Some Major Bouncage

Recently, my former boss Steve Rabosky said I should commit more time to writing about advertising.

Last week I took him up on his suggestion and committed 5 days of blogging to nothing but our beloved and sometimes hated industry.

I chose quite the week to do it as well because there were tectonic shifts right here in the Southern California ad market.

In any case the stunt was a bounding success. Sending Round Seventeen traffic through the roof and hitting all kinds of new peaks. Ending with Friday's posting that featured a half-naked woman and a nipple-grabbing boiled lobster, the best kind.

To that end, and taking our cue from the NY Post and the London Sun Times, postings this week will all feature photos of scantily clad women.

I had some luck finding a picture today and I am confident, through rigor and determination, that I will be able to locate similar puerile pics for the upcoming posts.

In addition to kicking off All Titillation Week, today is also Passover.

So let's switch gears. From mammaries to matzos.

The producers of the Noah's Ark movie have been receiving all kinds of flack because their film does not adhere to the original screenplay authored by God. And Shane Black. Yet no one has raised a peep over God's earlier bibler, the Ten Commandments.

Here, we must focus our attention not on the film  but at the original Passover story and its many, many faults.

I think it's clear that when God was done with the first draft, he should have optioned it to the studio and let the script doctors do a total rewrite. Because as it stands now, the Passover yarn is a complete sham.

First off, it starts out way too slow.
400 years of slavery and bondage.
Talk about a yawner for an opening.

Nothing happens for two hours and then Moses starts talking to a burning rhododendron. A bush?

Where does that character development go?
Why couldn't it be a three-legged talking goat?
Or a sassy donkey?
Or a cat that thinks he's a pirate?
Has God even seen Shrek?

OK, the plagues.

Ten plagues for Christ's sake! Why not three? There's an age-old magic symmetry to three. Plus, this God character is the Master of the Universe, the King of Kings,  Lord over everything from Pacoima to Pluto and the best he can do is whip up some frogs and locusts?
How about some meteorites?
Tsunami waves?
And I know this is often repeated, but what the hell is murrain?

Finally, and this is where the story loses all kinds of credibility, are we to believe that it took an act, or eleven boring acts, of God to convince the Pharaoh to let my people go?

I've sat in living rooms, dining rooms, and oneg shabbat rooms at the back of the Temple, my entire life. I know about the kvetching, the griping and the sending of the cold soup back to the kitchen.

I can say with no small amount of Hebraic certitude that Pharaoh would not put up with this tsuris for 45 minutes, much less 400 years.

If I were the Egyptian Sun God and Moses told me his people wanted to leave, I would have helped him wrap up the ruggelah and the kreplach and personally escorted he and his yappy tribe of yentas across the Red Sea.