Have you ever watched a commercial and just thought, “Ha! I like that!” Well, that was my response to that commercial. Whoever put that 30 second spot together really did a good job. One of the things that I like about the commercial is the use of the Neon Trees as the band that performs in the last part of the spot. In fact, I did some Googling and it turns out that the Neon Trees actually recorded a performance of that entire song – Everybody Talks – while sitting in that tour bus. Sure, the song is very likely lip synched (there’s no drum set for the drummer to play inside the tour bus!), but it’s still a pretty impressive feat. Take a look at the full video (which is hidden from people if you search for it on YouTube, but fully available to watch if you have the link… like I do):

Pretty cool, huh? Anyway, turns out that the Neon Trees will be putting out a new album in April. I’ll definitely check it out and see if it’s worth purchasing and if you like alternative rock, then I encourage you to do the same. Enjoy!

That’s not funny. That’s not a joke. There’s nothing humorous about that statement. Ugh! Horrible marketing.

Anyway, the other commercial that has me at my wits end is the one from Mass Mutual where these business people are in a Chinese restaurant and their waitress doesn’t speak any English. So one of the women at the table speaks Chinese and asks her colleagues if they like dumplings.

Well! The guy sitting next to her has a look on his face that is an interesting mixture of constipation, aggravation, astonishment, disgust, and whatever emotion represents the thought, “What the hell are you, you worthless disaster?” Take a look at a freeze frame of this guy’s face:

Why so angry? Good grief! You're getting dumplings for goodness sake. Cheer up!

I mean what gives?! This guy is going to get some dumplings and yet he has a look on his face like he wants to choke this woman. What’s his problem? He’s about to get dumplings for goodness sake! Cheer up, you dummy! Free dumplings! Gah! Here is a video of the whole commercial so you can see just how creepy and awkward this guy really is in the grand scheme of things.

So remember – the next time you’re in a Chinese restaurant and one of your business colleagues manages to get you dumplings… look appreciative!

I love it!

Look, I’m a big (overweight) guy these days, but back in high school I was bench pressing 385 pounds, squatting 660 pounds (on a yoke), and leg pressing over 900 pounds. So there was some serious power in this body and I think my performance on the wrestling mat and football field proved that fact. However, once I graduated from high school and began working out at the gym at my college I began to encounter people like the one you saw in the video above. Frankly, I found them to be bizarre people.

Seriously, who goes around grunting and flexing in a weight room? For a former high school weightlifting powerhouse, I was always taken aback by the 150 pound guys who were strutting around the college weight room looking at themselves in the mirror. Weirdos.

Then I graduated from college and joined the local gym and found a whole bunch of meatheads like the one in this video. They didn’t bother me as much after I graduated college because, well, I was a little bit older and didn’t really care. Yet, I find myself wanting to seriously get back into the gym these days. At the same time, I’m somewhat reverting back to a high school state of mind where I don’t want to be aggravated by the presence of wannabes and false meatheads at the gym!

So I saw this commercial again and again over the last few weeks and it prompted me to go online to check out this Planet Fitness gym. Wouldn’t you know it, but they just opened one up at the Monmouth Mall?! Something about working out at the mall didn’t sit right with me, so I didn’t consider joining this place. Then I did some more research and found out that there was also one in an old Walgreens building in Succasunna (my family’s hometown) and that they had amazingly-priced membership deals.

Having one in my family’s hometown makes working out easier and the membership deals make affording a new gym much less impactful on my personal budget. On top of that, my office is moving to New Brunswick and there’s a Planet Fitness near our new office and I can use my membership there, too.

You put all of this together and I had to seriously consider joining this gym. Ultimately, I did decide to join this gym where I won’t find a bunch of meatheads walking around lifting things up and putting them down!

I can’t stand watching shows on NBC. In fact, most of the NBC shows that I do enjoy watching (Biggest Loser, for example) I only watch on DVR now. The biggest problem that I have with NBC – which I bitch about all of the time, by the way – is that they interrupt the flow of their shows way too much. Sure, the highly paid executives all “know” that you have to enter each commercial break with a cliffhanger because that’ll make the viewers stick around, but there is a time when enough is enough. If you’re wondering when that time has come – watch any of the four episodes of Kings.

Horrible, horrible usage of commercial breaks. In fact, the usage of commercial breaks was so bad that watching the show on DVR was even tough to do because the flow of the story is interrupted too much. So that’s my first comment about Kings – NBC sucks with commercial breaks and almost forces their viewers to use DVRs instead.

The next comment is that the Kings story never really got enough air time. How many people out there really knew that the television show was based on a Biblical story and, in fact, it was the story of King David? Right. I thought not.

The other problem, that I’ve had with this show is that the characters are all too pristine. In other words, the society doesn’t look like it is made of real people. Instead, the people who put this show together focused too much on getting model-esque characters. For me, that made the show somewhat hard to watch.

The final problem that I had with NBC and this show is that it was moved in the schedule. The show was promoted as a Sunday night show and then it was almost immediately shuffled to Saturday night. Alright, I get it that the show wasn’t doing well in the ratings and that the suits wanted to move it, but give it a chance!

I heard that there was a chance that there will be more Kings episodes coming out in June. Let’s hope that NBC can fix some of the problems listed above and give this series a chance!

First, there is only one fat person on the entire show and he plays a bit part as a security guard. I can’t imagine that in this fictional society there are no overweight people besides a security guard. Very awkward. In the real world, more than half of Americans are overweight and a large number of the population is considered obese. Of course, I guess that this is one of the reasons that the show takes place in a fictional land!

Second, the show is a bit eerie in that everyone sort of looks alike. Not that they all have the same hair color and eye color, but I think the casting folks went a bit overboard on the “model” look. Everyone from the King all the way down to rank and file soldiers in the Gilboa army all could double as models for Calvin Klein, Old Navy, Gap, etc. It’s weird. The characters don’t have any blemishes, no scars, no deviations from the “perfect” look that models are always trying to achieve. Frankly, it creeps me out.

And finally, this isn’t really a criticism of Kings, but rather one of my continued criticisms of NBC in general. Someone over at the network needs to learn that the few seconds before each commercial break does not need to be overly dramatic! In other words, at this point in the show’s short history those people who are watching the show are probably going to stick with it for the duration. There is no need to make every pre-commercial portion of the show seem as though the world will end if you don’t tune back in. It’s tiresome and awkward and it makes those portions of the show tedious to watch.

And for someone like me, it forces me to record the show and watch it at a later point in time when I’m not going to be bothered with such stupid mid-episode arcs.

All in all, I like Kings, though I don’t know if it’ll be around for the long haul. NBC’s Crusoe was also a good show that didn’t get renewed and if Kings doesn’t bring in big numbers, then I don’t think NBC will give it a chance to make an impact. That’s a shame because the show definitely has potential.

The other channels – especially those morons at NBC – could learn a thing or two from FOX about how to put on a good show and (more importantly) how to reduce the amount of commercials during their broadcasts. For example, I find it extremely hard to get into NBC’s new show, Kings, when there are so many awful commercials scattered throughout the broadcast (incidentally, I think that this is what did in NBC’s Crusoe earlier this year, too).

On Monday of last week, my Sirius XM unit started showing a message saying, “Antenna Not Detected.” I hadn’t moved the unit or the antenna in many months so I wondered what the problem could possibly be. After some fiddling, the message went away and the unit worked fine. Then Tuesday came around and the message popped back up on the radio. I figured that some more fiddling would fix it – nope. I didn’t get mad, but I wondered what the issue was that was causing the problem.

I tried to self-diagnose the problem. On the one hand, I have a Sportster Replay, which is one the older, discontinued models and there was a chance that the unit was shot. On other other hand, though, I’ve only owned the radio for three years so for it to be busted after three years of use is unacceptable. I did some Googling and the information online wasn’t really clear about what the problem was (it could be the unit or it could be the satellite receiver or it could be something else – great). As it turns out, the satellite receiver was shot and I needed a new one, which was provided free of charge via a spare receiver that one of my roommates had (thank you!).

However, in the few days where I didn’t have Sirius XM I had to listen to terrestrial radio on my two-hour daily commutes plus my driving around town. It was mostly miserable. You really forget just how many commercials there are on terrestrial radio until you have prolonged exposure to the endless drones of car, lawyer, and doctor commercials. And they don’t stop. Two minutes goes by, three minutes, five minutes, seven minutes – sometimes even more! It was horrible.

To avoid the commercials on Howard Stern’s channels on Sirius XM, I flip to one of the music channels. Easy enough, right? Well, with terrestrial radio when the talk show hosts would hit their ten to fifteen minute non-live content breaks I was essentially screwed! First, I had to find a channel with music on it that I actually wanted to hear. Second, I had to hope that the channel came in clear (my commute takes me across state and I generally heard more static than anything else). What aggravation!

When one goes a few days without Sirius XM satellite radio, they begin to really appreciate how great of a service this really is for those who have long commutes. I’m so glad that Sirius XM exists because other than NJ 101.5 (when it’s not on another ridiculously long commercial break) there is absolutely nothing to listen to on terrestrial radio.

Anyway, in his op-ed, Mr. Abruzzo makes a statement that I think bears repeating on this blog:

Contrary to its name and to what many believe, the nonprofit sector is not non businesslike; in fact, compared to government and the commercial sector, nonprofits are better managed and more efficient. Yet, by providing services that would otherwise be unaffordable in the marketplace, the sector relies on contributions and grants and it is this that makes the sector vulnerable during the financial crisis.

Bravo, Mr. Abruzzo! This is the truth, people. Nonprofts are created to fill a gap. That gap can range from a social services gap to a gap in opportunity to access certain resources or even a personal gap left in one’s family after a person passes away from a specific cause. The point is that nonprofits fill a gap that otherwise would not be filled by the government or private sector. As Mr. Abruzzo suggests, many of the services provided by nonprofits are unaffordable in the marketplace and thus the sector must rely on generosity to succeed.

Which brings me to my first point of this entry – please try to continue to send your weekly, monthly, or annual donations to your favorite charities! I’m not asking you to go out and find a new charity and start making donations to it (though if you’re in the business of donating money to new charities, let me know and I can hook you up with some good ones in Morris, Monmouth, and Mercer Counties). What I am saying, though, is that if you can afford to continue your existing donations to your favorite nonprofit organizations, please do so.

My second point in writing this entry is to reiterate a point that Mr. Abruzzo makes in his op-ed, namely that the nonprofit sector is not non businesslike. In other words, nonprofit does not mean “no profit!” In fact, nonprofit organizations have begun using the term not-for-profit instead of nonprofit to describe their business activities. The basic difference between a for-profit organization and a not-for-profit organization is that for-profit generate profits which can be distributed back to its shareholders, not-for-profits are not allowed to do this as per IRS regulations. That’s the difference in a nutshell.

Do not expect a not-for-profit company to expect not to make money on its activities. In fact, you should expect the opposite. The best not-for-profit organizations are financially healthy despite the current economy since they are built on a fiscally responsible framework made for success. I’m glad that Mr. Abruzzo kept that point in his op-ed. The world needs to know that a good not-for-profit organization should generate profits and even bank some of those profits. A good not-for-profit organization will not, however, break the law and redistribute those profits to their shareholders.

Remember this if you ever deal with a not-for-profit company!

Example #1: Spent time reviewing applicants and deciding whether or not they would fit in with the company’s mission statement

In this example, someone is seeking a job in human resources and is describing one of her regular tasks at her previous company. However, remember that your potential employer does not read your resume to read a description of your previous job. Instead, they want to know about how effective you were at your previous job.

Resolution #1: Hired 14 staff members over a 5 year period including 3 executive level positions; managed an average of 4 employee complaints per month; designed and successfully implemented an annual department review program

The resolution tells a little bit more about what you actually did while in that position.

Example #2: Managed a loan portfolio and analyzed potential new borrowers for the company’s various loan products

Blech! All this tells the reviewer is that you went to work each day and did your job. How exciting?! Talk about what you managed at work and describe your analyzing.

Resolution #2: Manage a $60 million loan portfolio including $30 million in residential mortgages, $20 million in federal grants, and $10 million in commercial real estate; analyzed new business opportunities through cash flow statement and audited financial reviews and background credit checks on applicants

This resolution gives specifics and tells the reviewer much more about your daily work load.

Quick, pertinent details are what you’re looking for in your resume. Keep it simple, but make it count!

This post is also scheduled to appear on GradSpot.com – Your destination for life after college with all the content, tools, and services you need to ease your transition from college to the real world.

As someone who spends a great deal of time in my car each week because of my job, I can tell you that the benefits of commercial-free music channels far outweigh the benefits of terrestrial radio (which is, essentially, the fact that it is free). I’m willing to spend $13 per month to listen to commercial free music for about two hours every day that I have to commute to and from work or travel around the state. Sure, some other commuters may not need this service and if I traveled a much shorter distance to work, then I might not have Sirius XM installed in my car.

But what bothers me in this situation is the rumor mongering that only takes into account what Stern said on one day. No one mentions that on the very next day he said that if he wasn’t on Sirius XM then he wouldn’t be in radio, period. So as a Sirius XM shareholder please forgive me if I want the full story out there and not just the negative sounding part.