Forget these random commuter gripes: When will we see the audience participation post?

I know, I know. But things have been hectic 'round here and you guys gave me so much stuff to work with that I'm still sorting it.

I'm planning to sit down Thursday night with the remainder of my Scotch and see if I can't git 'er done.

I hate these ads. I hate them with a passion. And I hate them more every time I see them. Which is twice a day. Every day.

On this, you and I are in total agreement. I've often thought to myself, 'boy they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel when that douche art director lobbed those "creative" quotes during the agency pitch.'

I want to rip them down.

"And it strikes me that the concept of a kid who can't distinguish presidents from basketball players would be a source of shame, not apparent pride."

One of the recurring themes in your posts, Robbo, is the notion of civic pride. It's very Roman of you, if I had to put a word on it.

It's also a delusion from which I suffer. When I did that blog-word-cloud-thingy you posted some time ago, it turned out one of the frequent recurring words on my site was "shameful". I think you and I might be the last two people on Earth familiar with the concept.

I found those ads distasteful myself when I encountered them recently. But I also have to think that they ran them by focus groups of the kinds of people that they wanted them to appeal to and got a good reaction, right?

I've long thought that it was time we reinstituted the concept of shame-as-deterrent-for-stupidity-and-or-other-ridiculousness. The problem with this, of course, is that if we actually caused someone to feel shame, we would be damaging their precious self-esteem and then where would we be - cause we may not have kids that know much, but darn it, they feel good about their ignorance.