People really really love to love hating PETA, which is probably why PETA remains one of the more effective non-profits around.

In an especially tortured post yesterday, Best Week Ever’s Dan Hopper explains why he simply cannot post the lastest controversial ad from PETA, recently barred from appearing during the Super Bowl:

I didn’t want to post PETA’s REJECTED SUPER BOWL AD OMGGGG SO CONTROVERSIALLLLL!!!! because it’s obviously a calculated attempt by PETA to say “check out this commercial we made that THE MAN refused to air,” even though they clearly had no intention to actually pay for Super Bowl airtime.

Needless to say, he posted the ad.

He concludes with some impassioned non-profit existential crisis-bait:

Why does PETA still exist? This is nonsense.

But it’s easy: PETA still exists because Dan Hopper still posted that ad, even though he didn’t want to.

Don’t look now! PETA owns you.

Who (other than, apparently, The Fixx) knew the Toyota “Saved By Zero” commercials were based on an actual, true-to-existence pop song*?

As an aside; I never realized how annoying those Toyota ads were until a lot of other people started pointing out how annoying those Toyota ads were.

And herein lies the moral dilemma: who is higher on the stink list, the marketing folks who created the ads, or the nit-pickily culture-conscious types who first pointed out the obnoxiousness?

* Embedding of the video has been disabled for some mysterious reason. And not just embedding of that one solitary YouTube video, but of every YouTube version of The Fixx’s “Saved By Zero” music video, across multiple users. Which is weird. Because The Fixx is…who the eff is The Fixx? And why would they care to disable embedding of their kitschy music video? Obviously they’re ok with it being on YouTube, otherwise the video would just be yanked. So why the beef with frustrated bloggers made ranty by their irritating pop song chorus?

I’m having a hard time figuring out whether or not these Brooke Shields VW ads are deliberately riffing off her well-publicized struggle with postpartum depression:

Women everywhere are having babies just to get a new Volkswagen minivan.

It’s a joke, yes, and, har har, potentially a funny were it presented by, I dunno, Lori Loughlin. But Brooke Shields had a very public struggle with a terrible disease, a debilitating depression centered around the overwhelming feeling that having a baby ruined her life.

I highly highly doubt these ads are intended to be taken in this way, but, then…why Brooke Shields?

I just can’t stop thinking about it: the horror of her condition, the sadness of the isolation, all brought to bear by the televised dramatization of Brooke Shields’ postpartum thoughts, as she stared aimlessly out the window, day in and day out, contemplating suicide and wrestling with immense self-loathing and a frightening indifference to her newborn child.

Man, I really shouldn’t have had a baby just to get a new Volkswagon.

Drawing attention to and normalizing postpartum depression was certainly a wonderful thing for Brooke Shields to do (as was making Tom Cruise look like a total dweebus). So good on Brooke for that.

But these ads just make me sad and somewhat panic-stricken. Which is totally not the mood I tend to be in before I buy cars.

(It probably would have been more effective for Shields to riff off of Suddenly Susan, thus leaving viewers feeling nostalgic and slightly annoyed, a much more consumeristic state of mind.)

Prosecute more incidents of prison masturbation.

Andrew Sullivan highlights some “good news about smoking,” touting a new study that shows smoking may reduce one’s risk of Parkinson’s. Sullivan quotes David Harsanyi, who asks:

My only question is how many major news organizations will give this politically incorrect fact the attention it deserves? If eating tofu lowered your risk of Parkinson’s by 54 percent would it be a front-page story? Should it be a front-page story if tobacco does the trick?

I recently heard cutting off your head is a sure-fire way to prevent brain cancer. I wonder why I haven’t seen this on the front-page..

Foxy Brown was once a cashier at my grocery store.

CNN gets down to the nitty gritty with some hard hitting news:

Two airliners had to circle for 18 minutes and a plane ferrying human lungs for transplant was briefly delayed Friday while an airport’s lone air traffic controller took a bathroom break, the controller’s union said.

It’s gotta be pretty harsh to have CNN publish the length of your poo right there on their website.

From a column in the LA Times:

Before I said yes, I told him I needed to ask my wife, Cassandra. Afraid of a fight, I wimpily text-messaged her. Less than a minute later, she wrote back: “Are you going to get naked and simulate sex? I’d like to see that.” I read this five times. I couldn’t figure out if it was a joke, or if she was turned on, or just didn’t care. Was it, “I’d like to see that,” as in “I’d like to see it over and over again when you’re not home as a marital aid”? Or was it, “I’d like to see that,” as in “I’d like to see that so I could show everyone your pathetic attempts at foreplay”? Text messaging, I discovered, needs more emoticons.

Brooklyn, March 24th at 4:41 PM – The Ice Cream Truck is heard, its first appearance of 2007.

Can hardly wait for Spring in full swing.

Jeopardy! super-champ Ken Jennings is increasingly becoming one of the Best Bloggers Alive, and this post defending his usage of the generic feminine pronoun is a good example why:

Even if you’re not a feminist, there are already four ridiculous things in Cranky 1950s Man’s e-mail. One: that you should stop reading a book the second you disagree with exactly two words. Two: that two pronouns in a 300-page book constitute “agitating” for anything. Three: that there even is such a thing as agitating for a cause without telling anyone, and four: that books should, at all costs, protect readers from the author’s point of view.

For perhaps his best claim to the title check out this post analyzing dance styles from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special.

If the subtitle of this blog is anything as indication––Poetry, Politics, (and the) Boneless Sea Fauna––I’ll say right now I feel like a bit of a pussy starting off with poetry. In fact, I can’t determine whether or not posting poetry here would be a good idea at all, or just an uncomfortable and unintentional indication of my closeted namby-pamby. I’m so out of practice. My blog needs to be redesigned. Is that any reason not to do this? I can’t tell whether or not I should focus on the politics (a not-as-gay, left of right-of-center Andrew Sullivan), or the poetry (a non-Chilean, non-Black, non-as-impressive Amiri Baraka/Pablo Neruda). I’ve already found that this is no reason to start a blog––self-indulgent self-congratulation, unintentional self-parody. But it’s ok; I’m tired and lonely and a little bit thirsty. It’s a yawn, Brooklyn is a sleepy town, but there is some hip hop on the streets and beats in our meats, even for a young vegetarian. This is the introduction, and I just gentrified an entire city block.