The 2010 "Kars 4 Kidz Awards": Chicago's Worst Radio Commercials

Marketing mavens have long been saying that radio is the most intimate of mediums and they're probably right. Radio approaches you thru only one of the senses. It usually approaches you when you are in a captive situation -- in a car or with little electronic devices attached to your head. It gets up with you in the morning and even follows you into the shower.

And since radio is so intimate, when it heaves up something really seriously awful, it becomes a really serious insult -- an unwanted invasion of personal space. I think that's why bad radio commercials are so infuriating.

I actually hit the station change button every time that hideous "Kars 4 Kidz" commercial pollutes the airwaves. There have been a lot of really bad commercials on the radio over the past year. But try as I might, I could find no comprehensive list of the worst ads, so as a public service, the Chicago Lampoon has compiled one.

I have named the list in honor of the "Kars 4 Kidz" jingle. Despite the fact that it still regularly spews forth, it is not included on the list itself since it is so far and above the run of the mill bad radio commercials, that it is in an entire class of its own.

In ascending order here are my picks for worst radio ads of 2010:

#4. Roma's Stomach Bug ads for Natren's Healthy Trinity

In these, WLS morning drive co-host, Roma, plucks out some health item from that day's news -- such as an outbreak of dysentary in Indonesia -- and tells you how you can avoid things like the perils of dysentary if you just take some of Natren's biotic stomach bugs every morning. Over the Christmas holiday, Roma delivered these messages in conjunction with a very odd sounding elf character.

I find Roma's voice annoying, the odd sounding elf's voice very annoying and the thought of ingesting these weird stomach bugs extremely annoying. These messages have now expanded beyond the morning Don Wade & Roma program and now annoy throughout the day on WLS.

#3. Smarmy Scott Lee Cohen's Job Fairs

For reasons no one quite understands, Chicago pawn broker Scott Lee Cohen insisted on squandering scads of his money running for IL governor as an independent. He did this after winning the Democrat primary for Lt. Gov. and then withdrawing in a teary, blubbering news conference after apparently being threatened by Democrat chieftain, Mike Madigan.

In his second run he ran the very same ad he ran in the first round, wherein his smarmy marshmallow tones instructed us that all the state's employment problems would be solved by his gimmicky "job fairs." The very same ad ran so frequently over a period of at least 5 months that by October, most listeners could mouth the meaningless drivel along with him word-for-word.

#2 McDonald's Coffee Slurping

Most children from civilized backgrounds are taught by their mothers at an early age that it is impolite to make slurping sounds when ingesting liquids. As such it is considered rude to do so. It offends most people. That is why the 3 Stooges used to noisily slurp their soup. It was so obnoxious and uncouth, it was funny.

The people at McDonald's ad agency must have been raised with wolves as surrogate parents in the wild, because they seem to think that slurping coffee sounds are just what their clientle wants to hear. As such they have run two radio ads with people noisily slurping their coffee. It drives me nuts.

But, come to think of it, coffee slurping is probably standard table etiquette for your basic McDonald's customer.

#1. Your Mother Just Got Run Over by a Car -- Dignity Memorial Providers

The winner of the 2010 "Kars 4 Kidz" award for worst Chicago radio ad goes, hands down, to Dignity Memorial Providers for their "Your Mother's Dead" offering.

On more than one bright morning I have rolled out of bed, full of energy, ready to optimistically take on the day, only to be felled by this total downer of a commercial.

A somber spokesman for the ghouls over at Dignity Memorial -- a corporate consortium of funeral homes, crematoria and cemetaries -- depicts a scenario where your father calls you to tell you your mother was run over by a car while on vacation and is now, quite dead.

"You wonder if you've ever really seen your father cry," the ghoulish spokesman intones.

Then you are told to trust the caring folks at Dignity Memorial Inc. to take care of all your future mortuary, burial or cremation needs. This radio ad was so collosally, depressingly bad, that I frantically went down the AM dial desperately looking for something, anything a bit more uplifting to cheer me up.

All I could find was that lousy Kars 4 Kidz jingle.

Schakowsky: Immigrants Afraid of Census

Speaking on the morning WLS radio Don Wade and Roma Show, North side Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-9th) said that Chicago's low rate of census form return was due to the fears of Chicago's massive population of recent immigrants.

Hear the entire interview here.

The rate of return of the mailed census forms was a paltry 38% in the Chicago area compared to a nationwide average of 52%.

Schakowsky said that this was because immigrants are poor and begin to "double up" with several families living in a single apartment. "They may be afraid to say how many people are living in certain spaces," she said.

Wait a minute. Is Schakowsky saying that immigrants, many of them illegal, are overcrowding apartments and homes in violation of various municipal codes of occupancy, health codes and fire codes?

Immigration control activists have been arguing for more than a decade that this overcrowding is commonplace among immigrants. They argue that it is unsafe, unhealthy and poses an unfair burden on other renters who have to share common spaces with people who are not paying there fair share. They also argue that it is unfair to taxpayers who pay to educate the large numbers of children brought into their neighborhood schools after being illegally crammed into these dwellings.

In fact, in September of 2006, there was a fatal fire in Schakowsky's own district where 6 illegal alien children died. They were among 13 illegal aliens who lived in a cramped East Rogers Park apartment.

And this past February 14th, 7 people, including a newborn died in a fire which swept thru a Cicero apartment that was packed with multiple families.

Yet when Cicero authorities had tried to enforce the codes of occupancy that would have stopped such overcrowding, Schakowsky and her friends in the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant Rights - Chicago's main illegal alien lobby group - called the enforcement racist. It discriminated against Latino immigrants, they said, and in '97,they prompted the Clinton Justice Department to force Cicero to desist.

And when Waukegan authorities objected to packing multiple families and unrelated persons into apartments and homes, Schakowsky and her illegal alien lobbyist friends got the Clinton Justice Department in '97 to force them to desist too.

And now Schakowsky is explaining to us that immigrants aren't answering the census questionnaire because they may be packing multiple families into small apartments and don't want to get caught by authorities who she and her allies have not yet browbeaten into non-enforcement of their occupancy and fire codes.

What a web these leftist do-gooders and uplifters weave.

Todd Stroger's Marvelously Blissful Ignorance

In the wake of the vote by the Cook County Board to partially roll back his sales tax hike, Board President, Todd Stroger, made the rounds of the airwaves this morning. And while casually chatting with Don Wade and Roma on WLS-AM, he made the amazing revelations that:

1. He did not watch or listen to Obama's major speech on Afghanistan last night, because "he doesn't ever have time to watch TV."

2. He never reads Chicago newspapers because, "they are all biased against me, and besides, they have gone up in price by 50 cents."

3. He never uses the internet as a source of news and information because,"I have people to do that for me."

4. He gets all of his news from a "clipping service."

YIKES!

He also said that he didn't know what Obama's speech was about, and when told that it was about the future conduct of the war in Afghanistan, he said that he was too busy with managing Cook County to worry about Afghanistan.

Now this is the chief executive of the second largest county government in the country -- an entity with a $3 billion annual budget, larger than all but 6 states --and he doesn't even read a newspaper or monitor electronic sources of news!

He did admit that he would occasionally watch television, but it was usually only to catch reruns of "The Nanny" around midnight.

Anyone else think that maybe the Toddling could himself benefit from the care and guidance of a stern nanny?

And just who were the people who actually voted for this clown over Tony Peraica in the election of 2006?

Oh well, ignorance is bliss.

Libertarian Mancow Wants Nanny State to Police His Diet

I sometimes wonder if trendy radio jocks who find employment on conservative talk stations don't just adopt the self-description of being "libertarian" just to safeguard their employment, while not jeopardizing their invitations to A-list, wine and brie soirees on the Gold Coast, in Evanston, and in other trendy leftist circles.

First there was Jay Marvin, the self described, bi-polar, manic depressive talker on WLS-AM a few years back. As the station got progressively more conservative in tone, he began calling himself a "libertarian," while persisting in purveying his unabashed old-line liberal claptrap.

Then there was Jerry Agar, on WLS and now WGN. He genuinely is a libertarian. In fact during his stint in North Carolina, he rubbed shoulders with some acquaintances of mine who run a genuinely libertarian think tank there.

But now there is Erich Mancow Muller, the super jock that WLS recently lured in to fill its 9 to 11 am slot.

I genuinely like Mancow. He's a breath of fresh air after the turgid old schtick of Don Wade and Roma who seem to think that a weekly 30 minute bit on wine tasting makes for good radio. (I'm sure, however, it does generate a goodly number of gratis vintage bottles for the Wade household wine cellar.)

Former disco disc spinner, Wade has a sense of humor that high school sophomores would find embarassingly unsophisticated. Any day now I expect to hear him start laughing uproariously at his own booger and fart jokes. And if I hear Roma's grating voice touting the wonders of "Healthy Trinity" stomach bugs one more time, I think I'll stick a fork through my ear.

So Mancow is exciting by comparison -- even despite having to endure the burden of a woefully miscast, overpaid, news reader sidekick -- Pat Cassidy. Cassidy is at best dead weight to the show, but all too frequently, he begins to fancy himself a serious journalist, id est, liberal journalist and has the effect of stepping on Mancow's lines, creating unneeded tension and basically, upsetting the timing and throwing a wet blanket over the entire production.

But anyway, Mancow calls himself a libertarian.

And in truth, he usually seems pretty true to libertarian ideals. He spoke at the Chicago Tea Party tax protest and afterwards lashed into his on-air guest, Leftist Congressthing, Jan Schakowsky in a way that she has probably never experienced in her life. He actually had you cheering him on.

But yesterday, Mancow interviewed one of those pecksniffity women from the Ralph Nader nutritional group, that every six months or so, crawls out of the Beltway muck to propose some new limitation on our liberty.

This month they're advocating requirements that restaurant chains print complete nutritional information for every dish served.

Aside from the fact that this would cost restaurants a bundle -- likely necessitate an increase in costs to the consumer and probably necessitate the layoffs of some of their illegal alien busboys and cooks -- it is clearly a step down the Naderite road of prohibiting certain food choices.

But "libertarian" Mancow thought this was just great.

Apparently suffering from something of a burgeoning lard butt (perhaps osmotically contracted from daily proximity to Cassidy) and a passion for fast food, he said the government should regulate what he eats, to protect him from himself.

This prompted a regional Libertarian Party spokeswoman to call in and tell Mancow that real libertarians don't plead for government protection and care.

Maybe next, Mancow will want OSHA to come in to the WLS studios and put safety bars around his desk.

He would certainly want to be safeguarded by his government nanny protectors, should he somnalescently fall off his stool while listening to Roma's interminably turgid "Healthy Trinity," commercials.