How to Work Product Placement Shamelessly into Your Narrative

We, as a society, are still trying to work out how corporate sponsorship of TV shows can work. There was a time when characters on hour-long dramas would be embroiled in some life or death situation then suddenly become distracted by how incredibly roomy their new car is. I distinctly remember an episode of Fringe where two FBI agents discuss whether their new Nissan Leaf had enough range to make it to the paranormal crime scene. These are characters who dealt with alternate dimensions and alien invaders, but their most pressing concern was range anxiety.

These days I mainly notice product placement on HGTV, which is already in the process of becoming the 24/7-attractive-couples-bickering-about-backsplash-tile-channel. Occasionally they’ll compose the shot in such a way as to make it obvious that said attractive couple is bickering in a Ford.

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How to Understand Men's Fashion

Sport team based Garanimals for adult men would totally work! If the shirt, pants, and tie all say Seahawks, you know they go together.

Or, you could use sci-fi franchises, for the more slightly built, pastier chap. Disney could make that work, now that they own (or will soon own) The Avengers, X-Men, Star Wars, and Tron.

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How to Learn from Other People's Mistakes

It seems to me there were a few different iterations of the show “Say Yes to the Dress,” where women shopped for their wedding gowns, but there were no versions where the men went tux shopping. “Say Dunno to the Tuxedo,” or some such.

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How to Enhance Your Reputation

There’s a whole slew of charity schemes that utilize workplace peer pressure as a means of prying your wallet open. It’s never sat well with me, probably because my first exposure to it was a retail job in college where they called us all into the break room and literally told us that not publicly pledging to sign over part of our paychecks was basically the same as saying we wanted sick children to suffer.

The manager who oversaw that meeting also accompanied his daughters around the store and watched, stone faced, as they asked all of us employees to buy Girl Scout Cookies.

He was later fired and prosecuted for embezzling. I can’t help but wonder if he was somehow wetting his beak when the cookie monies rolled in.

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How to Use Deductive Reasoning

The Motorola Razr made the fastest trip from being cool to being uncool of any gadget I can think of. I feel for the designer. They made something insanely cool and desirable, and as such, almost everybody got one, robbing it of its coolness and desirability.

I never had a Razr, but I did have a Motorola Pebl, which is interesting in that it’s the exact same phone while being the total opposite phone. It had pretty much the same internal guts as the Razr, but instead of being impossibly thin and shiny, it was a rounded matte black lump.

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How to Create a Diversion

I’m no sports fan, so I may be way off base, but the fact that we call our game football just seems like pettiness on our part. The players barely ever touch the ball with a foot. There’s the kickoff and the extra point, and other than that they mostly clutch the ball to their chests with both arms. I suppose there was resistance to calling it “Bosom Ball.”

I think John Cleese was right when, on the Late Show with Steven Colbert, he said we should call American football “Giant Leather Egg Fight.”

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How to Curse with Flair

You shouldn’t let your cursing become repetitive.

My father has done more than his share of cursing, but when I was a child he’d often start his tirades with the same opening salvo of six specific words in the same order, delivered in the exact same tone and volume every time. Eventually, my brothers and I started laughing (or desperately trying not to laugh) whenever we heard it, which didn’t make him curse less.

Note from Missy: You can’t leave it at that, Scott. We need to know the six words.

Note from Scott: Since you asked, they were “Jesus Christ, son of a bitch!”

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How to Defend Your Musical Tastes

Actually, I like Duran Duran. They aren’t my favorite, but they made several songs I quite like. One of their songs has a lyric that I think is one of the best character descriptions I’ve ever seen.

“Going down to the disco where she's gonna star in some fiasco”

It contains no physical description, but you can picture the woman they’re talking about and you know exactly who she is.

Note from Missy: (pushes glasses up nose, clears throat) This lyric is from “Pretty Ones,” an unreleased demo from the Astronaut sessions.  I will also point out that my knowledge of Duran-lore meant I was laughing out loud to things in The Venture Brothers episode “Maybe No Go” that baffled Scott, which was kind of a nice feeling—for a brief time, I was the pop culture master!

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How to Run a Joke into the Ground

Magnum P.I. is back. The pilot/first episode of the reboot hasn’t aired as of this writing, but was directed by Justin Lin, who directed several of the Fast and Furious movies. Looking at the commercials, it seems like he looked at the original show and thought that what it lacked was more high-speed chases, big stunt sequences, and cars blowing up. This isn’t a huge surprise. This is the same guy who directed the only Star Trek movie in which the captain jumps a motorcycle.

Note: I enjoyed Star Trek Beyond, but having the solution to the crew’s predicament be letting Kirk skid around on a dirt bike for twenty minutes did sort of take me out of the story.

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How to Be a Good husband During "Ladytimes"

I have a theory.

Since I was a child, I’ve been told that women become irritable when they are menstruating, and that this is because their hormones make them irrational. I suspect that their irritability is entirely rational, and that rather than hormones, it is caused by having half of the people they deal with not understand that they are having to continue functioning despite the fact that they are in terrible pain.

I have another theory.

Since I was a child, I have heard that men don’t like to buy feminine hygiene products for the women in their lives, and that this is because the men in question are insecure. I suspect, however, that if the lady in your life mentions that she’s going to the store, and asks if you need anything, they would hesitate to buy whatever you ask for, even if it’s something totally innocuous, like Diet Pepsi, or a scrub brush, if you specify that it’s “For my nards.” This effect would only be magnified if strangers were able to look at that item in her basket and know, “She’s buying that for some dude’s nards.”

Also, I should point out that my disguise in this comic is sunglasses and a hoodie. I was apparently disguised as “Most other guys.”

Note from Missy: My brain read “for my nards” the same way one would shout “FOR THE HORDE!”

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