commercials

Chris Knight's avatar
My best friend since third grade Chad has encouraged me many times over the years to start running.  Chad knows something about that, being an active runner and also the veteran of numerous full marathons and countless shorter races.  Running is how he and his wife first met, during a running ministry at their church.  So maybe it’s something I should have looked into a long time ago already.
Now, I can run very fast over short distances.  Maybe even faster than a lot of seasoned pros.  It’s just the way I’m built and it came in handy a few times when I was at the state department of mental health.  But perhaps running a mile or so a day, if that much?  Nah, that just hasn’t seemed feasible.  I have harbored doubts all this time and it didn’t seem that anything could dispel them.
But then I saw this
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Whoever came up with this ad deserves an award.  This spot is brilliant, tragicomic, heart-tugging, funny, and beautiful.  Publix has a long history of having great commercials and this is one of their best.

Growing up I thought that people whose birthdays fell on Christmas must be so lucky, because it meant that they got more toys.  Watching poor Isabelle suffer from being a Christmas baby makes me greatly regret having that notion.  May all who were born on Christmas have a birthday just as wonderful as this young lady’s 🙂 ...

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Okay, let me say first that I love this little film!  Whatever has happened to Star Wars in recent years, there still are and always will be the true fans who thrill to share their love of the saga with others.  This spot shows the kind of energy that we used to have at a new Star Wars movie.  The costumes, the mock lightsaber fights, screaming lines from the movie out loud… 

…it was a whole different and in so many ways better world than it is today.  I know, I was there.  I didn’t just see it with my own eyes, I was part of it.  Maybe it will come back someday.  Especially for the youngsters.  The ones who George Lucas intended Star Wars to be particularly for.  The grownups have tried to make Star Wars into something it was never meant to be.  So we get bullcrap like ...

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Not for the
first time, not for the last, I am smacked with the realization that the
rest of my life is going to be dogged by my being the man who ran for
school board by blowing up a little red schoolhouse with the Death
Star…

Yes, it’s true: Chris Hardwick used my school board commercial – the one with the Star Wars theme – on his Comedy Central show @Midnight late last night/the wee hours of this morning.  The clip came during a segment called “Smeared Campaigns” and was one of three political ads taken from YouTube.
I would have missed it had good friend Aaron not spotted it.  I was hopped-up on Dr. Pepper and Swiss cheese, wrestling between sleep and stuff about my book, when I happened to get on Facebook and Aaron was blasting my timeline with the news.  Needless to say, I had to
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At this point I’ve lost count. It’s at least the fourth or fifth time that my shenanigans have landed me on popular humor site Cracked.com.

Cracked.com, Christopher Knight, Rockingham County, Board of Education, Star Wars, school board, commercial, campaign, Viacom, DMCA, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, copyright infringement, hypocrisy, hypocrites

This latest appearance comes courtesy of an article titled “5 Famous Online Copyright Crusaders Who Are Total Hypocrites”.  With a title like that I just had to scan and tear it down and analyze it to see what I was doing that was so hypocritical… but I honestly can’t find anything about my own part in that very strange episode from the fall of 2007.  In fact, the entire article is about corporations – as Viacom did in that incident – who cry and crow about copyright laws protecting their assets and then steal and violate the assets of everyone else without giving a damn!!

Anyhoo, my situation, “Viacom Lays Claim to a County Board of Education Campaign Video”, made #2 on ...

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Last night’s The Walking Dead on AMC brought back the intensity after the past couple of weeks’ relative calm (which was needed, after what happened to Lori). This series is consistently demonstrating why many consider it to be the finest show on television right now.

But that’s not the point of this post. Instead I have to remark that what you’re about to see is either gross negligence or brilliant marketing.

At the end of the next-to-last act of this week’s episode “When the Dead Come Knocking” we find Rick and his team trapped in a cabin, nearly surrounded by ravenous walkers. To escape they have to throw a freshly-killed dude out the front door as a distraction. Rick and company flee through the back door while the walkers start munching.

That’s the setup. That’s all you need to know.

So watch the final few seconds of that act, ...

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Behold the 8 Weirdest Real-Life Science Fiction Political Ads as assembled by popular geeky/techy website io9.

And yes, that school board commercial of mine from 2006 is on the list.

But check out this ad – also inspired by Star Wars – that West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin aired when he successfully ran for re-election two years ago…

Hey, Manchin shot a TIE Fighter out of the sky with a rifle! That’s a hella lot better shootin’ than the Imperial Stormtroopers ever did.

But John Waite of Spokane, Washington blows away everybody with what he did when he ran for city council. The comic book store owner campaigned while wearing a full set of space marine armor from the StarCraft computer game series! Nevermind Spokane City Council: we should send Waite to Washington D.C.: that whole town is overrun with worse than the Zerg ever were.

Blast on over to ...

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…it’s… me!

That was almost six years ago. I really am never gonna live this down, am I?

Well, it was a lot of fun running for school board. The entire experience, I mean! One that I would never trade for anything. I learned a great deal more about election laws and running for office than I had ever known before. I didn’t win a seat but that’s okay: it was a great run, I campaigned my own way and kept it positive, upbeat, and I wanted to present my beliefs in an enlightening and entertaining fashion. I wanted just ten people to vote for me, and wound up getting nearly forty-seven hundred.

But I didn’t for once believe that this commercial was going to grab any attention beyond Rockingham County… and much less still be going strong more than half a decade later!

Well anyhoo, Cracked.com has my Star ...

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