This is why I watch basketball games with the remote in my hand

I used to worry that I would hurt myself leaping for the remote to change the channel when one of the perfectly dreadful, awful, insulting, ghastly, pathetic, garbage-like Ameritel Copy Services commercials came on. These things make my skin crawl.

There are more recent ones and older ones, but they all have something in common. Somebody, somewhere believes in putting these four unfortunate children in the spots. God only knows why. The people who do these things ought to be taken out and shot for the good of the country. (But they must be proud of them; they put them up on You Tube! They probably figure it's a pret-ty slick marketing move to do it.)

When I was in college at South Carolina, there was a car dealer who used his son in his spots. The kid - he was about 12 my freshman year - would bang on some drums and then tell us all that he was "drummin' up bidness for mah Dayuddy!" Even as an 18 year-old I knew they were stupid. And, even as I am today, I was an idiot.

By my senior year, you could tell that the kid in the spot thought they were stupid too. Poor guy sat there like somebody off-camera had a crossbow pointed at his head and gamely delivered his lines. Admittedly, he had a much better set of drums by then, but the ridicule he must have suffered in school probably scarred him forever.

I'm sorry, but wretched commercials like these aren't campy or anything. They just suck. S-u-c-k.

I have some very good friends who put out Bethesda Magazine. And when I win the lottery, I will have a standing offer to them that I will give them $22,886 cash every time they refuse to accept an ad from somebody who wants to do some variation on "Got Milk?" Seems like you run across those things daily. Somebody ought to sue.

Point is, there is some really, really terrible advertising out there that people are spending good money on.

If an agency does these horrible spots and terrible ads, the rest of us should storm the place with torches and pitchforks. But my guess is that it's usually the advertisers themselves who dream those things up. And you know what lawyers say about a lawyer who represents himself or herself. **

And while we're looking at horrible spots, the one below for Senate Insurance was on You Tube right there with the terrible Ameritel one at the top. Why they decided to feature cave men humping a parked car is anybody's guess, but that's sure what it looks like.

Enjoy. We didn't do either of them.



** Well, maybe you don't. They say that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.