I’m a big fan of urban legends.  Actually, I fucking hate urban legends, but what I love is debunking them and telling the people who forward them to me by way of email, facebook, or whatever that they’re an idiot just for thinking these things can possibly be true.  I wait each week for my newsletter from Snopes.com to see what kind of stupidity is moving around the net just so I can pounce on people who somehow think they’ve stumbled onto some great secret that is completely valid just because some other idiot forwarded it to them a few minutes ago.

This is why I fucking hate these ads from CarMax so very much (there are two in a row here):

Car Max – Not Smart Series

Now, the “laws” that they are stating, as far as I can tell from a little research, could very well be actual laws.  The problem is that the two outrageous laws they use are usually part of a much longer list of “dumb laws” that have been forwarded around the net so many times that they are used as content filler on a bunch of shitty sites, so I have no friggin’ idea if they’re real or not.

I do know that University City, MO is a pretty affluent neighborhood, so the idea of them not allowing you to have a yard sale sign in your own front yard isn’t that crazy. It’s like how home owner associations don’t let you paint your front door hot pink or have inflatable nativity scenes in your front yard over the holidays. It’s tacky as hell and it makes the whole street look like shit.

As far as the peanuts after sunset on Wednesday, who the hell knows.  It probably had something to do with some bizarre business practice and it got left on the books so long that no one wants to take the time to fix the damn thing. It’s like how in Los Angeles, it’s illegal to throw anything out of your car window except water and chicken feathers because farmers who use to truck around their chickens kept getting pulled over for littering, so they had to modify the law.  Kind of dumb, but it makes sense once you know the back story.

These are basically a variation on the “joke looking for an ad” category of advertisements that I’ve brought up before.  Borne of pure laziness on the part of an agency or an in-house ad team, they basically have a stable of bad jokes and weird information that they will bend to their will when they’re under a tight deadline, despite the fact that the information has absolutely nothing to do with the brand or the product.

I remember awhile back, there was a local plumber (Mike Diamond, I think, the “smell good plumber”) who was doing some local radio. Whoever pulled the ads together for him got a hold of some folksy old wives tales (the forerunner to urban legends) and through copy writing magic turned them into advertising.  My favorite was one ad where they were explaining where the word “shit” came from, which they claimed was originally an acronym for “Ship High In Transit“, a phrase stamped onto crates of manure when placed on ships. This is completely false… I mean, it’s not even close, yet these yokels were selling it as the truth.  Now, if you can’t get your facts straight in a lazy ass ad, I’m not letting you anywhere near my pipes.

Same thing goes for you CarMax… you sell cars, idiots.  I’m not looking for your back woods legal advice, I just want you to take my trade in without asking about the blood stains in the back seat.

J.