The Wal-Mart ad featuring Destiny’s Child is currently near the top of my imaginary “Ads that suck” list.

There are three serious offenses against this ad:

1. The “music” makes me long for the sound of nails on a chalkboard.
2. It’s always on the super-annoying-I-paid-so-you-can-advertise-to-me-more Twenty crap at Regal Cinema outlets. Ohhh….entertainment ignited! No, but the audience is.
3. The messaging at the end of the ad is particularly suggestive. Yes, I know, tricky advertising. But in case you didn’t catch how this ad works, here goes. At the end of the ad the lyrics finish on “So just give more” and they flash the slogan “Hook up your home for the Holidays” with the Wal-mart logo up. That’s some pretty good programming you got there.

I’m greatly interested in observing marketing in our society. Understanding how that marketing helps shape us is interesting, but sometimes, wondering how the marketing reflects society is even more so.

Case in point. Last Saturday, I visited the local Vons grocery store to pick up a card with an encouraging theme to it. Mind you, this store has quite a selection of cards, I think it spans one entire side of the aisle. I waded through the mass of birthday and graduation cards to find the “Special Occasions” section. This section takes up I suppose about 1/5 of all the cards. It’s not a tiny section. I looked for a card with the “Encouragement” label sticking out behind it, and found a sweet, understated one right away. It even fit my intentions perfectly. I’m glad, because, it was the only encouragement card I could find. And I’m not talking about labeled spots that were empty. I mean, you could tell, this was it.

Then I noticed a funny thing as I was leaving the aisle. There must have been at least seven cards, maybe more, with the theme of “Happy Birthday from the cat/dog”. So let me get this straight. Out of hundreds of cards, I found one on person-to-person encouragement. That’s at least six less than cards “from” creatures that don’t buy the card, can’t communicate in spoken language with humans, and have no intentions in ever engaging in funny birthday wishes.

That’s messed up.

We’re messed up.

Just wanted to rant a second about a pet peeve of mine. Web app designers, listen up. OK, that’s melodramatic, barely any read here, but I just want to vent.

Do not ever use an email address in place of a username for system login. Yes, email addresses are easy to remember. Yes, many people only have a small amount, or one only. Yes, they are unique. But let’s face it, spam is a problem. Many people use one-to-one email systems like sneakemail or spamgourmet to prevent leakage of their real address to spammers. I rely heavily on the free sneakemail service, and therefor have addresses like 123dkjds at sneakemail.com with all my accounts. This poses a problem when I try to log into a site that uses my email address as my username. I can easily remember my username, or a variation of it. However, I cannot remember 123dkjds at sneakemail.com. As a result, I either have to check the login every time, or store all my logins in my browser form management tools. Am I OK with my browser remembering my login to some random comments forum? Yes. Do I want my Amazon login stored? No way.

One possible way out is to edit my keychain entries to hold my web form logins to sensitive sites, but manually edit the password field to hold a bogus password such as the number 1. Forms that use a typical password entry without javascript simply replace each password character with an ‘*’, so the single character would be easy to identify. It’s annoying because then Safari will also prompt me to resave the login info, to which I’ll always have to click “Not now”. I suppose that’s a minor annoyance.

My cynical prediction is that when Everwood returns, Ephram will be dressed like he’s singing for The Killers or some equivalent. Then we can come up with cute names like Emowood.

I like The Killers, but boy, has the fashion these days gotten ridiculous. Orange County is swimming in the mod look, and the colors pink and black. At the Getty Center on Saturday, I think I saw somebodies gramma wearing pink and black. Can you say, “Gone too far?”

Just in case you didn’t know, the WB Monday night lineup of 7th Heaven and Summerland is probably the worst block of television right now. Maybe ever. It’s so bad it’s almost not entertainingly bad. It takes skill to aggregate that much poor acting.

I turned 30 today. Yay me.

In case you can’t tell, I am not too thrilled. Somehow, I see 30 as really old. No offense to those over 30 of course. I decided that in honor of my birthday (and weakening body) I would take a floating holiday today. We get two a year, and I figured, what better time. Of course, I did nothing of great value, other than lounge around the house and play on the internet. At least I spent some time organizing my photos.

I’m excited about tonight. In three hours, Crista is taking me to a surprise location to eat. I’m not even going to try and guess, that would spoil the fun.

Thanks to those of you who sent me greeting cards, emails, and gifts today. They were greatly appreciated.