Fool Me Tee Vee -- A Clip Show

An anthology once updated daily but nowadays only occasionally...

1. In museums the world over you will find clay jugs centuries old that already feature the New and Improved E-Z Pour Spout.

2. Babies wearing denim diapers while sexy music plays in the background? Not cute, actually. Not cool, actually. Not anything at all but creepy and sick, actually.

3. Ladies, if he's looking at your lashes, he's gay.

4. "Real Americans" hate San Francisco so much that all commercials are filmed in our beautiful city so they can stare longingly at it all year between their vacations here.

5. The sixteen year old model looks young because she is young, not because of the cream they are lying about her slathering on her sixteen year old face.

6. Seeing the same commercial four or more times over the course of an hour, even for a product that seemed mildly desirable the first time around, comes to provoke in any sane self-respecting person, I find, a kind of spiritual crisis, calling forth the urgent desire to obliterate every single instance of the damned thing and every single person associated with it in a screaming bloody sledghammering rain of vengeance.

7. I realize it's already round, Mr. Dyson, but don't you think the doorknob, too, is just crying out for a radical re-think?

8. Yeah, thanks, Febreze, when I think of "air freshener" what I really have in mind is a smell like a rotting florist refrigerator in a retirement community for incontinent prostitutes.

9. It's a good thing BBC America is turning into the SciFi Channel now that the SciFi Channel is turning into TBN…

10. And after all, who needs feminism when the tee vee assures us women want nothing at all in the whole wide world but a constant supply of yogurt and chocolate?

11. Your new car looks exactly like everybody else's new car.

12. He's a tough talkin' rule breakin' lawman, he's a loose cannon, he's an infantile belligerent bully, he's a white racist asshole, he's a patriarchal prick, but he gets results!

13. Who needs sit-coms when there is obviously nothing in the whole world more laugh out funny than the subject of goddamn insurance?

14. In 1967, in the Summer of Love, all the hippies were in the park and on the street singing about peace, love, and understanding, but in 2011, in the Summer of Shove, all the hippies and all their guitars are peddling soft drinks and luxury cars and adult diapers like they should be.

15. Using an android phone is just like being sucked into a virtual world and you are flying on an exhilarating adrenaline wave through space and exploding space stations and insectivorous robot swarms and models in cat suits and oiled athletes and they are all brushing white hot against your skin while dance beats throb and guitars wail and you are those space stations, you are those robots, you are those models, you are those muscles, you are those explosions, you are those guitars, except you are really checking your work e-mail on a postage stamp screen because you're on a cellphone and it's not anything like any of that at all you moron.

16. If you were a real man, you'd be driving a big truck. Also, your dick should be bigger.

17. To those who say, "Free, just pay!" I say, "Live, just die!"

18. The proportion of the public relations budgets of major petroleum companies devoted to images of renewable energy stands in a revealing relation to the proportion of the operating budgets of major petroleum companies devoted to producing renewable energy.

19. I'm so old I can remember when they still said you were subscribing to a cable provider so you wouldn't have to watch so many commercials.

20. Chances are, it's neither new, nor improved.

21. Designer pillows? Designer? Pillows? Really?

22. Shouting is not the same thing as acting, there, Whitey McPlainwrap.

23. If Public Broadcasting really wants to thank "Viewers Like Me" they can start by getting rid of the goddamn petrochemical and car commercials already.

24. Homophobia is so gay!

25. It is enormously helpful that they run ads about the show I am watching during the show itself, since by now so many commercials interrupt it to play in a row I am prone to forget what goddamn show I am watching in the first place.

26. You can tell Chris Matthews is a very smart and very serious person by the way he barks like a dog at those with whom he is conversing at regular intervals like all very smart and very serious people do.

27. Note to the Faithful: I'm pretty sure god wouldn't give two shits how you are faring in your little game show appearance.

28. An empty swing-set, a discarded doll, a blond wig, a gavel coming down, dong-dong! and eleven hours later you're saucer eyed in a ruin of blankets and pizza crusts with the phone off the hook as you realize you're re-watching episodes in a Law and Order Marathon that's been repeating itself for at least a couple of episodes now wondering if it's still Sunday or if you accidentally missed work Monday already. In case you were wondering, this is the freedom they hate us for. Well, that and all our, you know, murdering and marauding and stuff.

29. Well, no, since I think actual whores tend to be considerably more professional, ethical, and attractive than the personalities featured on Fox News.

30. When MTV came out, we started watching record company promotional content in between the ads. When Facebook came out, we started surfing promotional content we produced ourselves promoting ourselves in between the ads. In this way, here in America, progress is made.

31. Has it never occurred to you that if you really want your bedroom to look like a hotel suite and your living room to look like a hotel lobby and your kitchen to look like a food court that maybe what you need to do is change your life and not redecorate your house?

32. When you finally toss your crappy Kindle in the trash because it cracked, or because of the expense, or because of the censorship, or because you grasp renting isn't owning a book, or because of all the ads you can't skip (and believe me, it's coming), don't pretend there wasn't somebody warning you and there isn't somebody laughing at you.

33. It really is too bad John Lennon didn't live long enough to see the fulfillment of his dream that one day his music would be used to sell breakfast cereal and long-distance phone service.

34. Watching cooking competitions on television you're given the impression that no woman has a place in the kitchen, while watching the commercials during cooking competitions you're given the impression that women have no place except in the kitchen.

35. It bears remembering that none of the actually safe, actually effective, actually best prescription medicines are advertized on television because they don't have to be.

36. Can somebody please tell me what the fuck Julia Roberts is cackling about all the time?

37. Sorry, but your crappy kitchen isn't Tuscany.

38. Only celebrities are real, and no celebrities are real.

39. Pundits, it might be worthwhile occasionally to point out that Nixon's "Silent Majority" was a minority, that Reagan's "Moral Majority" was a minority, that Bush's "Values Voters" were a minority voting for a minority of the values people vote for, that Red State "Real Americans" are a minority of real Americans, that only a minority of "Independent Voters" have ever had an independent thought let alone voted on the basis of one, and that a majority of those who call themselves "pro-life" also happen to support civilian casualties in wars of choice, lethal back-alley abortions, poisonous material environments, accidental executions of the wrongly convicted, ever more guns and bullets in the streets, and billions of people dying unnecessarily of starvation, from unclean water and treatable diseases around the world so that a miniscule minority can roll in dough for life.

40. Could there actually be more suburban housewives on television than there are in the suburbs?

41. Modern advertising began a century ago by deceiving us that there were substantial differences between mass-produced consumer goods according to the brands they bear, and has succeeded by now, a century later, in deceiving us that there are substantial differences between mass-produced consumers according to the brands we buy.

42. You probably aren't depressed at all, but just fucked over. If there's a pill for that it's not on sale, and chances are there's a War On It.

43. To win a cooking competition on reality television it usually pays to be an asshole, while to be a successful chef in reality it usually pays not to be an asshole.

44. I hate to break it to you, HGTV, but every room has a sense of space, every door brings the outside in, every window lets in the light, every surface has texture and you haven't actually said anything of the least use to anybody yet.

45. It is a little disturbing to grasp how many disclaimer-stuffed pharmaceutical ads on television today could aptly be summed up with the slogan, "Perish Sooner Than You Have To, But Leave A Better Looking Corpse."

46. It really is amazing how much more interesting an utterly undistinguished new automobile can look when we are confined to half second glimpses filmed two inches from its surface in strobe lighting.

47. Surely, there is really no such thing as a "fitness celebrity"?

48. Could all these wives in all these commercials possibly not realize their husbands are gay?

49. It is high time America's corporations waged war on that fetid field you call a body.

50. Can anybody who enjoys prime time game shows pretend incomprehension to the draw for the Romans of the Colosseum?

51. 4G? 3D? All still entirely yet 2B.

52. If remote control units were invented today do you really think they would allow them to feature a mute button?

53. You really should be worrying about the devastating humiliation of toilet paper fragments clinging, despite your best efforts, all the livelong day, possibly even right now, to your buttocks.

54. Kids screaming at the top of their lungs and destroying everything in sight: cute or ugly? Apparently, unaccountably, cute.

55. Given the atrocities Rachel Maddow is documenting, I'm a bit surprised she doesn't begin every show with a "Cocktail Moment."

56. You know, I was just watching this ad on my tee vee, and I think those nice earnest kids over at Exxon Mobile really might do something about the environment if only we'd give them some real money to work with!

57. What with their endless obsession with germs menacing every apparently pristine surface in their fortress homes and unpleasant odors emanating subtly, ceaselessly from every fold and pore in their bodies you get the feeling sometimes it's almost as if Americans collectively feel nervous or guilty about something...

58. Even with your logo slapped on it everybody knows that egg you're selling is just a goddamn egg, you jackass.

59. Comparing the number of robots you see in commercials with the number of robots one encounters in actual life, you almost get the feeling the guys running the show must think a lot of us are just robots…

60. A cream isn't a clinic.

61. Chinese tech company announces development of an even SMARTER abacus!

62. Now that Americans can't put a man on the Moon anymore it would probably be a good idea to stop listing all the other things we should be able to do if we can put a man on the Moon.

63. This quip has received "Four Stars!" from a premier quip rating agency.

64. Unfortunately, even a soundtrack of hysterical dance beats is rarely enough to make gluing pieces of a broken plate to a lamp base for ten minutes exciting to watch.

65. Four out of five dentists will not laugh at this joke, despite the stunning manufactured beauty of their smiles.

66. Yeah, that's right, assholes, we do all get up and pee whenever your commercial comes on, so there.

67. Since the switch-over to the digital television future I am most grateful for new features like off-synch audio, blackouts, and shadowy pixellation waves sweeping and distorting the images on the screen, all of which have, I must say, "enhanced" my television experience in ways I never expected but probably should have.

68. Thanks to the capitalists at General Motors, OnStar now dials the socialists at 911 so you don't have to and even when you don't want to.

69. It'll take more than "Mr. Blue Sky" in the background of your commercial to make me smile as you bastards try to steal another minute from my life.

70. You aren't educated just because the circus came to town.

71. Today's observation is both specially formulated and clinically proven.

72. You really don't have to smell that way, capitalism wants to help.

73. Honestly, all the ads front-loaded onto my new DVD were so absolutely captivating I didn't even notice that I couldn't fast forward through them anymore, I was just drinking in every second of sparkling advertizing content in a kind rapture spoiled only by a slow-growing dread that all too soon the commercials would end and I would be left with nothing to watch but the actual goddamn film I actually paid my goddamn money to watch in my goddamn home on my own goddamn time in the goddamn first place, goddamn it!

74. Hamlet holding the remote: Press play or a trigger, what is the difference?

75. Today's quip is working on the molecular level.

76. Nothing in all the world says youthful fun, really, like some dead-eyed choad barking at the top of his lungs in an Australian accent.

77. Not only should you not be waxing rhapsodic about it, but every person of the meanest sense should run screaming for their lives from that toxic petrochemical bouquet that is New Car Smell.

78. Funny how many couples on television actually consist of fabulous gay men with women they wouldn't be caught dead with or fabulous straight women with schlubs they wouldn't be caught dead with.

79. The wholesome tasty dairy products in your refrigerator did not arrive from a sunny bucolic family farm from a daydream of the fifties but from a sprawling seething industrial nightmare of screaming metal and pain and fear and feces and mob-violence.

80. Choosy Moms choose dangerous anesthetizing drugs and big screen televisions exploding with violence and crap commercials to raise their kids!

81. Today's observation is brought to you by Acerbix.

82. Apparently, heterosexual males are distinguishable from homosexual ones primarily by their erotic relations to backyard grilling apparatus.

83. If it bleeds, the News cedes.

84. The differences between a Honda and a Jaguar and a Chrysler and a BMW scarcely amount to more than different hood ornaments, different price tags, and different rubes.

85. I prefer my tap water free from public fountains rather than from your crappy bacterially-infested landfill-destined toxic-plastic bottles at a dollar a pop, thanks.

86. You have to wonder whether the imbeciles who buy gourmet dog food have ever noticed the bliss with which their little darlings lick their own assholes for hours at a time.

87. So, we're calling episodes "experiences" and re-runs "encore presentations" now, are we? What are the commercials, then, "liaisons"?

88. My working theory is that advertizing executives are not human beings but a reptile-brained humanoid species distinguishable from humans by the emission of blue fluids from various bodily orifices.

89. It is truly perverse the number of commercials which indulge the fantasy of food endowed with speech… and with nothing to talk about except how desperately it wants to be eaten for lunch.

90. Our gadgets are not alive and they are not intelligent. This matters, because we happen to be both alive and intelligent ourselves and when we say the same of things that are neither we risk being rendered less alive and less intelligent in compensation.

91. Nothing succeeds like less.

92. We are all unpaid unwitting uninformed subjects in a profoundly dangerous experiment examining the effects of long-term exposure to complex combinations of toxic and medicinal substances nobody understands. Since we cannot opt out of our experimental subjecthood, I propose we demand substantial payment for our service from those who are disproportionately profiting from it.

93. I strongly suspect it is watching your commercial that has given me this burning sensation.

94. One thing sure to improve this quip for next time would be to slap some bacon on it.

95. Between all the heartfelt talk shows and all the heart burn commercials, who really has the heart to watch day time television?

96. It really is too bad the way car exhaust is destroying so many lovely wilderness settings car commercials might otherwise be filmed in.

97. Broadcast television is so righteous you can show your hero putting his fist in somebody's mouth every single episode and win awards but if you show your hero putting his penis in his lover's mouth just once you'll never work again till the day you die.

98. How strange to observe that as tee vee screens keep getting bigger the fine print for the legal disclaimers on tee vee commercials is still getting smaller.

99. Why listen to your doctor when instead you could be directing your doctor's attention to things actors on television who don't know you and can't see you are talking about so that the pharmaceutical companies that hired them to say these things can make more money?

100. The image of an infant nursing at her mother's breast? Unacceptable! The image of an obese shirtless man nursing a beer in a stadium crowd? Ubiquitous! It's called standards, people.

101. There is nothing the least bit romantic about instant coffee.

102. Today's observation possesses a gravelly voice, a slight twang, and also, one may safely assume, a hemi.

103. The ugly, middlebrow, radioactive monument in granite to this dreary deadly decade is a million gruesome kitchen countertops.

104. Be Young! Have Fun! A skeleton? Have None! Drink more carbonated beverages!

105. It's funny because the woman character doesn't want to do anything but shop all the time, because women don't want to do anything but shop all the time, you know what women are like, they don't want to do anything but shop all the time, isn't it funny how women are like that, shopping all the time!

106. Essentially, every TED Talk sells you something, while incidentally pretending to teach you something.

107. Rather than wait in line at the Apple store for their latest must-have gew-gaw, why not just shellac any old dysfunctional decade old crap in white nail polish yourself and call it a day?

108. USA Network -- Characters Welcome (but neither required nor expected)

109. Nowadays, "innovation" is almost exclusively a word denoting a promotional rather than technical accomplishment, the benefits of which tend in turn almost exclusively to be distributed preferentially to usurers over users.

110. It's the feel-bored film of the season!

111. Of course she's crazy, listening to that discordant piano in the background all the time like that…

112. "At the end of the day" is the favored cliché of the pundit with nothing convincing to say.

113. What's her anti-aging secret? …she's fourteen years old!

114. Thank heavens after the Republicans dismantle our medical system, we'll still have celebrities hawking tee-shirts to support cutting edge research and universal healthcare coverage.

115. Won't somebody please think of the children? Except, you know, when they're gyrating around to dance beats in diaper commercials or made up like street walkers on reality shows about the pageant circuit...

116. Having new sneakers doesn't mean having a new soul.

117. Every time I watch a pharmaceutical ad today all I can hear is the ad tomorrow soliciting plaintiffs in a class action suit.

118. There's something about the endorsement of a cartoon character that just inspires immediate and absolute confidence in the quality of a product or service.

119. Given the curious prevalence in them of unappealing protagonists placed in pointlessly unpleasant situations, one gets the impression that car companies have not yet given their whole hearts to the selling of hybrid or electric vehicles.

120. Every reviewer of books who uses the word "unputdownable" should be put down immediately for it.

121. Don't mess with Texas. You might make it cry.

122. Just think how recently we all settled for the radical impoverishment of our viewing experience of not having a logo announcing the network we are watching at the moment filling a corner of the screen at all times.

123. We urge you to call and order within the next five minutes! Your supplies of credulity are limited.

124. Loan sharks and mail-order pawn shops are advertizing on prime time television now. Things are going well.

125. Rather than resigning ourselves to the endless ramification and amplification of advertizing in our lives what if instead we tried suing for harassment?

126. However much money she made in the exchange, it is not finally to the advantage of anyone that the name Jaime Lee Curtis once reminded us of movies but now of bowel movements.

127. How apt that the vast tragedy of for-profit insurance peddles its wasteful skimming and lethal scamming in the form of little comedy sketches.

128. Only the decorative deceptions of the advertizing agency deserve the label "artisan" whenever this term attaches in their commercials to mass packaged productions and fast food extrusions.

129. I wasn't interested in what you were selling before, but now that you are shouting at the top of your lungs about the damn thing I must say it is becoming more alluring by the second.

130. Your results will vary.

131. If your home isn't as sterile as an operating theater you are a failure as a human being. Also, you are in terrible danger.

132. Where everyone is quirky, no one is.

133. You are only as real as the envy your purchases inspire in others.

134. For Heaven's sake, shouldn't you be tweeting or scrapbooking or something?

135. In commerce, supplies are limited but the lies unlimited.

136. It's corn syrup! Soylent Green is made out of corn syrup!

137. The televangelist's path to Heaven involves preying one's way to the top of a gold-plated pile of poop before perishing and praying the peak pierces Paradise.

138. Whatever candidate or party prevails, it is only the television networks that are assured absolute victory in every American election.

139. It's beginning to look a lot like Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy! Buy!

140. Watching drug commercials may cause annoyance related death.

141. Iron Law of Televised Cooking Show Judging: When in doubt, kick the woman out.

142. You have to be pretty undistinguished to seek to distinguish yourself through the purchase of an automobile that is indistinguishable from every other.

143. It is truly a marvelous thing to observe, rather like watching water turned to wine, the way companies turn whine into fodder, when, after being fought tooth and nail for as long as possible and in every possible way, supposedly onerous, supposedly ruinous, supposedly outrageous regulatory demands are instantly transformed the moment they are implemented into immensely desirable safety and energy efficiency features about which the companies go on to crow in the most self-congratulatory fashion imaginable and on the basis of which they go on most energetically to outcompete their rivals.

144. When a Republican tells you government is good for nothing in his campaign ad you really should pay attention because he is admitting his attraction and announcing his plans.

145. If Los Angeles were as dedicated to recycling as it is to remakes you could eat the buildings for dinner by now and they would grow back in time for breakfast.

146. The bigger the box, the more air inside.

147. Has any manufactured good remained either alluring or even functional for nearly as long as the packaging it comes in lingers on as toxic landfill?

148. Today's observation is made with 100% real fruit juice.

149. When you're painting with cosmetics the blank canvas is inevitably more beautiful than the resulting painting.

150. The world isn't a better place just because you got off.

151. If she isn't careful Jane Lynch may soon discover that literally the only thing people won't buy if she is selling it is that she is an actress.

152. Also, I hear, every jiss begins with Jay.

153. You may think it's clean but let's see what is revealed by this black light… oh, look at that, vile bacteria still clinging to your gums even after brushing… germs seething around the base of your toilet bowl… and, oh dear, your soul appears to be irredeemably stained with complicity in the wasteful destruction of the planet and the exploitation of billions of the world's poor…

154. The Soap Opera is a languishing narrative form, its vestiges now living on primarily in prime-time televised singing competitions.

155. When they turn the cameras off, you do realize the models spit that garbage back out, right?

156. Beyond the thanks, think: Beyond the feast, famine.

157. Never once has making a good purchase made a person good.

158. The pill, powder, or potion promising you weight loss or to lower your cholesterol level when accompanied by a sensible diet and exercise never points out that a sensible diet and exercise need no accompaniment by pill, powder, or potion to promise you weight loss or to lower your cholesterol level.

159. The only thing more exaggerated in prime time crime dramas than the incidence of crime is the competence of criminologists.

160. You have to lie to a whole lot of people before the rotten liar becomes the respectable professional, just as you have to owe a whole lot of money before the serf becomes the King.

161. The difference between a used car salesman and a televangelist is that one steals from you by lying about the vehicle while the other steals from you by lying about the road.

162. While watching sports on television doesn't make you a real athlete, masturbating to online porn does at least give you a real sex life.

163. Today's observation is part of this complete breakfast.

164. Is there anything more nostalgic than a product said to look futuristic?

165. The number of characters in a sit-com living in places they could actually afford is roughly equal to the number of jokes per episode that actually get a laugh.

166. Moms in Malls are the scariest clowns in the world.

167. No matter what they promise to the contrary, your garbage bag will still tear on a corner, your paper towel will still shred in a puddle, your wineglass will still speckle in the machine, and no matter what they imply to the contrary, you will still be fine.

168. Straight marriage is more like prostitution than anybody cares to admit and gay marriage is more like dating than anybody cares to admit.

169. When it comes to climate change, one gets the impression most people on television won't realize until curtain that the big show wasn't a dress rehearsal.

170. It is distressing how often "Made in the USA" is a label displayed in the USA on commodities mislaid in the USA made by slaves for the USA.

171. This observation is vitamin fortified.

172. Is there anything in the world that makes a food product more alluring than seeing it smeared all over some snot-nosed spoon-shaking maniacally-grinning infantile face? America unanimously declares apparently that, no, there is not.

173. So, let me get this straight, you're charging the same money for a chocolate bar you've blown a million tiny holes in as for a solid chocolate bar because what really matters about the holes, you say, is the enhancement of my chocolate eating experience presumably afforded by the holes compared to which the fact that there is now half as much chocolate you are selling me is merely incidental?

174. If you would understand a stock market graph, whenever the arrow goes up simply imagine it piercing the heart of a small child like a fondue fork and popping the heartbroken morsel into the slobbering gob of a rich man who has no heart.

175. If mortality makes you queasy and aging more diseasy,
Still, youth-peddlers are so sleazy disregarding them should be easy.

176. Your online education isn't worth the paper it isn't printed on.

177. What is that even supposed to mean, "A Family Company"? The phrase reeks of nepotism, dogmatism, and incest.

178. 'Tis the Season for all the white patriotic consumers to celebrate the birth of the brown pacifist communist they would kill.

179. The revolution was televised but I only caught it in syndication.

180. More fast food should arrive in a bucket. It's handy to vomit in when you're done.

181. I adore flavored coffees. I mean, they are talking about booze aren't they?

182. IT'S JUST YOUR IMAGINATION THAT COMMERCIALS ARE LOUDER THAN THE REGULAR PROGRAMMING!

183. When I was a kid every refrigerator had a bottle of Thousand Island dressing in it. Now, every refrigerator has a bottle of Ranch dressing in it. Progress under consumer capitalism is, we all know so well, marvelous and inexorable. Who knows what salad dressing will grace the refrigerators of the future?

184. "So crazy" is inevitably what boring people call being boring.

185. Anybody can become famous, but only monsters remain famous.

186. No celebrity who calls himself a dork, a nerd, or a geek in the expectation that this will be regarded as charming is a dork, a nerd, a geek, or charming.

187. Bury Crass Mess!

188. Now that their norms for male beauty have become as unattainable as those that have so long prevailed for female beauty, mass media have made as their single concession to feminism the eager encouragement of equal self-loathing.

189. If you enjoy time travel narratives, might I suggest watching C-SPAN?

190. On crime shows, the most famous guest star did it. It's the law.

191. Actually, no, your cleaning product isn't in any available sense revolutionary.

192. Tee Vee young is not real young, Tee Vee ugly is not real ugly, Tee Vee intelligent is not real intelligent.

193. Freedom has nothing to do with buying things.

194. Television commercials are forever implying their chocolate will deliver shattering orgasms, but I can assure them that the average candy bar is hardly impressive enough even remotely to manage the trick.

195. You'd think an "original series" would be less unoriginal.

196. I mean, what reasonable person wouldn't invite radically increased infection risk, suicidal thoughts, and occasional homicidal sleepwalking for a slim chance at clearer skin?

197. Online University is now offering advanced degrees in "technology"! "numbers"! "words"! Also, mopping and filing!

198. Worried about computer viruses? Go to novirussexydad39800trustmenoreally.com!

199. "I'm a lying reactionary asshole and I approve this message full of lies."

200. Claims made in this advertisement were not evaluated by the FDA, a meddling fascist conspiracy agency that should be abolished anyway, MegaPharmaAgriChemiCorp, a Family Company

201. I'm sticking to the handheld I came with.

202. The web is an embarrassment of riches when it isn't being just an embarrassment.

203. The wireless future is the rabbit ears past.

204. Nothing stamps out a radical like putting them on a stamp.

205. Sure to be Dumb: Anything marketed as "Smart."

206. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to the HBO logo.

207. Any change in services that increases corporate profits will be peddled to consumers as "convenience," however inconvenient it may be. Indeed, that is what convenience means.

208. When you're hammered everything sounds like a nail.

209. A haircut may be a claim, but it isn't an argument.

210. Live tweeting is dead.

211. Watching Chris Matthews is like watching Mars Attacks! dubbed entirely into Martian.

212. Every Apple product is a funhouse mirror, an iMe killing time.

213. Distractions don't add up to a life and won't subtract you from death.

214. Every selfie plucks a self from the shelf.

215. When you are flying under the radar you are still flying.

216. First being is degraded by consumer capitalism into having, then having is degraded by spectacular media into appearing, and now appearing is being degraded by data collection into being framed.

217. Capitalism exploits everyone and destroys the planet and can't even provide me with Deep Space 9 on blu ray.

218. Be the droids you're looking for in the world.

219. Use of the smoking gun analogy is the smoking gun for ineptitude in the use of analogies.

220. I don't follow politics for inspiration, entertainment, or a dream date. That is what porn is for.