Take That, Advertisers

If you ask us, dear reader, you can only see a cockney gecko shill for a car insurance company so many times before you begin to lose it. We’re not trying to be glib: That stupid Limey lizard is about to drive us up a wall.

According to the new and improved (read: Flimsier and more economical) Wall Street Journal, the irksome dolts at Geico spent more on advertising last year than Coke-a-Cola. And, boy, wasn’t that just great? You really enjoyed those umpteen car insurance ads, didn’t you?

In fact, the veritable deluge of Geico commercials has led us, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” to enforce a strict anti-advertising crusade. Simply put, if a particular advertisement troubles us, we steadfastly refuse to purchase the product it’s pushing.

The product in question doesn’t matter: Milk, tampons, HIV vaccinations. If we hate the ad, we won’t but it. It’s kind of like our personal Danish cartoon fiasco, minus all the murder and mayhem one associates with the Religion of Peace.

For example, we don’t care if we can save 15 percent or more on car insurance. We don’t even give a darn if it would take us 15 minutes or less to discover our savings. Geico is, for lack of a better word, evil, and we won’t call them if our lives depended on it.

But let us not offer the erroneous impression that Geico is the only offender in the irritating advertising game. We can think of myriad other malefactors.

Take, for instance, those incessant “Get a Mac” commercials, with which Apple has decided to smother us. You know the ads were talking about: A fat guy who personifies an IBM idly competes with a cool cat who personifies a Macintosh for potential television customers.

Now, let’s set aside the fact that the purportedly hip fellow who plays the Mac was a nerdy high school kid in the movie Dodgeball. Although that doesn’t exactly scream “cool” in our books, perhaps it’s worth a few “awesome points” in a few people’s “awesome meter.”

What really troubles us, dear reader, is the countenance of the guy who stands for the IBM. He’s portly, bespectacled, poorly—albeit somewhat formally—dressed. In short, he’s quite a nerd. Come to think of it, he greatly resembles a cousin of ours, though he has far more hair on his head.

Why are the fat cats at Apple casting aspersions in this poor sod’s direction in order to sell a couple of computers? We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” have a sneaking suspicion that the folks who engineered the new I-Books look a heck of a lot more like the IBM guy than the Mac kid.

Call it a hunch, but we’re assuming that computer designers aren’t exactly the reincarnations of James Bond. Accordingly, in solidarity with fat, poorly dressed losers everywhere—including those who work for Apple—we shall buy IBMs from now on. How do you like ‘dem Apples?