Monday, January 9, 2012

Bad People

Jack LaLanne is the only adult who could pull off the onesie. And perhaps because he'd kick all of our asses if we said otherwise.


I was working late one night (which is typical, since I work the overnight shift), and a commercial came on TV for something called “The Forever Lazy”.

The “Forever Lazy” is one of the all-time dumbest products of all time. I believe it's by the makers of the “Snuggie”, a product I originally openly mocked, but have come to love. The Snuggie is basically a blanket with sleeves, and at first I accused it of being some horrible product for lazy people, and said that nobody'd ever use them. I readily admit that I was wrong. The Snuggie is fucking awesome. It's warm, it's comfortable, and I can stay warm and drink my drink.

The Forever Lazy, on the other hand,  is horrible and embarrassing, and I stand by my opinion that it'll never catch on.

It's a an adult onesie.

That's right. It's baby pajamas (feeties included) made for adult people. Making it worse are 3 factors:

1) There is a hatch. For pooping. Unless you are in the fucking Alaskan wilderness, with hypothermia nipping at your nethers, you DO NOT need a hatch in your one-piece pajamas. When you're sitting in your home, with a restroom mere steps away, there should be no circumstance where you don't have enough time to unbutton and remove your ridiculous adult onesie. Maybe… MAYBE if you’re in the asylum and are afraid. Of what? I don’t know.

2) They have dropped all pretense and are completely owning the fact that it's for the laziest people on Earth, calling it THE FOREVER LAZY. Not The Lazy Sunday. Not “Sometimes Lazy. It's the fucking FOREVER Lazy. So sad.

3) They make total fools of themselves by showing morons wearing their product out in public. I'm sorry... I can accept that people will occasionally give up at home; in private. I cannot accept that anyone other than the absolute biggest social morons, or possibly the occasional unfunny, ironically dressed hipster would ever stoop to wearing the thing out in public. They pretend that a person would ever, EVER wear that shit at a TAILGATE. Are they joking?

Anyway, I'm not here to talk about the Forever Lazy. This is all just preface.

So, I'm sitting there at work, pondering the silly onesie thing, and thinking... Is this the most embarrassing product ever created?

Is this the one product the makers should be most ashamed of presenting to the public?

For a while, I was certain that it was.

Then, as I drove home this evening, I heard a radio commercial that guaranteed something else the title of “Worst Thing Ever Sold”.

AshleyMadison.com

I'm already dreading writing about this, and having fool after repugnant fool end up at my blog after Googling “Ashley Madison”.

I don’t really know of a colorful way to describe this shit, so I’ll just tell you.

AshleyMadison.com is a dating website, sort of like Match.com, but designed specifically to help people cheat on their spouses.

I’m not kidding.

This is not one of those fake products on Saturday Night Live like Baby Spanx.

They’re also not hiding it in any way… You could argue that Match.com is loaded with people with bad intentions. Match doesn’t exactly discourage that kind of behavior. I mean… that’s why some of the more expensive dating sites do background checks to verify people are single. The difference is, though… Match or OKCupid or whatever else… they may not stop married people from joining, but they aren’t actively inviting it.

It’d be like the US Government passing out heroin instead of welfare. Sure, they may accept that a small portion of the people getting welfare use it to buy drugs, but they aren’t openly endorsing the drug use.

Can you imagine coming up with this nonsense?

How repulsive of a human being does one have to be in order to not only jokingly invent that concept while getting drunk with their friends watching MMA, but to then go so far as implementing the product? That’s a rhetorical question. The only possible answer is “Pretty fucking repulsive”.

For some reason, the existence of this product makes me sadder and more scared for the human race than just about anything else. There are a lot of details of it that I don’t know, because I wouldn’t even come close to daring to visit the website, even just to investigate (and rest assured, I’m dumb enough to click just about anything… (See: Two Girls One Cup, and any e-mail touting the “Worst Thing You’ll Ever See”.) I click all manner of nonsense out of morbid curiosity… So, maybe because of my ignorance of the ins and outs (no pun intended…probably) of the product, I have some thoughts –slash-questions.

1) Who is this Ashley Madison person that the site is named after? Is she the biggest skank in the history of the world simply because she’s the inspiration for “the cheating site”? My god… What if she’s the name of the wife of the founder? How terrible is that?

2) I only know it exists at all because I’ve heard the ads on the radio. How hard-up for money does a radio station have to be in order to allow this horrible company to advertise on your radio show?

3) I am vaguely aware of a story about how they offered to pay 10 million dollars to the city of Phoenix to rename their airport. Thankfully, the city declined.

4) The slogan on the most recent commercial was “Show me a beautiful woman, and I'll show you a man who's tired of being married to her.” I’m not making that up.

I’m fairly certain that this is the worst thing ever. I don’t understand how it can even exist. Look… I’m not naïve. I’m fully aware that people cheat, and I’m also aware that there is often more to the story. Nothing is totally a black and white issue.

Still… I think there’s a big difference between acknowledging that cheating is something that happens, and being all.. “God damn… I’m bored tonight. You know what would be an awesome? Cheating on my spouse. I wish there was a website service to facilitate this illicit transaction. What?! There is?!!”

Whatever happened to staying late at the office in the city, and hooking up with the bohemian heroin addict who then takes you to a poetry reading? If it’s good enough for Don Draper, it’s good enough for all the other dirtbags.

Maybe that’s what offends me the most (probably not )… Doesn’t this just strike you as being fucking lazy? Like… If I’m going to do something bad, no matter what it is, I don’t want to cheapen the bad act by making it super convenient online. There should be some sort of effort involved.

Yeah… that’s definitely not what offends me most.

NBC refused to let them advertise during the Super Bowl, which prompted the president of the company to call NBC hypocrites for disallowing the adultery ads, but allowing ads for beer. (since beer kills people). Maybe I’m being obtuse (I was just recently told I was being obtuse about something, and it made me feel like the warden in Shawshank)… Anyway, maybe I’m being obtuse, but don’t cuckolded spouses kill people too.

[ PS: People who found their way here by Googling “AshleyMadison.com”. Go away, please. But thank you for reading!]

I’m getting annoyed, so I’m gonna change the subject with some miscellaneous updates…

Resolution Updates:
- The first blog of the new year went up last Monday, and here’s the 2nd. So far, I’m right on schedule, even if I’m not exactly re-inventing the wheel. I’m hoping to finish my Movies of 2011 Blog for next week. I likely will have seen all of the 2011 Releases that I plan on seeing by then.

- The woodworking is slow-going. I’ve spent the week practicing dovetail joints and looking through books and magazines trying to find a suitably interesting, but not too intimidating project for February. I’m leaning toward a Zig-Zag chair. In any case, making a dovetail joint is about as hard as you’d imagine, and it doesn’t make me feel better when I watch YouTube videos of experts making flawless dovetail joints in three and a half minutes. It’s quite infuriating, actually. So far I’ve broken my coping saw, and failed to make a single truly straight dovetail, but I AM improving… (and shopping for a new saw..). Tomorrow, I’m going to try using the dremel to see if I can make that horizontal cut a little cleaner with that. In any case, I fully expect to be ready to roll on real furniture/ projects by the start of February, which would put me squarely on schedule.

- I’m now operating at about 95% vegetarian, and (aside from the 1 steak dinner, and occasional non-fried seafood, I should be 100% by the end of the week. The meat products in the house are just about gone, and that was my last hold-out excuse. I have decided to forego the remaining bologna and just suffer the waste.  In the meantime, The TM and I have found a new restaurant called “Zoup!” which is basically a Panera type place, but instead of 40 sandwiches and 4 soups, they have 4 sandwiches and 40 soups. (exaggerations abound). It’s awesome, and when we went there were at least 6 vegetarian soup options, 2 sandwiches, and several salads. She also has been perfecting her vegetarian enchiladas. Effing delicious.

- Household Chores? As of writing this portion of the blog (Friday night), none so far, unless you count meeting with the contractor.  I’d like to carve out the 45 minutes it’s gonna take me to bust up the old box-spring. I’m debating keeping the wood for burning. Sadly the trash people won’t take it in whole form, because they are afraid of bedbugs. I can’t say as I blame them. So, I’ll take to that bitch like Tom Robinson took to bustin’ up that chiffarobe…. Poor Mayella and her forbidden love… Sigh.

- Workout. No progress yet. I’ve spent a fair amount of time online shopping for a good rowing machine, but unless I come into some unexpected money, it’s looking like I’ll need to find an alternate for the near future. In any case, the Tofu Muchacha has, in her wisdom, suggested phasing in my resolutions gradually. I’d like to be up and running (so to speak) with all of them by the end of February, but I’m not gonna feel bad about myself for not doing getting all of them started until then.

7 comments:

Julie said...

What's funny is that website already existed before Ashley Madison. It's called Craigslist.

Though, I suppose, if my spouse were wearing the Forever Lazy, I might understand the need for Ashley Madison a bit more...

Danni said...

okay, you piqued my curiosity so much that I just signed up at Ashley Madison under a bogus email address. There are men on there that openly state that they want to screw around on their wives...and post their pictures. I'm no prude or anything, and far away from moralizing. If the wives know that these scum bags are doing this and approve because of whatever extenuating circumstance..that's their life to live. However, this is Cincinnati that we're talking about so I seriously doubt this to be the case. I'll report back if my bogus email sees any action.

Look forward to developments from the land of wood working. Although I usually advocate drinking while crafting, I fear that spirits and power tools don't mix. Boo for you.

Annie said...

There was something of a scandal with them recently too when they put out an ad with an obese woman that said "Wife too scary?" or something like that. You should google it, it was on Jezebel. This computer won't let me pull it up to link.

I don't know, of course these things are going to exist. They don't really bother me. It's not as though men didn't cheat before this web site came along. There are far more foul things on the internet than a site for douche bags.

Capcha is "noskin". Is that a threat? Ew!

The Tote Trove said...

I too was pretty appalled by the Forever Lazy when I first saw the commercial. Especially the "escape hatch" bit. The whole thing reminds me of that Family Guy episode where Peter finds a pair of footed pajamas at Goodwill and proclaims them to be the best thing ever because he no longer has to choose between being warm and going to the bathroom.

As for Ashley Madison, I agree that it's the far worse product. Aside from being just plain gross, it lacks the comic appeal that makes the Forever Lazy tolerable. I heard one of the creators on a radio show once, and he said that the name Ashley Madison was chosen because it was a combination of the two most popular female baby names that year, and that it would make people (women, I guess) more comfortable using the site. Talk about disturbing.

Danni said...

So...less than 24 hours since I began this little experiment and already I have....3 messages, 5 men have added me as a favorite, and 2 of the more aggressive ( desperate?) have sent me pictures of themselves. All of this for a profile with virtually no personal information about myself....I need to end the account less than 24 hours after opening so that I may, one day, renew my faith in humanity again.

Beefy Padre said...

I love this post; and while you're probably right that AshleyMadison.com is more heinous than the Forever Lazy people, there still is something overwhelmingly weird about that product. I also think about the actors who proudly list those commercials under 'Industrials' as they prance around at a faux-tailgate in their baby suits.

Maybe you should start a website for people who have completely given up - something like Icantbebotheredtochangemyclothesorwearanythingthatfits.com....just a thought...

Laurie said...

Oh, my....I knew about the Forever Lazy, but I'd never heard about AshleyMadison. I kept hoping you were joking so I visited the site.....Oh, it's so wrong!