Pure Adrenaline!

Some of my favorite commercials on TV are the Geico commercials. I love the gecko. I loved the woodchuck ad and most of all I love Maxwell the pig and his commercials.

Maxwell is an adrenaline junkie who loves to go fast and scream weeeeeeee whenever he is doing so.
What particularly makes me laugh at all of them though isn’t the fact that a pig is having so much fun and going weeeeeeeee and talking. No, it’s the fact that he is holding pinwheels in each hoof as he is doing so.
Who even owns a pinwheel anymore? How many people under 30 even would know what one was at first sight? It was such a random and goofy prop to stick in the ad that it kills me every time.

Maxwell the Gieco mascot

But, no matter how much I love the ads that Geico runs, I will never buy their product. It’s too expensive. It has to be spending all of that money coming up with all of those ads. Obviously they work to the point where people buy the product, but it will never be me. Not as long, anyway, as 21^st Century Insurance continues to cost me half of what every other plan does.

Over on American Idol last night, Heejun Han got the boot. It didn’t matter to America that he tried to get more serious the evening before or that a concerted effort to keep him on the show was in place. It was just his turn and it was inevitable.
Sadly that meant that DeAndre Brackensuck is still on the show. He is the absolute worst “singer” that has ever made it this far.
Jimmy Iovene had it right about Brackensuck; his style is polarizing. One can either love it or hate it. I HATE IT.
I also don’t like Joshua Ledet’s voice and style either but I get it how others might. He is at least likeable enough also.
My current belief is that Philip Phillips will win AI. Jessica Sanchez is the best singer left of the eight but the female vote is much larger this year, apparently.

I know people who scoff at American Idol for a few different and strange reasons. One thing is certain about this show, however, and it is that it is huge and powerful.
What other type of show has there been in prime time like this that attracts the type of stars to it like it does?
Let’s face it. Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler are superstars in the music industry and this show attracted them to it to take it on as a new career and it has made their careers bigger. Randy Jackson was well known in the industry also but as a member of bands (Journey for one) and is now pretty much just famous for AI.
Let’s not forget what it did for Ryan Seacrest.
The real proof of the shows power though was evidenced last night as last year’s winner Alfred E. Neumann (Scotty McCreary) was presented with a platinum album for his first-ever record. Platinum means one million albums sold. That was in less than a year, my friends. That is truly amazing.

The same holds true for The Voice, a show which I know continues to attract more viewers and even some of those who I know don’t like American Idol. After all this show has Christina Aquilera as a judge and not just for the first year but now also the second and the same holds true for the other three judges. I didn’t really see them all coming back for year two. This means that the opportunities for these judges, and anyone who appears on the show, are gigantic.

Speaking of gigantic, the Mega-Millions lottery drawing going off tonight is currently at 540 million dollars and it will grow by the time it is drawn tonight.
The cash option on that is a whopping 389 million dollars. If you just figure that half will go for taxes I will get a staggering 190 million dollars clear when I hit it tonight.

Tonight is my night!
If you see another blog of mine in a couple of days you will know that it wasn’t me who took the jackpot down to the bank. But if you never read this again you will also never hear anything from me again because I’ll disappear faster than my puppy’s breakfast every morning.

And stock up on pinwheels!

The premier edition of our second show, Marshcast, was recently posted. You can find it right here on this blog page over to the right in that Podbean player. As mentioned this is a mainstream show and in the first edition my friends Chris Park, Mike Peco, Pete Rotteveel and Dennis Morina joined me to discuss gas prices and what we believed could be done about it. A conversation about uses of urine came up also after I mentioned that someday it would be cool to use that to power cars. Wouldn’t that be awesome though?

Our second show with the same guys featured talk about gay marriage and about our favorite TV shows. If you even remotely like reading this page you’ll get to hear a whole lot more on this podcast and meet some new people who have some funny and interesting things to say as well.

Done

Silent No More

Ok, I can’t take being silent any longer. It’s time to get back into this.

I am someone who suffers from depression and there are simply times when it doesn’t matter how much I would like to write, that the battle with it makes it unwise to do so.

But Spring is here now which means baseball season is upon us and that is reason to have cheer.

Except if you root for the Mets, like I do.

Damn, now I’m depressed again.

I am a fan of American Idol, as you know by now, and one my regrets about not writing for a while is not being able to prove that I have again picked a bunch of singers who have made it into the top ten.
The ones that I picked early on during the show were Jessica Sanchez, Phillip Phillips, Elise Tostone, and Hollie Cavanagh. I did also pick Shannon Magrane, daughter of former MLB pitcher Joe Magrane, but she was eliminated in 11^th place and out of the tour.

Magrane was actually selected by the AI terrorists at www.votefortheworst.com as one of the worst singers. Granted she had one real bad night that spelled her eventual doom, but at 16 years of age, she belonged there.

The one who doesn’t belong there is Deandre Brackensick. (Lets just call him Brackensuck right now.) This kid is horrible in the mold of Sanjaya from a few years ago but at least Sanjaya didn’t shriek in falsetto and bop around like a bobble head on stage.

The VFTW terrorists have chosen Heejun Han as their worst of the group right now, and while Han has really blowin off tune the last couple of weeks, he at least has real personality and is funny. Brackensuck just sucks and needs to go.

It’s more obvious than ever that the voting audience is heavily female since Brackensuck is still hanging around and getting votes while decent singers like Magrane and particularly Erika Van Pelt, who was booted last night, are now gone.

DeAndre Brackensick

I think the two most interesting people left are Phillip Phillips and Colton Dixon right now.
Phillips is a humble southerner who took advice from singing coaches Jimmy Iovene and Diddy (or whatever that dude is calling himself now) and from fashion advisor Tommy Hilfiger and tossed it all out of the window. Iovene told Phil Phil to lose his guitar and Hilfiger said to never wear grey on stage. Phil Phil came out with his guitar strapped over not just one, but TWO gray shirts and blew the house down with his rendition of a Billy Joel song.

Dixon’s story is interesting because he was a contestant last year who made it to Hollywood week and was eliminated. This year he came to support his sister who was auditioning and he was going to audition. Somehow he was in the room in front of the judges with his sister (sort of suspicious, yes) and then was asked to sing again. He was put through to the next round…then the next round…then the next round, and now he is on this summer’s tour.
Dixon also is a Christian who makes it known to this National audience that God is his driving force. He apparently has been told to tone down talk of all that on the show and then last night gave thanks to God anyway.
I’m agnostic so I’m not pushing anything here one way or the other. I admired that the kid stood up for what he believed in that case.
Both Dixon and Phillips stood up for what they believed was right for them and that is particularly courageous given the fact that major players in the music and TV and fashion industries are telling them to other things. Neither of them have reached high levels of success where it wouldn’t matter if the industry booted them to the curb so to risk sacrificing potential higher levels of success to do what they think is right is admirable for sure.

I was happy to see Haley Reinhardt singing on the results show last night. She was looking hotter than ever. Not sure that I liked the song but I liked watching her sing it for sure.

There are so many other things to say because I’ve been away for so long. I sort of want to get it all out in case I don’t write again for a while but no one will stick around that long.

So I’ll make shorter notes.

I’ve been watching a lot of TV because it’s the only thing I can really afford to do these days.

The next time I write I’ll say more about the Voice. I continue to like that show and soon they will do live songs from their finalists. The guy with the actual best “Voice” there is an opera singer and it will be interesting to see how he will get molded to get enough votes to win the competition. Again, more later…if I don’t hibernate again.

I am a fan of the show The Bachelor on ABC. I won’t watch the Bachelorette because there are too many dudes on it for me. But watching 25 desperate women trying to find “love” on a TV game show creates so many opportunities for good laughs for me that it is so worth watching.
I also happen to be great at picking who will win. I have successfully chosen the past two winners from just the very first show of the season. That’s right, Bachelor fans, I picked Courtney from day one and during Brad’s second season I picked Emily from day one (who will be the Bachelorette this season.)

This past week we taped our last weekly version of the Dungeon of Manlove. It’s been a full year that we have been taping that show which has now reached into 61 different countries.
It’s time for a change of pace for us in our podcast world and next week we will begin taping our new show.

The new show will be pop culture related and will be a mainstream show rated PG (ok, perhaps from time to time someone will curse but there will be a warning, if so.)
The new people on this show will have their own blogs, such as this one, which will help them expand further on topics that come up on the show but perhaps we don’t return to discuss on it.
The main reason for this change is pretty simple; the Dungeon show has a niche audience and those who are on the show are all afraid to tell their friends that they are on it!
I never cared about all of that. I had nothing to lose if people didn’t like something we were doing on there. Ok, perhaps somewhere I missed something to gain, but I never wanted to play by all of those rules either (much like Phil Phil and Colton Dixon.)
But for those who are starting this new show with me I would like them to have the chance to share what they are doing with their friends without taking the same of risk that I took myself. I certainly don’t wish to force that type of risk on anyone.

I still don’t know what to call the new show though. I don’t really want to call it the Marshal Manlove show, because there is no draw because of my dumb assed name. I have been thinking about calling it Poppourri (as opposed to Potpourri of course) or something like “The Culture Vultures” (even though a websearch for that name had a few hits.)

Any ideas for a name of the new show? Send them to me and I’ll give you credit for it, if you wish.

But for now, I’m

Done.