Commercial insanity

If you've been watching TV at all over the last month or so, you've probably seen the commercial for this pick-up truck. There's a road through a desert surrounded by big mountains (there's something inherently masculine about a topolist's version of large boobies) and for some reason they built two pendulums holding up I-Beams that swing lengthwise across the road, presumably to inflict a combination of impaling and crushing on any oncoming car.

Enter the truck of some brand I don't remember. It's towing a 19th century pullcart of sandbags, and occasionally the cameraman pans in to a close-up of the mighty beast's internal organs slaving at the whim of the driver. The pick-up approaches the two relatively-closely-placed I-Beam pendulums. It races in past the first falling I-Beam, stops at a line in the middle, and then accelerates to get away from the oncoming second swinging heavy metal object. After the truck makes it, of course, the camera pans out to a sky-view of the prodigious clusterfuck.

Either the message was buy our car because we spend our R&D money gratuitously on silly, expensive stunts for our commericials, or I'm missing something. You could push an old clunker through the same set-up... if you got to decide all the specs before you started. It reminds me of the commercial where the dude is slamming his hand down on paper cups that may, or may not, have a sharp knife underneath, and he's blindfolded and shit. You know what's going to happen through: Network TV errs on the side of not showing dudes with real knives through their hand. I think he'll be fine.

I'm confident, all you corporations, that you can find elaborate ways to do stupid things. It'd just be nice to think that it weren't all so staged that stupidity couldn't invade stupidity. Take 2.