If you questioned the sanity of the "McDonald's Hot Cofee Lawsuit" some years back, you're really going to love this one. A woman sued McDonald's after claiming "she was permanently scarred by a hot McDonald's hamburger pickle". Not only did she sue, saying the the pickle was, uh, "defective", but her husband also sued, "for losing the services and consortium of his wife." ???

I've also realized that I'd forgotten to mention Sprite's idiotic commercials the other day when I bitched about stupid ads on TV. Though I do prefer the taste of Sprite to 7-Up, their ads make me wish I didn't. Morons standing in front of a camera, rapping incomprehensibly about meaningless gibberish. Oh yeah, that makes me want to drink Sprite. What it really does, though, is make me turn the damn channel.

Worst commercials currently on TV: The Gap's annoying "hallelujah" campaign, which features girls in jeans who can't dance. Now while normally I'm not opposed to girls dancing in jeans, the annoying music combined with their just plain terrible dancing makes this just too painful to sit through. Even worse, though, is the new Levi's campaign of karaoke singers who can't sing, and usually aren't attractive either. I mean, what braindead marketing executive got the idea in his black and twisted brain that I'd want to listen to some reject of the 70's sing "Karma Chameleon" so off-key that I had to jam rusty nails into my aural canals just to retain what shreds of sanity I had left? At least Old Navy dropped their retch-inducing "Magic the stupid dog" advertising campaign. Apparently there is a quota of on-air wretchedness that simply needs to be filled, and Levis and The Gap are simply providing a public service.

Hey, you fucknuts in marketing, why the hell would I buy a product featured in commercials that make me violently ill? I won't, idiots, because just getting people to remember your brand name is not enough. Because when I go to the store, I remember that I HATE your brand. Now how does that sell jeans?

Gah. Our local mail system has been dead the past 2 days. Not real sure how it happened. Anyway, if you sent me a message over the past two days, best resend it since it probably never got to me.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised when a show like "The West Wing" shows only one side of the gun issue, but it still bothers me. One of the oldest literary methods of persuading your audience to your point of view is to present two arguing characters, one (the opponent to your viewpoint) less than competent. Television and movies commonly make use of this tactic to influence the audience into taking up their own opinions.

On "The West Wing", we have a White House official denying the intent and meaning of the 2nd Amendment while simultaneously blaming violence on the existence of guns. No rebuttal is given to these points, no mention of the fact that the militia, as defined in Federal law (Title 10 USC, Section 311), "consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age... under 45 years of age... and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard." Kinda makes it hard to claim that the militia refers to the National Guard, when the very definition indicates the Guard is merely a subset. No mention made that Switzerland, one of the countries listed in the show's great roster of low gun-crime nations, requires that all able-bodied citizens keep an automatic assault rifle in their homes for defense of the country.