{"id":42655,"date":"2021-12-09T17:23:27","date_gmt":"2021-12-09T17:23:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.oracletutoring.ca\/blog\/?p=42655"},"modified":"2021-12-09T17:23:28","modified_gmt":"2021-12-09T17:23:28","slug":"pop-culture-humour-lessons-from-captain-obvious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oracletutoring.ca\/blog\/pop-culture-humour-lessons-from-captain-obvious\/","title":{"rendered":"Pop culture: humour: lessons from Captain Obvious"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2>Self-tutoring about messages and humour from popular culture: the tutor discusses a gem from Hotels.com<\/h2>\n<p>\nA recent ad on YouTube has me laughing, simply because of the incredible content it delivers in maybe 30 seconds. I&#8217;m sure many of my readers have seen it as well, which helps. It&#8217;s not my aim to relate what the ad says, but rather to explain why I find it so funny.<\/p>\n<p>What follows is how I recall the ad.<\/p>\nTo begin, you see a lady join two others in a convertible Mustang with its top down. I think she jumps from the pavement, over the trunk, into the backseat. (She makes this move look easier and more natural than I imagine it would be.) Next, she turns, looking backward, waving: &#8220;I&#8217;ll come back for you!&#8221; The Mustang speeds away.<\/p>\n<p>Now we see to whom she&#8217;s waving: a solo lady with a suitcase. Next to her stands Captain Obvious.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;By the way&#8230;they&#8217;re not coming back for you,&#8221; he comments.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Thanks, Captain Obvious,&#8221; she replies, lightly crying.<\/p>\n<p>We then see, in the background, the hotel she must be booked at, all by itself, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. The point is that it&#8217;s so remote relative to the one her friends have chosen, they won&#8217;t bother to include her in their plans. Yet, supposedly, they were meant to be on the same vacation.<\/p>\n<p>Captain Obvious points out that the reason the lonely vacationer got such bad advice is that she didn&#8217;t book with Hotels.com.<\/p>\n<p>I usually tune ads out, but this one I couldn&#8217;t, for a couple of reasons:<\/p>\n<ol><li>\nI wasn&#8217;t sure, at first, why the traveler was being deserted by her friends.<\/li>\n<li>It never occurred to me that friends planning a vacation together would book their hotels without consulting each other.<\/ol>\n<p>Once I&#8217;d made peace with those two ideas, I realized the irony of the ad, and how &agrave; propos it is. Notably, the ad conveys three truths that, while current, I find completely absurd:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>People openly lie to their friends, and it&#8217;s &#8220;okay&#8221; to do it.<\/li>\n<li>People know when their friends are lying to them, and don&#8217;t object. Rather, they facilitate it.<\/li>\n<li>People will count on their friends even when they know their friends can&#8217;t be trusted.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>We also see some saving grace from Captain Obvious: even though the misguided lady booked with another company, he doesn&#8217;t desert her.<\/p>\nJack of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.oracletutoring.ca\">Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane,<\/a> Campbell River, BC.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Self-tutoring about messages and humour from popular culture: the tutor discusses a gem from Hotels.com A recent ad on YouTube has me laughing, simply because of the incredible content it delivers in maybe 30 seconds. I&#8217;m sure many of my &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.oracletutoring.ca\/blog\/pop-culture-humour-lessons-from-captain-obvious\/\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Pop culture: humour: lessons from Captain Obvious<\/span> Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3038],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oracletutoring.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oracletutoring.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oracletutoring.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oracletutoring.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oracletutoring.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42655"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.oracletutoring.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42667,"href":"https:\/\/www.oracletutoring.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42655\/revisions\/42667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oracletutoring.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oracletutoring.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oracletutoring.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}