Remember When TV Commercials Were Brilliant?

I don't own a television, because I so detest watching today's crummy commercials. But at one point in time -- some forty years ago -- commercials were brilliant, arguably more fun to watch than the shows in which they were interspersed. Check out this Alka Seltzer spot, which is just as funny today as the date in aired back in 1969. The agency was Doyle Dane Bernbach, whose creative director, Roy Grace (1937-2003), conceived it and other classic spots of the era.

I Will Miss ValleyWag.com

In its heyday, ValleyWag.com was the must-visit site for those benighted souls deeply interested in the flawed brilliance of Silicon Valley's enterepreneur class. From nothing, it built a dedicated viewership of some 1 million unique visitors per month, but that was not enough to sustain it, especially since it paid its writers a bounty for high-traffic posts that went viral. ValleyWag.com won't actually close down: it will be folded into Gawker.com but it will certainly lose much of its spice in the process. It's always a sad day when the Web loses an original voice.