Today’s post is dedicated to those things which truly, truly suck.

Now don’t worry… we will get to the things which suck in an entertaining and endearing way eventually.

But first, I am going to rant about some ads I hate. Starting with this crime against all that is decent and wholesome and good.

Good God, but that is disgusting. Look, I love black. Black is a great color (or lack thereof). I have two black shirts that I absolutely love. I have absolutely nothing against black.

But that ad make me ill. That black paint just plain looks disgusting. It looks like tar, or ink, or the evil monster from Skin of Evil.

And so to me, that whole ad is a nightmare of people enthusiastically, joyously even, smearing a disgusting substance over all available surfaces and making them far, far worse.

And all with an air of celebration verging on the orgasmic. Yay, today is the day we take our charming and colorful village and ruin it by smearing Satan’s sooty semen all over the damn place.

I mean, that one chick acts like smearing the sweat from a chimney sweep’s taint all over her face is her greatest burn unit bukkake fantasy… and then she smears that shit all over an innocent piano’s keys!

I get what you were going for, Guinness. I even agree that the idea sounds good on paper. I can totally see how this came to be.

But the final product is just plain horrifying, and that is why I hate, hate, hate that ad.

I think we all need these as a kind of palate cleanser right now.

There. That’s what you could have based your ad around. Granted, Mick and the lads would probably have charged you up the yingyang for the rights to the song, but that sure beats associating the beverage you are selling with nausea.

But that is merely aesthetic crime. For the ad that absolutely made my blood boil, we have to turn to the realm of medical products.

Unfortunately, I cannot find the commercial online so I will be forced to describe it to you like this was freaking radio or something.

The ad is for Otrivin Sea Water and Aloe Nasal Spray, and to sell the idea that the best thing for clearing your stuffy nose is sea water, the commercial begins with your classic fisherman type (grey hair and beard, yellow raincoat, on a boat, hauling up a net) saying something like “My breathing is fine!”, then another clip with some chick who is also evidently in a seaside location saying “Of course I can breath freely. What kind of question is that?”

(Really wish I had been able to video the stupid commercial online. WTF, Otrivin?)

So clearly, what they are saying in the ad is that people who live near the ocean, and hence breathe sea water all the time, never get a stuffy nose.

And speaking as someone who grew up six blocks from the Atlantic and has suffered from stuffy nose and sinus problems his entire fucking life, this really pisses me off.

I mean seriously, people. I probably inhaled a Great Lake’s worth of sea water in my life in Summerside, and it sure as hell did not keep me from getting stuffy noses so bad it made me practically faint from the sheer deformation of blood flow caused by very full sinus cavities.

It’s like they reached into my mind and discovered an extraordinarily potent and completed unexpected way to piss me right off.

And I can’t be the only one. A lot of people live on the East and West coasts, people. And a lot of people have sinus problems.

And you just pissed every single one of us off!

OK, OK. Calm down. Clear blue ocean, clear blue ocean. Now for the fun stuff.

First, thanks to the miracle that is Cracked.com lists. I recently discovered this gem from the annals of the marvelously cracktastically bad : Shooby “The Human Horn” Taylor.

Here;s the description from the Cracked.com article :

Shooby “The Human Horn” Taylor (1929-2003) was a scat singer who fancied his vocal improvisation a reasonable imitation of jazz brass. In reality, his scatting sounded less like a trumpet and more like an Ewok applying for a homeowner’s loan.

Now I think that is entirely unfair. That’s not at all what he sounds like. He sounds more like someone who forgot how to talk but doesn’t know it yet, or like a child in that pre-verbal stage when they are in between babbling and actual words.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a sample.

(Also, mad mad props to whoever took the time and effort to write out the “lyrics” to this gem. It adds so much to the sublime absurdity of it all. You are definitely my kind of weirdo.)

Apparently, Shooby Taylor was so convinced of his talent that he kept on going even though absolutely nobody else liked him and he often got kicked out of jazz clubs for being awful.

Sadly, this legend died in 2003, so we cannot convince him to contribute his song stylings to, say, an “Autotune the News” type project where he gives us his impressions of the day’s events.

Clearly, he made art that is too bad to ignore, which, coincidentally, the motto of the last stop on our tour of the terrible today, the Museum of Bad Art.

Now this is an actual real world museum. not just a Lileks-esque website. It has three locations and is quite earnest (and hilarious) about its mission to preserve and display the kind of art that is not merely bad, but bad enough that it achieves a kind of perverse majesty.

So obviously, this is exactly the place for an irony steeped lover of all things earnestly terrible like myself and my Gen X cohorts.

I mean, check this out :

When one of their paintings was stolen, the museum offered a reward to anyone with information regarding its whereabouts. The reward was $6.50. They also installed a fake camera in the museum after the theft with a sign stating, “Warning: This gallery is protected by a fake security camera.”

Yup. These are clearly my kind of people.