My new column is up at Examiner.com with my NFL picks for the week, as always, it's not all about sports. Check it out. In other Friday random thoughts...

• "The Riches" has been canned. Not much of a surprise. I try and watch everything FX puts on, but "The Riches" just didn't stick for me. I love Eddie Izzard as a comedian but not as an actor, and Minnie Driver appearing in something is somewhat akin to spotting an albatross on a long journey. It won't end well.
  
• My new bio and pic are up at KLTV.com. If you're going to make fun of my hair, please bring your A game.


• Idle question. Which is cooler, and by "cooler", I mean, "less dorky"? Civil War reanactors or Medieval Fair geeks?
  
  I'm going to go with Rennaissance Fair geeks. At least there, people get dressed up to remind themselves of an imaginary world where people could be knights or wizards, and magic could enable dorks to get hot chicks.
  
• The ratings were in, and Wednesday night's "Gary Unmarried" and "Private Practice" didn't do well.
  
  No surprises here, folks. Who's in these shows? Paula Marshall and Taye Diggs. I warned you. Pretty people, cursed TV shows.
  
• Finally, have you ever been watching a movie, and you notice a bit of casting so weird, so strange, so blessedly off-kilter that it throws the entire movie off for you? I'm talking about Flea being the hardware store clerk in the remake of "Psycho," or Anthony Michael Hall being in "The Dark Knight," or something to that effect.
  
  Last night, I'm watching "Silence of the Lambs," and when the SWAT team goes in to get Hannibal Lecter, singer/actor Chris Isaak is one of the lead SWAT team guys getting into the elevator. It ruined the movie for me, I kept wondering what else I hadn't noticed about the flick.
  
  I was scouring the group scenes for signs of other 90's musicians. Did I miss the Goo Goo Dolls as EMTs? Was that a Blowfish in the FBI classroom? Was that Scott Stapp playing a janitor, or was that actually Scott Stapp cleaning the set?

Last night, Lovely Wife Kimberly and I were eating at Chick-Fil-A. We were out shopping, and stopped in to grab a sandwich. However, we forgot it was "Kids Night," where anyone bringing a screaming child gets a free chicken nuggets kids meal. It seems like the offer was doing a good job of driving traffic to the restaurant, because it was so full of kids I thought the Jonas Brothers were giving away autographed chest hairs in the lobby.

Anyway, while we were eating I overheard what may be the silliest complaint ever. This man, his wife, and two kids were sitting behind me, and an employee walked over to the table to tell them something. Using my powers of observation/eavesdropping, I heard the employee politely apologize and explain to the gentleman that on Tuesday night, every child receives a free four-piece nuggets kids meal when an adult buys a dinner.

This guy was rudely complaining that his boy couldn't get a six-piece meal for free.

He told the poor employee that it wasn't clearly indicated anywhere that the free meal was a four-piece meal, and dismissed her saying he'd take it up with the upper management.

Is that what we've come to? We're complaining because we don't get enough free stuff?

This disgruntled customer, we'll call him "Mr. Douche," continued to complain on and on and on right through rude, then thoughtless, then to the point of comedy. Half of the people at his table ate for free, but that wasn't enough. Meanwhile, my 401(k) account is shrinking like wet cotton candy, and Mr. Douche is upset about fifty cents worth of nuggets.

I was afraid this guy was going to hire a shady lawyer, sue for deprivation of nuggetry, and call me as a witness.

"Have you or someone you know been unjustly denied your full nuggeting privilege? Did your son or daughter have to suffer the indignities of not being completely full of free food? Call me. I'm Brock Biffman, 'The Hammer of Justice." As a semi-licenced attorney, I'm dedicated to getting you your full free meals worth of chicken, regardless of whether or not it was offered.

At Brock Biffman & Associates, we don't get paid...until you get full."

We complain about the stupidest stuff sometimes. This Chick-Fil-A offers a "Kids Night" where kids not only get free food, but also get to play in their playground, a giant human hamster habitrail where kids can climb, run, and generally exhaust themselves. It's not like your standard terrifying fast food ball pit, all full of human waste and pointy things. It's really nice. If they had a night where they let adults run around in it without fear of societal scorn, I'd be there every week.

The worst thing about the situation was that this guy was sitting here complaining loudly in front of his kids. Little Billy and Bonnie were hearing Daddy rage about the injustices of only getting four nuggets for free instead of six, and you know that's going to warp their little minds.

Fifteen years from now when bodies start showing up in my town, bludgeoned to death and left in an alley with two pieces of chicken left behind as a calling card, perhaps I'll be the only one who can solve the mystery of "The Mad Nuggeter."

This was one of those moments I really wished I wasn't a public figure. I would have just walked up to the table and handed the guy a pair of nuggets, and saved his kids a lifetime of therapy.

"Pardon me for interrupting, but I thought I might be of service. Here are two nuggets for each of your children, along with an array of sauces and dips for your perusal. There is justice in this world, children, but you won't find it in a deep frier. Never stop seeking it."

And then I would turn on my heels, and make a dramatic exit, stage right.

The concept of this profession just completely eludes me. These people get money to tell you what they're doing in their own lives. Does this ever work? All I ever do is figure out if they're going to tell me how to be a Motivational Speaker myself, so I can pick up their speaking fee.

If you want to motivate your employees, don't pay some recently fired football coach fifty grand to come talk for a half hour about getting up at dawn and staying late. They have a lifespan of about eight years, and no family life to speak of.

Why would you hire a college football coach to tell you how to run your business? What did he learn by recruiting steroid-infused domestic batterers, and how will it affect our 3rd quarter profits?

Cash the fifty thousand in small bills, and then you let your employees fight over it. Last man standing is employee of the year.

Honestly, if motivation is so important, why should we waste it on work? Why can't I get motivated to daydream? Or to get my life in order? Or to get another job?

Everyone is not a winner, folks. That's why we have winners. Be perfectly okay with spending time with your loved ones, and not making money for people farther up the corporate ladder.

Motivational Speakers will tell you that Abraham Lincoln entered the Blackhawk War a captain, and came out a private. And he failed nine times. And it turned out okay for him.

Except for the whole "getting murdered" thing, that is.

Before I forget, there's some new columns up on the Examiner site. At "Pickin' Ain't Easy," I make my predictions for the NFL week, while simultaneously working in jokes about Britney Spears, Bill Maher, and Howie Mandel. As Joe Bob says, check it out.

I've got a site counter on Reid About It that tells you not only how many people visit the site, but how they are referred to it. I'm always intrigued by the things people are looking for when they find my page. Here's a few samples.

Sometimes there's not much I can do other than present the facts to you, my intrepid readers. So here goes, I present to you a woman arrested for disorderly conduct while wearing a cowsuit.

Seriously.

I blame this one on the economy. You can't get a loan for anything, nobody's hiring, the depression is hitting...why not get hammered, don a cow suit, and set about disturbing the neighborhood?

I'm not sure which is my favorite part of this story, although thoughts of the Bovine Avenger urinating on her neighbor's front porch bring to mind a half-dozen "teet" jokes. I also enjoy that the police report "did not speculate as to why Allen was wearing the cow suit."

Really, what reason could they infer? Mad Cow Disease? She forgot to get her Moo shot?

This is an occasion that just begs for puns, people. Don't feel guilty about using them.

With the current financial crisis, I'm going to take today to go get a warm coat, a trash barrel to light a fire in, and a new spoon to take down to the soup kitchen. My retirement account is paying out in wampum, so I'm going to take advantage of the day off to go sell some blood, urine, and kidneys.

In my place today, I've asked an old friend to step in for a guest column. Whit Watson is a cohort of mine in ye olde television sweatshop. He's the lead anchor for Sun Sports Network in Florida, and blogs at Sun Sports website. He's a pretty big deal. He has his own wikipedia page, for crying out loud. Not even Julie Tam has that.

Whit's like me, a sports guy who also has an eye for pop culture (like John Hughes movies, Sonia Dada, and pre-cocaine arrest Barenaked Ladies).

Thanks to Whit for stepping in to pinch-hit for me, check out his columns over at Sun Sports and tell him I sent you.

---

This, I believe, is the first sign of the apocalypse: JCPenney is doing "The Breakfast Club."

For those who haven't seen it, the venerable department store chain recently released a TV ad campaign for its line of teen clothing that features spot-ond reenactments of the 1985 John Hughes classic. Here, an exterior shot of Shermer High School; there, a kid with a passing resemblance to Emilio Estevez pulls on the drawstrings of his hoodie. The dancing scenes in the library are absent the pot smoke, of course, and the montage shots of the kids sliding around in the hallways while evading Principal Vernon are not terribly true to the original, but for the most part, the ads are scary good. Even the camera angles and lighting appear completely accurate. The film's iconic title track, "Don't You (Forget About Me)," is acknowledged by way of a very catchy cover - it's not Simple Minds this time, but New Found Glory. Not surprisingly, an EP with five different cover versions of that tune was available for purchase online as soon as the ads were released.

Sigh.

The obvious has been stated many, many times already, particularly on blogs that follow the advertising industry: the movie is 23 freaking years old. Which means, of course, that the subtlety and accuracy of the ads is completely lost on the kids who might actually wear this stuff. Sure, maybe they've seen it on DVD, but they didn't grow up with it. It was no seminal film of their youth. For that matter, I have no idea what films might fall into that category for a teenager today, and won't embarrass myself by hazarding a guess.

(Sidebar: I have an 8-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter. The last movie I saw in a theater was "WALL-E." If there's a film in theatrical release from the last nine years that doesn't feature an animated version of a talking car, animal, robot, mythical creature, or toy, I haven't seen it. I'm digressing.)

The obvious conclusion - the painful, grating, pisses-me-off-more-than-it-should conclusion - is that these ads are not aimed at the kids. They're aimed at their parents, who not only can identify with these scenes, but will theoretically bask in the warm glow of nostalgia as they pull their credit cards. And seeing as how I've just identified "The Breakfast Club" as a seminal film of my generation, well...

Those ads are aimed at me.

In my case, they missed. As noted, my kids are too young for the clothes being peddled. For that matter, I was only 14 when the movie was originally released. However, if one were, say, an 18-year-old high school senior in 1985, that would place one at or around a 41st birthday right about now, plenty old enough to have a child of at least 12. Further, if 1985 was your graduation year, there's a pretty good chance that your memory of that movie is further romanticized - Hell, it's 50-50 that "Don't You (Forget About Me)" was the theme of your senior prom. If that doesn't get you skipping off to Penney's with your sullen teenagers in tow, I don't know what will.

Naturally, someone at Penney's ad agency (in this case, the giant Saatchi & Saatchi) thought of all this. In fact, I predict that the concept, when pitched, was considered a "home run," or some other cliche typically spouted by advertising people. But it's not, for two reasons:

One, because it pisses me off that this film, which was such an integral part of my most impressionable adolescent years that I can nearly recite it verbatim to this day, has been co-opted into an ad for JC freaking Penney's. And no matter how terrific those ads may look, no matter how expensive they may have been to create, "pissing off the viewer" cannot possibly be on Saatchi & Saatchi's to-do list. And I cannot be alone. If this were to become a trend - if the JCPenney ad were to be followed by similar treatments of "Pretty in Pink" or "St. Elmo's Fire" or, God help me, "Fletch" - there will be torches and pitchforks, people. Torches and pitchforks. We are in denial about our age. Don't screw with us.

The second reason why this ad fails the mark is because JCPenney ignored the Disney Principle (which should probably now be renamed the Pixar Principle) of any form of entertainment that hopes to attract both kids and parents: you must entertain Mom and Dad without Junior realizing it.

If Junior thinks that Mom thinks a commercial/movie/song is cool, Junior will reject it out of hand. I guarantee that right now, legions of teenagers are resisting parental attempts to go shop at Penney's precisely because Mom thought those ads were "cute." It's a kid thing. If, however, Mom and Dad are snorting at subtle jokes that only they can understand, while Junior is laughing at the obvious, kid-friendly humor - THAT is how one hits a "home run."

Exhibits: "Aladdin," "Little Mermaid," "Toy Story," "Finding Nemo," "The Incredibles," "Cars," "Madagascar," and a dozen other animated films I'm too lazy to go look up. What they all have in common is a sufficient supply of in-jokes and subtle nods at adult sensibilities to keep Mom and Dad entertained, while leaving the scenery-chewing antics intact for the kids. "Aladdin," in particular, is probably the alpha dog of this category thanks to Robin Williams, who could barely keep it clean for the entire film - the exact sort of razor's-edge humor that will compel the parents to stay seated.

Put it this way: during the "Prince Ali" number, Williams' Genie makes a 2-second reference to the old Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade broadcasts -- "Aren't they lovely, June?" - complete with visible breath, as if it were cold outside. I have seen that movie 20 times with my kids, and I chuckle at that line every...single...time.

Further, I would submit that the "High School Musical" phenomenon falls into that category. Fact is, the kids can dance, and they can sing. The music is reasonably catchy, decent enough to play in the car with the kids and not drive oneself batty. "Barney" it's not. Again: keep Mom and Dad entertained without Junior knowing it.

The JCPenney ads, while brilliantly executed and cleverly conceived, miss on this front, because the kids aren't going to get it. And if you only go for the parents, you're only starting the battle, not winning it.

And seriously - if I see "Weird Science" as an ad for anything, I'm gonna start cracking some skulls.

-- Whit Watson

Email to my blog, obviously after someone saw me on TV. This is from someone on AOL called "GranpaJerry".

"Get a haircut!

Are you getting retrofitted for a trip back to the 60's?

Commune living appeal to you?"

Just for future reference, my hair is curly. At this point I wear it curly because girls, most importantly my wife Kimberly, like it that way. After suffering through having curly hair in the 80's and 90's when it was never in style, the winds of chance have turned my curly hair into something that people like and I enjoy taking advantage of it.

Furthermore, I would never change my appearance to be more attractive to anyone called "Granpa." That's kind of gay. And not the good sort of gay that's sensitive and introspective, but rather the bad sort that hangs out in state parks and truck stop parking lots.

Besides, are people still using AOL? What's next, am I going to get crap from somebody on Compuserve? Someone who's ticked at me and loading up my page on Netscape?

I'm still having some studio issues, so no PopCast this week. If you're looking for some hot fresh info-tainment, head on over to Examiner.com and check out my semi-humorous column over there, "Picking Ain't Easy." Even if you're not a sports fan, check it out.

Fresh on the heels of her Maxim cover, Transformers star Megan Fox told the magazine she was once in love with female stripper. To start with, this seems like really effective marketing. After reading this article, I decided that Megan Fox is the best young actress I've seen, even though I can't remember a single thing she's done except that movie I don't recall a single thing about. The article goes on to say Fox tried to get the stripper to quit, but couldn't do it. Let that be a lesson, guys, if Megan Fox can't coax a stripper out of the lifestyle, you offering her your El Camino ain't going to do it either.

"Guitar Hero" is reportedly coming out with a Jimi Hendrix edition. Unless this game comes with a headband soaked in acid, I'm against it.

Microsoft is cancelling the Jerry Seinfeld commercials, effective immediately. Good idea, those commercials were so bad I couldn't even tell what they were supposed to be advertising. They were the creepiest ads since the great Quiznos-talking rat commercials of the early 200s.

Finally, my favorite thing to do these days is to see if people are paying attention. Whenever a friend sends me an email with one of those motivational sig lines, before I respond I always change the line slightly to see if they're paying attention. I got one yesterday with the Will-Smithian-philosophy "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." I responded by changing it to "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the number of moments we make our enemies take underwater." Two replies later, it's still under the radar.

Once upon a time, I had a dog named Sammie. Since Sammie was an inside dog, I never had her spayed or neutered, so she would still go into heat. When she started, I didn't want her to bleed all over the carpet, so I bought a ten-pack of little boys' underwear.

I turned them around, put her tail through the front flap, and safety pinned them to make them tight. Then, as long as I remembered to take them off of her when I walked her, everything was fine.

At the end of the week as I was walking to the dumpster of my apartment complex carrying a garbage bag full of bloody lttle boys' underwear, I realized...

I didn't think this through very well.

The weather forecast for Tyler today:

 

A 100% chance of it raining like a sumbitch, with a 90% chance my trash cans will wind up in another county. Expect winds up to 3000mph, with flash flooding probable in Reid's garage. Stay in, and start building an ark.