There are two commercials out right now, one kind of old and another new, that, I don't know, they hit some odd nerve with me, The new one out there is for Progressive Insurance. This series of commercials has the bobbed haired, red lipstick woman yakking about insurance to some unsuspecting people. The one I've noticed of late has these two guys coming up to the counter and one of the guys says that money is so tight he had to sell his watch, in which the guy next to him smiles and shows the watch.

I don't know about most people, but I look at these two guy, the interplay between them, and my gaydar goes up. It's clear these guys just aren't roommates and it isn't really that subtle that their gay. Maybe on the first few showings you might not get it, but considering that commercial runs a lot, at some point a person has to put 2 and 2 together.

What I'm surprised at, and maybe this is something that's still underground and not in the mainstream, is how little protest the commercial is getting. Years ago, either some small fringe religious group or Focus on the Family/ Moral Majority would have been up in arms over the blatant flaunting of homosexuality. From what I have heard, not a peep.

From the other end, I haven't heard of the commercial being praised by GLAAD or other groups. Again, it could be something under the radar, but in the old days there would have been some major press statement about it. I'm not naïve to think we've moved away from having to praise or condemn lifestyles, but it's nice to hope that we're taking small steps in that direction.

The second commercial, which is one I don't like, is the freecreditreport.com commercial. This long series of ads just hits me the wrong way, with this guy moaning about how his life is terrible because his credit is bad. They just started re-airing the one of the series that made me sick of this ad, but for months this particular part of the series wasn't shown. It was the second part of the series I saw, and has the annoying guy singing about how his now wife had bad credit and because he didn't know about it, when they got married instead of having their own place, they had to live with her parents in the basement. Near the end of his song he says if he new about her credit, he would be a happy bachelor.

Huh? This fool is putting all his credit woes on his wife and has the nerve to declare if he knew she had bad credit he would have called off the weeding? Now, since is the only mention of his wife in any of the ads, I can only assume, if we follow the storyline, he did dump her behind because of her credit, yet we have to suffer through more commercials while he whines about his bad credit. Are we to assume this woman was so caustic her short contact with his has ruined him for life? Are we to accept that not revealing bad credit is a reasonable excuse for divorce?

The commercials, if followed, give a really bad impression to me. Just on a larger measure, you would figure the guy at some point would stop trying to get expensive things, since he knows his credit his shot.

Even with my annoyance with the whole series of commercials, it has done what it needed to do. I may hate the commercial but I remember those things, which is the whole point.