I’m not much of a football fan, and when friends ask me who I’m rooting for I’ve been know to say “Is that the game with the pointy ball?”  But I’ve always looked forward to the Super Bowl’s commercials because in the past they’ve been some of the best TV viewing of the year.  Millions of dollars and thousands of manhours spent by the best and the brightest minds in the advertising industry to create 30 seconds of commercial perfection.

For the last few years though the commercials have been so bad I might actually have to start watching the game for entertainment.  There were so many awful commercials during Superbowl XLIV it was hard to narrow the list down to just five. I understand consumers are bombarded with thousands of media messages daily so it’s a necessary marketing evil to do outrageous and shocking things to burn a company’s brand into our psyches (e.g. Punxsatawney Polamalu), but these five are just so bad the only thing they’re burning is the companies’ advertising dollars.

A good advertising strategy will positively link a company’s brand with their marketing message (e.g., Go Daddy = domain names + women’s breasts).  However, I had to watch some of the commercials that made my list two or three times and I’m still not 100% sure what they’re trying to sell me (e.g. the US Census).  And the Number 1 Worst Commercial was so bad I couldn’t even bring myself to watch it once – I’m going to have to rely on some brave volunteer to watch it for me and explain it to me in short sentences with small words.

I was going to do a best of/worst of post but FinancialSamurai.com did a great job of highlighting the best Super Bowl ads so I’ll just take a stab at the worst of the bunch. However, be warned – I wouldn’t recommend watching all five bad ads in one sitting:

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Know when to outsource and when to do it yourself

Companies and the government know it’s more cost effective to hire contractors to do certain kinds of work.  It just doesn’t pay to attempt to do everything in-house, especially highly technical work and routine administrative jobs.  Most of our IT staff and administrative help are contractors, and about half of my department’s positions are contracted out.  It’s a good working arrangement for us because if we need additional help we ask for more contractors and when there’s less work the contractors move on to other jobs.  Not always the best deal for them necessarily, but our contractors are compensated well and their kind of work is still in pretty high demand so ours always have someplace to go when they leave us.

So if it’s advantageous to outsource highly technical work and administrative jobs why do we insist on doing everything for ourselves at home? Read the rest of this entry »

"He's dead, Jim"

Anyone who’s familiar with the original Star Trek series knows the term “red shirt”.  These are the hapless crew members whose sole purpose in the plot is so Dr. McCoy can say “He’s dead, Jim.”

They’re routinely zapped, vaporized, stabbed, blown up, and dispatched in a variety of ways by alien life forms.  They gave their lives so drama could be added to dangerous situations without harm having to come to one of the main characters the plot revolved around.

It makes you wish you could be a fly on the wall so you could eavesdrop before they beamed down – I’m sure their conversations went something like “Hey, did you hear Johnson is going to be part of the away team beaming down to the new plant with the Captain, Spock, and Dr. McCoy?” “No, that’s too bad.  Dibs on his bunk!” Read the rest of this entry »

Space: the final frontier

I was battling insomnia recently and stumbled across an old sci-fi TV series on Netflix called Earth 2, starring Clancy Brown (I remember him as the Kurgan from The Highlander, my kids know him as Mr. Krabs from Sponge Bob Square Pants), Debrah Farentino (Syfy’s Eureka) and Terry O’Quinn (Lost’s John Locke).

The show is set in the year 2192 when the Earth is mostly uninhabitable and the majority of the population lives on orbiting space stations.  A group of settlers led by Farentino’s character travel 22 light-years to another planet that looks suspiciously like the western United States and all sorts of extraterrestrial hi-jinks ensues.  The show was cancelled after one season for reasons I can only assume were due to the fact the plots were really lame.  The theme of the show was intriguing but the plots deviated from their sci-fi roots and chose to focus on the show’s characters, turning it into more of a futuristic soap opera than a hard core sci-fi series.  I half-watched the entire series secretly hoping everyone but Clancy Brown would succumb to the alien planet but was sadly disappointed.

The same day I watched the Earth 2 series anti-climactic series finale I read Nasa’s planet-hunting Kepler telescope spotted its first five worlds beyond our Solar System.  Read the rest of this entry »

Going to waist

I just read in The Economist the average American wastes 1,400 kilocalories a day in food that is either thrown away or never makes it out of the grocery store.  According to a report in the Public Library of Science from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases this amounts to 150 trillion kilocalories a year for the entire country or about 40% of the food supply, up from 28% in 1974.

So what’s the big deal if we don’t clean our plates?  The report goes on to say this wasted food accounts for more than one-quarter of our consumption of fresh water and about 300,000 barrels of oil a year.   Read the rest of this entry »

My German micromini

When I was deployed to Germany after 9/11 I was given a Daimler-Benz Smart Car so I could commute from Sembach Air Base to Ramstein Air Base, about a 40 minute drive on the Autobahn. I thought this was extremely cool and was looking forward to tooling around in the microcar while the Toyota Yaris I was supposed to be driving was having routine maintenance.

The first few days were fun, there was plenty of room for my 6’ frame and the Smart Car was an attention grabber. I could also park it sideways in any parking spot – it was about as long as a parking spot is wide. Talk about making it easy to parallel park, you could literally park it nose in on the street without the rear end hanging out into traffic. Read the rest of this entry »