The other night I saw an ad on YouTube for a floor tile “wholesaler” in a city I’d never heard of with a really unfamiliar area code in the phone number. I looked up the company online. It was in Indiana.
I live in Missouri and the political ads seem idiotic to me, as well.
As for PBS, our local station has finally quit showing Lawrence Welk in their fundraising and has now moved up to musical acts from the 1960s with either 0 or 1 original members remaining.
Re: #2 on your list (the guy who committedcrimes but is not a criminal)
His “Popeye” mouth could be caused by a stroke. And that could have been caused by doing too much crack that he blew out arteries in his brain, or from the headshot by a rival gangmember.
As for the Westerns, I find that I prefer to watch them than the dreck that is on “regular” TV.
~VOW
I was thinking, birth defect or Bell’s palsy.
I guess his lifestyle probably did this to him.
Poor guy.
A blogger for the New York Public Library covered this:
Before television, the nation saw westerns at movie theaters and listened to them over the radio. When westerns started appearing on TV, viewers avidly waited for their favorites. In any one week, westerns often received the highest viewer ratings. Viewers were able to escape their humdrum lives to watch their favorite heroes overcome all adversaries
Early TV western series helped define America as a nation. Westerns sought to teach the good values of honesty and integrity, of hard work, of racial tolerance, of determination to succeed, and of justice for all. They were, in a sense, modern morality plays where heroes, strong, reliable, clear-headed and decent, fought their adversaries in the name of justice. At the show’s end, moral lessons had been taught and learned.
Not an “oddity”, but along these lines I apparently have the poor taste to be on a channel where Joe Namath and, separately, Jimmy Walker shill for something; Namath maybe for a Medicare Advantage plan? And Walker I don’t remember.
First: we’re all getting old, but neither of these guys look good. They both very much show their age, and both seem to have some slight tremors. But second: to echo the quoted post, why the heck would I trust these guys? I guess I could possibly see the nostalgic appeal of Namath to an 80-something-year-old, but Walker??
also shilling for medicare advantage. It’s an ad so annoying I want to physically kill the man.
You can tell Jimmie Walker is trustworthy because of the way he says “MON-EEEEE.”
Depressing?
Not to my watch at all
Dyn-O-MITE!!
(I feel old, because I used to watch young JJ say that every week. I watched when they still had John Amos. If you know what I’m talking about, hi! Old fart!)
We’ve been watching Classic Concentration, with Alex “Colonial Penn” Trebek. You can win one of these fabulous cars! Well… they were some of the most crappy, interchangeable, BOR-ing POS cars ever. I don’t even remember some of them. Who here remembers Daihatsu?
I trust JJ Walker with my Medicare decisions the way I trust Tom Sellek’s advice on getting a reverse mortgage.
Then there’s the reanimated corpse of Ted Danson, brought back to peddle something whose target audience is a fourth his age, and have no idea who the fuck he is.
eta: I hope that sentence made sense 
I’ve only seen promos for it and, AFAICT, these commercials tie in with his recently canceled series.
The only thing I’ve seen Ted Danson hawking is Consumer Cellular, whose target audience is definitely older, maybe even older than Danson.
Those ignorant Liberty Mutual Emu Commercials.
I know the Geico lizard is aggravating, it used to be funny 20yrs ago.
The Emu never was funny
A few years ago, Liberty Mutual changed ad campaigns*, going away from a more sincere campaign, to several silly ones, in an attempt to be more like Geico and Progressive.
I don’t think the ads are particularly good, but my guess is that it’s helped build “top of mind” brand awareness for them, which was probably their goal. (I’m guessing this because they’ve stuck with the campaigns for several years now; if the ads weren’t working, they would have changed course.)
*- It wouldn’t surprise me if they also changed ad agencies at that point, too, but I don’t know this for sure.
It’s a chain of family resorts and waterparks; around here, there’s one in the northern suburbs of Chicago (up the street from a Six Flags amusement park), and another one in the Wisconsin Dells (their original location).
The wolf-riding ad should have a “no actual wolves may be ridden at Great Wolf Lodge” disclaimer. 
They were easy to make, and the Hollywood studios already had lots of Western sets on their backlots, from decades of shooting Western films.
A few years ago, I read James Garner’s autobiography. In the section where he talked about starring on Maverick, he mentioned that the studio (Warner Bros.) was filming several Western series simultaneously, on the same backlot sets. They would have a set of film crews in a central location on the set, and the crews would take turns shooting scenes for each show. Then, they’d rotate the actors from one part of the set to another – say, from the town set to the ranch set.
He said that they also frequently reused/repurposed footage of establishing shots and backgrounds between the shows.
what Westerns was the blogger watching? “racial tolerance”? Where? Movies (not so much TV) showed Indians as savages to be killed. no Blacks (except occasionally Woody Stroud). no Asians, some Mexicans (mixed treatment) We’re not talking Star Trek here
Blogger? Do mean me, the original poster?
I was talking about westerns on TV, mainly.
Wasn’t talking about race in the shows. I know America was more racist back then.
I was later born than their hey-day. Every time I see a western it’s a different one. I’ve been counting and I’ve determined there were, at least 20.
Speaking of Star trek, I’ve seen most of the crew of the Enterprise as guest stars on the episodic westerns. And many out-of-work older movie stars.
I especially like to see Bette Davis.
And, Shatner or someone said the show was described as a western set in space.
ETA. Bonanza had an oriental, Hop-sing, as a cook. So there were some orientals .
I knew you could put it plainly where my pea-brain could understand.
Thx😁