A Therapy Related lolcat Pic

Boxing Kitty

This is cute, too!

I Know, It’s Not A Written Entry . . .

. . . but these are too cute!

qui

Thursday Thirteen: Most Brilliant Ad Campaigns

I hope I’m doing this right.  I hope I’m allowed to use the graphic from the Thursday Thirteen site.  It looks like a lot of other bloggers have created their own graphic.  I could do that, if I end up doing this on a regular basis.  I hope the note on the Thursday Thirteen site about it being gone doesn’t mean it’s too late for me to start doing this, since it looks like a lot of fun.

If I understand it right, I get to pick whatever my “thirteen” list is about.  So, I’m going to make it about thirteen brilliant (in my opinion) ad campaigns / commercials, since I’ve been planning to blog about some of them anyway for a while.

Alrightie . . . (in the order they come to mind; not necessarily in order of preference)

1. The Progressive Insurance Commercials with Flo – I really like Flo.  Sometimes my sister and I imitate her.  When the first commercial came out, we got a kick out of saying to each other, in public, “WOW!  I know, I say it louder.”

2.  The Geico Gecko Commercials – I never get tired of that little guy.

3.  The Geico Cavemen Commercials – Especially this one, because, well, I’m in therapy, and my therapist is smart.  And I know, at this point, it appears that my whole list is all about insurance company commercials, but that really is just a coincidence.  I would like to ask, while I’m on the topic of Geico commercials, however, what the hell their advertising people were thinking when they decided to start running those creepy googly-eyed money commercials.  Somebody ought to be fired over those, especially after the Gecko and Caveman commercials.  I have been known to change the channel to avoid watching the “money” ones.  I’m just saying.

4.  I can’t find a link for this (if anyone knows where one can be found, please do share!) – Back in the late 1990’s, there was a series of radio commercials that cracked me up.  They were for a wine cooler, I believe, but I don’t remember the brand.  They used gender stereotypes.  One, for instance, was a group of women talking at a backyard barbecue.  One woman comments on another’s lawnmower or something, and the other proudly tells her the width of the path it will cut, kind of with that Barney Fife sort of chest-puffed-out way.  Another woman talks about putting in a swimming pool that summer, then adds, ” . . . but it’s not like my husband’s gonna help me” and the others laugh that knowing laugh that says they understand that her poor husband couldn’t know anything about putting in a pool.  Stuff like that.  They were just so funny, though.  Much funnier than I can do justice to by trying to remember how they went.

5.  The Clearblue Digital Pregnancy Test Commercial – I haven’t seen this version in a while, but I loved it when it used to run.

6.  The Nestea Plunge Commercials – This was a brilliant ad idea.  Didn’t they start in the 1970’s?  I can remember them from when I was a kid, and I remember immitating them with my friends and my cousin every time we went swimming.

7.  I Can’t Believe I Ate The Whole Thing – Annoying as it may have been, everyone I knew remembered it.  This link is to the remake with Doris Roberts and Peter Boyle.  I cant believe I can’t find the original.

8.  The Mac vs PC series of commercials – Really funny stuff.  And more therapy humor at the very end.

9.  Reeses “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter” commercials – And I’m linking to the one with Robby Benson, because I really, really, really liked him as a kid.

10.  The “Dude, You’re Getting A Dell” commercials – I found a couple with the guy, Steve, but couldn’t find any with that actual line that he became famous for.  Before his pot bust rendered him virtually invisible, that is . . .

11.  The old Slinky commercial – Everyone my age can visualize the Slinky going down the stairs, and can remember the song.  Has anyone seen the not-G-rated parody, which comes to mind every time I hear that song now?  *snicker*

12.  Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun – ‘Nuff said.

13.  Lee Majors Hearing Aid Commercial - Ok, it’s sad, too, but also smart to put his name behind it, as most people who are of an age to use a hearing aid used to watch The Six Million Dollar Man.  Now be honest, didn’t you hear that bionic sound in your mind?

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The Importance of Not Letting Your Mind Wander

* Juvenile snicker *

“We have brain.”

I had such a great visit, last night, with my friend RB.

It’s kind of funny, how she got the name “RB’.  When we were first getting to know one another, someone who knew both of us would often remark about how alike we were.  When the three of us would get together, RB and I would very often say the same thing at the same time.  At some point the joke became that she and I share a brain.  When it occurred to us that she is left-handed and I am right-handed, we decided that she must be Right Brain and I must be Left Brain.  And we became RB and LB.

From time to time, if one of us has had a day where she didn’t feel quite on top of her game, she would IM or email the other and say, “Did you steal my half of the brain today?”

We would decide that must have been what happened if the other said that she’d felt unusually sharp all day.

It also became a convenient all-around excuse for any time one of does something she regrets or thinks wasn’t the smartest thing to do: “Well, if you hadn’t hogged the brain, this wouldn’t have happened.”

So, last night, we came up with a fun idea for a new invention.  I said, “We just need to find funding, since we have the brains.”

RB shrugged and said, “Well, we have brain.”

More Big Bang Theory

This first scene is one that I had been looking for when I posted my entry of TBBT clips, but I couldn’t find it.  This a “best moments of” video someone made, but it’s the first scene that I specifically love so much.

Cat Yodeling

Um.  I do the “semi-automatic kissing machine” thing with Emily, but it doesn’t seem to annoy her.

Procrastination

This made me laugh out loud when I saw it on the ADD forum I belong to.

Shopping Lists

My therapist, when I asked her to talk about some ADD-coping strategies a month ago, suggested, among other things, that I keep a shopping list.  Not just to make one from memory, right before I go to the store, but to keep one that I add onto whenever I realize there is something else I need.  (This was after I talked about having forgotten to buy laundry detergent over and over, when I’d gone to the store serveral times for other things.  Did you know that shampoo works pretty well in a pinch, for washing clothes?)

Anyway, I have a little notebook that I carry in my purse, and I started to use it as a running shopping list, and it has begun to double as a small to-do list as well, for the more immediate to-do items, like errands to run or phone calls to make during my lunch break.  It’s serving two purposes, and that’s nice.  It’s also a better solution than having little scraps of paper in my purse, that I can’t find when I need them.

My friend RB and I saw a very amusing book about shopping lists last weekend when we went to the bookstore.  I’m so funny about other people seeing my shopping lists, whether because of my embarrssment about my hard-to-read writing or the way I may abbreviate things or put question marks next to an item that I may not need all that badly unless it happens to be on sale or enough other items are on sale to “make it fit” into the budget.  But the shopping lists in this book are so funny (be sure to click on the “Look Inside” link to see some of them) that mine now seem boring enough that I don’t have to care who sees them.

The thing is, though, for me, other than occasionally forgetting to buy something repeatedly (like the laundry soap), on my better days (and if I need only a handful of items), I’m usually pretty able to remember what I need.  On my bad days, I may not even be able to construct a list at all if I haven’t been slowly adding to it for days, let alone navigate the grocery store or decide what to buy without a list.  But the good days . . . they’re fun.  They’re fun because I like to use creative ways to remember what I need to buy, such as arranging the items in my mind so that I know them based on the first letter of each word (“I need three B’s, two L’s, and an H”), or I may arrange them so that there is a silly rhyme scheme (“Soap, shampoo, and wine, and tomatoes-on-the-vine”).  Sometimes the syllable-pattern reminds me of a song, as it did the other day, even if it happens to be a song I’d never paid all that much attention to.  I was walking toward the store and reached for my purse to get the list out, and I thought to myself, “No, wait.  The syllable-pattern reminded me of ‘Lawyers, Guns, and Money‘.”

And it came to me quickly: Toothpaste, cheese, and butter.

I could write a Weird Al song, if only I’d needed liver, buns, and honey.

People tell me all the time that my mind works very differently from most others.  I guess they’re right.