As we head into a long weekend, and the unofficial end of summer, here are some random thoughts.

• There is A LOT of bad advertising on television, but over the past several years, I have noticed that one company’s spots are consistently poor in every aspect. They are unfunny to the point of being offensive, do nothing to entice me to try the brand or the products, and they actually cause me to resent the company. I am talking about Taco Bell - consistently amongst the worst ads on television. Not sure who the agency is here, but they need to be fired immediately.
• Speaking of bad advertising, Noah points to the big “who cares” that is YouTube’s “revolutionary” advertising channel featuring Paris Hilton. Wow, groundbreaking. As I said on Noah’s site, the only way I am interested is if along with “Paris Hilton” and “You Tube”, the other words in the sentence are “see”, “blowing”, “dudes”, and “on”.
• I never really thought of those school magazine drives as offline affiliate programs, but they really are. Suzy sells magazines to her parents friends to finance a trip to the local dairy farm, and the magazine distributors keep their cut. I know it is pretty obvious, but I guess I had never looked at it that way. It is a tiny army of affiliate marketers.
• Will someone please do a formal study of the effects of the hurricane season on the volume of SPAM and commercial mail? Given that most spam, and commercial email companies are deep in South Florida, enjoying the homestead laws, I would imagine that when a good storm rips through there, that UCE volume tails off considerably. It’d be interesting to track.
• Jason Calacanis seems like a bit of a douche, but I do like his balls (metaphorically speaking). Every now and again he says something that makes sense, like this. That is, when he is not petting his silly dog, and paying people to agree with him.

That’s all for now, as you were.

Oh, and look for some sweeping changes around here soon, as I begin to split out some of the content to my new, in the works site, irregahdless.com.