activities in an easy to read, easier to follow webinar.  Follow the steps outlined below and Rick Warren will be coming to your conferences by Christmas.

1)      Take up surfing – If you moved to Russia, you’d grow a beard.  If you moved to Vietnam, you’d eat dog meat.  If you move to Southern California, you must learn how to surf.  People aren’t much interested in this Jesus fellow until they find out what you know about Kelly Slater.

2)      Throw out all your close toed shoes – if I have to explain this further, you might be in over your head.  While you’re at it, go ahead and donate all your non-Hurley, Quicksilver, or Billabong clothing to the poor-in-fashion people at Old Navy.

3)      Rent out a middle school gym, local theatre, or abandoned storefront for your Sunday services.  In addition to the obvious financial benefits, your humble accommodations will further separate your “gatherings” from the stodgy old codgers down the street at the 1^st Presbyterian Church of Buzzkills.  Cause let’s be honest, is there anything less chill than property ownership?  No, there is not.

4)      Come up with a monosyllabic, vaguely biblical, one word name for your congregation. F words seem especially popular.  The Field, The Flood, and The Flock are all excellent examples.  But they’re already taken so come up with your own F’in name.  Whatever you decide upon, make sure it (a) conceals the nature of your organization from casual visitors and (b) comes with a built in sermon whenever someone asks for further clarification.

5)      In the spirit of sneak attack evangelism, don’t hesitate to season your opening worship set with songs by secular or “trans-orthodox” groups like Owl City, Band of Horses, and Maroon 5.  If God can speak to us through nature, he can certainly speak to us through “Fireflies.”

6)      Each sermon should contain at least two surf-related illustrations.  This will hold your audience’s attention and will ensure that, at least twice weekly, they’ll understand what you’re talking about.  Words like “rad”, “gnarly”, and “badass” should be used liberally when describing Jesus, especially his interactions with Pharisees or money changers.

7)      Try to minimize the attention brought to the weird or icky parts of Christianity.  If you’re into the whole “tradition” thing, you can set up a little juice and cracker station off to the side, but try not to talk about it too much.  Things like this only confuse people.  Contentious issues like gender roles, hell, and The Old Testament should be avoided entirely.

8)      Do your best to hide/expel anyone over the age of 40 who shows up.  People that old haven’t been cool since the early 90s and you can’t afford the negative vibes put off by people so close to death.  Schedule Bible Studies for Wednesday at three in the afternoon.  Plan all-church retreats around pretend holidays like Martin Luther King Day and Spring Break.  Keep all your cultural references this side of Gavin DeGraw.  The grownups will find their own way out.

Those ought to get you started.  If you ever lose your way, I guess you can look to your Bible for answers.  Or, better yet, you can just remember the 3 C’s of SoCal Churches: Casual, Contemporary, Crushin’ It.

“Follow your heart, kid.  You’ll never go wrong.” -Sandlot

(If you’ve got a few more minutes to waste, check out my new article over at Five Minute Answers.  I can almost promise that most of you won’t regret it.)

And I also went up from my couch, in my living room, in apartment 113, to the mailboxes, which are over by the leasing office, to mailbox number 113 because I am of the apartment and mailbox #113.  Also, it was a Saturday and I wasn’t really doing anything else and whenever I don’t check my mailbox for a couple days it always fills up with junk mail until there’s hardly any room for important bills and stuff.

Arriving at mailbox 113, I discovered that the receptacle was indeed stuffed to the brim with Ralph’s coupons, credit card offers, Trader Joe’s flyers, and various other marketing miscellany.  The time had come to clear it out.  So I wrapped the junk mail together and stuffed a bunch of it in the outgoing mail slot, because there was no room for it in the trash can.  But before junking the junk mail, I was careful to extract the census form of which the Commerce Department had spoken.

And in the same region, later on that day, I was back on my couch keeping watch over the NCAA Tournament games at night.  When suddenly, a commercial from the government appeared before me and the sound of propaganda was all around me, and I was filled with confusion.

And the commercial said unto me, “Be not confused, for behold, I bring you good news of great appropriations which will be for all taxpayers.  For unto you is offered this day, from the city of Washington in the District of Columbia, a government distribution which is more than $400 million.  And this will be the sign unto you, you will find your census form, wrapped in an envelope and lying in your mailbox.”  And suddenly there was on the commercial a multitude of disembodied voices praising the census and saying,

“We can’t move forward, until you mail it back.  We can’t move forward, until you mail it back.”

When the commercial ended and a plug for Two and a Half Men appeared, I said to myself, “let me go over to the table and see this free-money form which the commercial has made known to me.”  And I went with haste and found the form lying on the table next to a box of Berry Berry Kix and beneath a copy of Sports Illustrated’s Swimsu …I mean…March Madness Preview.

I remembered the saying which I had heard concerning this form and was eager to discover the criteria by which the government doled out its blessed funding.  I made known to the form my birth date and skin color and was astonished to see that I was not questioned further.  Is that all that is necessary for the judicious appropriation of public monies?   What of my education?  What of my marketable skills, virtuous lifestyle, or community service experience?

In this manner it was made clear that personal merit is of no concern to the form.  As has been foretold since days long past, one cannot obtain the grace of the government through hard work and personal achievement.  It is only with one’s national descent that the government is concerned.

As the Reverend Jesse Jackson has rightly stated, “the government giveth and the government taketh away.  Blessed be the government and blessed be the Chicano, Filipino, Alaskan Native, Hmong, Laotian, and Pacific Islander with whom the government is well pleased.”

And all who heard of the form were greatly amazed and gave praise to their government for its unmerited favor.

But I treasured up all these things, pondering them in my heart.  (And on my website).

A pleasant Monday to all of you.  Apologies are in order.  From the fact that you are reading this, we can surmise that you have not recently made any destructive life decisions like, for example, giving up the internet for Lent.  From that, it can be further surmised that you have noticed an unbecoming lack of updates on The Talking Mirror.  It’s true, we have been woefully negligent in our duties as of late.  There is really no excuse for this.  Ok, so maybe there are two.  The lure of a temperate climate (Kent) and the remarkably unfunny Chicago weather (Conor) have prevented us from giving the site the attention it and you deserve.

Sadly, I do not have anything funny to lay at your feet this evening.  I have come instead to ask for your patience and to assure you that we are working on it.  TTM is in the process of trimming down and honing the focus of its ire and – as a result – inspiration has not been as forthcoming as it was when we were writing about homeschoolers, Twilight, and Tila Tequila.

But fear not, dear readers, the humor will return.  When?  Who can say?  All we can say is that, like Brett Favre and The Fast and the Furious franchise, we will return.  We hope to see you on the other side.

In the interim, you can continue getting your fix of funny on any of the excellent sites in our blogroll as well as on the new blog created by TTM co-founder Kent Woodyard.  It’s called fiveminuteanswers.net.  You should check it out.  The rest should be fairly self-explanatory.

As always, thanks for following and reading and laughing.  Keep the faith alive.  We’ll see you again soon(ish).

Sincerely,

Kent and Conor

Gut instinct tells me he’s talking about the front gate at Disneyworld on Labor Day Weekend but odds are better he means eastbound Interstate 10 entering New Orleans.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

When creating a profile of the future rulers of the planet, qualities like submissiveness, patience, and timidity don’t typically top the list.  But perhaps they should.  In a world increasingly taken with gun ownership, WMDs, and Michael Bay movies, it makes sense that the future would belong to the draft dodger and conscientious objector.  Think of the meek people in your life.  My guess is they aren’t the ones getting mixed up in gang violence or addicted to smack (same thing, I know).  They’re the ones hiding in their panic room with an Amazon Kindle and a mountain of batteries.  Sounds to me like meekness is the name of the game.  Especially when the “game” is nuclear holocaust.

“If you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘move from here to there,’ and it will move.”

With all deference to Wegener’s The Origin of Continents and Oceans, this appears to be the first recorded lecture on the theory of plate tectonics.  Jesus has apparently gained awareness of Jerusalem’s location at the collisional boundary of the Eurasian and Arabian Plates and is attempting to explain geosynclinal theory to a crowd of illiterate herdsmen.  No small task, I can assure you.  In this instance, he is likely making reference to the year 80-207-684 A.D. when continental drift will cause the low-lying mountains of the Eastern Mediterranean to collide with modern-day Pittsburgh.

“Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”

Doable.  Assuming all specs and submittals are in order and all necessary city, state, and local permits are processed and assuming we’re building on the existing slab and all necessary underground work is in place and in good condition, we could do it.  Get me some high-wattage light towers, an 80-ton tower crane, two boomlifts, and forty laborers with minimum ten years Tilt-up experience.  We’ll use pre-fabbed components and work around the clock.  The union will be all over my ass and OSHA’s gonna throw their usual “standard workday” bull spit at me, but we’ll git er done.  It won’t be easy, and it probably won’t look as nice as this one you got here, but I can guaran-damn-tee you’ll have the keys by sunup Monday.  Lord willing.

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”

You ever tried to smoke a cigarette on the observation deck at the Space Needle?  Impossible.  Take my word for it.  No way, no how.  You take one puff and before you can say “civil liberties” some granola-humper has ripped it out of your mouth and stubbed it out on her hardback copy of Catch-22.  So yeah, I guess rich people aren’t going to heaven because there’s no way in hell you’re getting a Camel up the Space Needle.

Okay, so maybe that’s a little extreme.  Obviously there are worse places in the world than an American freeway at rush hour.  (The back seat on a Greyhound bus comes to mind.)  Can we at least agree that traffic is the most annoying thing in the world?  And yes, I’m putting it above Wanda Sykes, rainy weekends, and middle schoolers in a movie theater.

To say traffic is one of my pet peeves would be like saying that civil liberties were one of Stalin’s pet peeves or that George W. Bush “annoyed” some political science professors.  I hate traffic.  It makes me crazy.  No matter how much I brace for it or plan my trip to account for it, I always end up losing my freaking mind.  I gesture and curse, I rant and rave, I call down fire from heaven.  I go nuts.

I don’t like feeling this way.  The occasional longwinded rant notwithstanding, I consider myself a fairly even-tempered guy.  I’m not prone to fits of rage and I don’t often ponder the ways my temperament might be improved by an automatic weapon.  Traffic makes me do these things.  But why?  Why have six short months in Los Angeles (aka The Julliard School for traffic jams of promise) transformed me from Jeffrey Lebowski into a ball of rage who is perhaps only days away from (a) some serious stomach ulcers and/or (b) pleading guilty to vehicular homicide?  I have some theories.

My first problem with traffic is that it is an inexcusable underutilization of one of the great inventions of human existence: the automobile.  The automobile is a wonder of modern technology.  It allows us to travel at speeds unimaginable even 100 years ago.  Yet there it sits, bumper to bumper with its similarly impotent peers, while lesser modes of transit like bicycles and feet race ahead on nearby pedestrian walkways.  I defy anyone to show me a situation more frustrating, more enraging, more downright tragic than watching an octogenarian in a motorized cart reach your exit before you do.

And my car isn’t just sitting anywhere mind you.  It’s sitting on a freeway. Freeways are to cars what military service is to high school linebackers.  It’s what they were made for.  Sitting in a car that’s parked on an interstate is like starving at a Golden Corral.  You have a machine (your vehicle or your mouth, respectively) which wants to do only one thing (drive, eat) and here it is in the one place where it can experience the fullness of all it was meant to be (an open road, a buffet) and yet it is doing the exact opposite (idling, starving).  Inexcusable.

It is one of the cruel tricks of the universe, and an indictment of traffic’s wickedness, that the only thing more aggravating than being stuck in traffic is to be freed from traffic.  This is because 90% of traffic jams end without explanation.  One moment I’m taking a nap while I roll along at 0.5 mph, and the next I’m cruising at 70 without so much as a construction zone or escaped zoo animal to account for it.

I’m more pissed now than ever.  “WHY?” I shout to the heavens. Why did this have to happen?  To what end?  For what purpose have I been tormented?  It’s not enough that I’m going fast again.  I want answers.  I want to know what greater good was served by my time in gridlock.  I want – alright, I’ll admit it, I want an accident.

Go ahead and call me a terrible person, but don’t tell me you haven’t thought the same thing.  I don’t want anyone to get hurt or killed or anything crazy like that.  I just want to see some good, old-fashioned, drivers-ed-worthy wreckage.  I sacrificed 30 to 90 perfectly good minutes of my 20s.  All I want in return is a Hyundai wrapped around a telephone pole.  Or maybe an 18-wheeler on its side with Hostess products strewn across the asphalt.  Or anything on fire.  Whatever.  I’m not picky.  I ask only that it justify the delay and that it look awesome.

But no.  Nine times out of ten the bottleneck’s origin is more underwhelming than Britney Spears’ acting career.  It’s a stalled vehicle 25 feet off the shoulder.  It’s a puddle.  It’s a curve in the road.  It’s some jackass who hits his breaks for no reason thereby forcing the next 1,000 drivers behind him to hit their breaks at the same spot.  It’s nothing and no one and my precious minutes die in vain – unexplained and unavenged.

I’ll say it one final time, traffic sucks something awful.  I could go on (and on, and on, and on) but, depending on your reading level, I think my five minutes are almost up.

I’ll close with this.

Traffic is a step backward for humanity.  It is the most disagreeable symptom of civilization as well as a compelling argument against it. If I’ve learned anything from The Road, The Book of Eli, or Revelation it’s that freedom from traffic will be the coolest thing about the coming nuclear holocaust.  Will it make the cold, hunger, and roving bands of inbred barbarians worth it?  I couldn’t say.

Am I looking forward to finding out?  You bet.

You know what I’m talking about.  Mine’s Bigger Advertising is the kind of commercial that feels less like an intimate conversation between your wallet and your favorite fast food chain and more like a domestic dispute between two corporate rivals.  No longer content to settle their beef in the privacy of their own boardrooms or trading floors, advertisers have brought the bickering into the living room and we can do nothing but sit awkwardly on the couch, listening to the name-calling and the ugliness, wondering if it’s our fault that mom and dad are always fighting.

This is the modern television commercial.

As with most things modern, trendy, and annoying, this movement was created by Apple. That’s right, the mad scientists who invented the lower case “i” and taught nerds how to be pretentious are the same people who sucked the fun out of commercial watching when they introduced their “Hi, I’m a Mac” campaign.

I’ll admit, as far as Mine’s Bigger Advertising goes, the Mac commercials are probably the most palatable.  As with many harmless ideas gone horrible (i.e. Star Wars, fur boots, Lindsay Lohan) the full evil of competitive advertising was not seen in the first manifestation but only in the monster that followed.

No sooner had Justin Long completed his first pwning of the bespectacled John Hodgman than every other major corporation decided that – like a towel fight at football camp – they just had to get in there and find someone to pop.

Before we knew what was happening, Burger King was talking smack to Wendy’s, Carl’s Jr was dogging on McDonalds, and the GMC Sierra was pulling the Ram, the F-150, and the city of Detroit out of a mud hole.  (Hahaha!  Oh snap! Take that Dodge/Ford/Michigan!)

Yet all of these examples pale in comparison to the very public, very petty dispute between Verizon and AT&T.  With assistance from Luke “Holy Crap I’m Getting Fat” Wilson, these two telecomm giants have spent millions of dollars and up to ten minutes of our lives (depending on how much NFL football you watch) trading petty insults about flaccid maps and unresponsive 3G spots.

Whenever I see one of these commercials, I feel like I’ve just walked into a fight between two Twilight fanatics about the relative merits of the vampire guy and the werewolf guy.  Both parties are passionately defending their position and disparaging their opponent, and I immediately lose interest.  I don’t know enough about the argument to know who is right and I don’t care enough to figure it out.

That’s what these hostile companies fail to understand.  Most of us don’t hate their competition as much as they do.  Sure, we have our favorite brands, but – with the exception of Apple’s flock of catatonic disciples – most of us don’t care enough to get involved in an argument over our phone plan or favorite light domestic beer.

Not only do we not care, we often leave these commercials with the wrong idea.  It’s a natural human tendency to root for the underdog (unless the underdog is from Oakland), and Mine’s Bigger Advertising often leaves me with greater fondness for the supposed inferior product.  I don’t know about you, but when I hear an arrogant Big Carl ridiculing an insecure and emotionally unstable Big Mac I start to feel bad for the Big Mac.  The poor guy already has an extra bun and a pair of undersized patties, and now he’s getting bullied?  Screw you Carl’s Jr.  Why don’t you go heckle a special ed softball team while you’re at it?

I guess in the end, I’m just tired of being neglected.  As someone who spends 90% of his weekday nights alone with his television, commercials represent the closest thing to a conversation I can get this side of a 900-number.  I need them to stop talking to each other and start talking to me again.  I want to be directly addressed by the faceless corporations who are destroying America.  I want Luke “Chumbawumba” Wilson to look directly into my eyes and tell me why AT&T and nothing but AT&T will satisfy my deepest dreams and desires.

Speak to me, Luke.  Lie to me, confuse me, lead me astray, cloud my reason with beautiful women, whatever.  Just pay attention to me.  Forget about Verizon, put the tape measures away, and pay attention to me.

That is all I ask.