FreeCreditReport.com Rankings: #2

Your silver medalist:



Music: Ahh country music. Drink it in. It always goes down smooth. Examples A, B, and C. The "YeeHaw" that we get from the bass player is timed pretty perfectly, and we also appreciate the drummer's use of utensils and light fixtures to provide us with a beat. There's also a bit of harmony in the chorus, which we applaud as well. Grade: 8.5/10

Lyrical Creativity: This one has the benefit of being the first commercial that was released, so the information was actually new and informative. The lyrics are quite catchy in this one, and when you say free credit report.com, most people will probably remember this one. We find out that a hacker stole his identity, so we're glad to hear that it wasn't him being irresponsible again. A troubling line is that "he could have seen this coming at (him) like an atom bomb." Can people see atom bombs coming at them? I'm not so sure. Did you see me dropping this bomb on you? Yeah, didn't think so. Grade: 8/10

Visual: Pirates are always cool. Captain Jack Sparrow has got to be one of the coolest ever, but these guys aren't that far behind. Also, is the lady eating at the table the same lady from the other ones? I can't tell. But the nice thing is, she's happy in this video. Smiling and nodding along to the music. It really makes the tone of the whole video much more positive. A solid video all around. Grade: 7.5/10

Overall Grade: 24/30

FreeCreditReport.com Rankings: #3

Your bronze medalist:



Music: I love me some punk rock music. It's just a fact of life. You all know that Relient K is my favorite band. So in terms of music alone, it shouldn't surprise you that this one ranks very highly for me. Grade: 9.5/10

Lyrical Creativity: When you have a punk rock song, the words move alot faster and you can find out a good deal more information, which I appreciate here. We soon find out that they are at a renaissance fair, which is "a place where (his) credit could stink." But is a renaissance fair such a bad thing? Me thinks not. Another nice touch is paying homage(6:18 - 7:16) to the original commercial, using a pirate hat as a cymbal. The main drawback in this section is similar to video #4, where our singer appears to have gotten himself into credit trouble again, which takes him down a notch in my book. Grade: 7/10

Visual: They commit nicely to the renaissance theme, which I appreciate. The costumes are good, and I especially appreciate the use of live animals throughout the song. Also fun are the guest musical appearances by somebody playing what looks like a fife, and a guy playing a lute. However, I think the lute player is wearing a baseball hat. That my friends is quite the anachronism. Also, the angry crossing guard lady from video #4 shows up again, and she looks more annoyed than Paul Rudd. What is her deal? Grade: 6.5/10

Overall Grade: 23/30

I hear that some people haven't been able to comment on these posts. What's up with that?

FreeCreditReport.com Rankings: #4

Here is your 4th place commercial:



Music: This one is super catchy, and I like that. It kind of reminds me of Ben Lee, who I like enough to have paid $20 to see him at the Kimball (and got a free 92.3 tide fm t-shirt, a hot dog, and some cake - what a deal!) This song puts me in a good mood hearing it, so I think that makes it a pretty solid song. Grade: 8/10

Lyrical Creativity: This one starts off talking about sky-rocketing gas prices and how he needs to get a bike because of them. The whole eco-friendly theme is cool, but I think this one is no longer on TV because gas prices are wayy back down now. So now that this is the case, these lyrics are moo. After that, he goes on to do the whole spell it out thing, which just isn't that creative anymore. Also, in our previous two videos, a kid got a credit card with the singer's i.d., and his girl didn't tell him she defaulted on a credit card, neither of which were his fault. Now all the sudden, our hero just has bad credit all by himself. A hero of mine no more. Grade: 3/10

Visual: Pretty high marks on this one for the visual. He's wearing a helmet, so although we shouldn't follow his financial example, he certainly knows his bike safety. I also like the buggy that the bass player is being pulled in, because my mom used to have one of those for the twins. Good times. And any time a bike parade is involved, well that's just a good thing. My only drawback on this one is why is the crossing guard lady so mad? My first thought was because she was holding up the stop sign in his direction and was mad that he was crossing, but a girl clearly goes running right by her as well, so this theory is no good. What is she so angry about? Grade: 7.5/10

Overall Grade: 18.5/30

Discuss.

Captain obvious

Thanks for the clarification...

FreeCreditReport.com Rankings: #5

We're back with our fifth best FreeCreditReport.com commercial:



Music: Our guys are going for a bit more of an alternative rock song sound here, which at one time was a very popular genre of music, and one that I think we all still enjoy to an extent. My problem with the music here is that there's no real hook - nothing sticks out. In some of the other ones we've got catchy choruses and things, but not in this one. Music purists will say you don't need one, but when you're trying to sell a service you definitely do. I'm giving them a hard time on this one, but the music is much better than the rap/techno one, and our lead singer is actually showing off some vocal range, which we can all appreciate I think. Grade: 6.5/10

Lyrical Creativity: This is where this commercial really suffers in the rankings. You can debate me on my musical tastes, but I'm married, so I'm an expert on marrying one's dream girl. A girl who is lying to you, or withholding certain very key information in her life is nobody's dream girl. I dunno, maybe this is another example of men and women differing on opinions of what's important in life. Conversely, he says that if he had gone to freecreditreport.com, he'd be a happy bachelor with a dog and a yard. So is he saying that even if he really loved this girl, if he found out she had bad credit he would dump her? If she is withholding important life information, and he would dump her based solely on her credit, there's no way that she was his dream girl, making the first 2 lines of this song a complete lie. Busted. Grade: 2/10

Visual: He says that they are living in a basement, and if you look out the window in the back right, you can see people's feet as they walk, so they are actually in a basement. Points for honesty. Also, big points go out to the drummer who is playing while sitting on the toilet. This is funny. Some questions do remain however. There is clearly alot of tension here between man and wife. Dude needs to put down his guitar and talk it out with the wife instead of singing about her while she's right in front of him. If this tension continues on, a whole bunch of anger could surface later on down the road. But I digress. Despite my analysis of their relationship, the basement looks pretty accurate, and they get a boost for the drummer on the toilet. Grade: 6/10
Overall Grade: 14.5/30

As usual, feel free to agree or disagree.

New Series: FreeCreditReport.com Rankings

You've seen them. You might hate them, but be honest, you probably love them. The FreeCreditReport.com commercials with everybody's favorite singer. (Who is actually lip-synching, and is Canadian) So I decided this would be a good time to evaluate and rank the 6 commercials.

I'm grading each video based on 3 criteria:
1. Music - does it sound good?
2. Lyrical content - Judging lyrical content is a tough job because the basic message of all of the songs is the same. So maybe the more appropriate word would be lyrical creativity. I want to see how they're telling me to go to FreeCreditReport.com.
3. Visual - This category takes into account costumes, scenery, acting and the like.

I'll reveal the videos in order from 6 to 1 over the next week. Without further adieu, your 6th place video: (Not a loser because all of these commercials are winners, this one is just the 6th best)




Music: They're going for a kind of rap/hip hop vibe here, but I'm not buying it. The beat is suspect at best and sounds too much like techno. Also, the guy sounds like a robot with his monotone voice. If you're gonna have a rap song, go all out and really make it sound like rap. Bottom line, this song is just not as catchy as the othes. Grade: 4/10

Lyrical Creativity: The lyrics open pretty strongly. It starts out "When you're a rock star you get to party hard/Champagne and caviar tricked-out exotic cars" That's not a bad verse I don't think. However, later on when we get to the chorus, He's got to ask the DJ "Free what?" This could mean one of two things: Either he forgot what he was advertising, which would be disastrous, or more likely, it's cause he couldn't think of anything cool to say there, so he had to throw it over to the DJ for a second. Somebody who doesn't know music might think this is just a cool back and forth between rapper and dj. Luckily, you all have somebody who really knows music (me) to tell you that this occurred because there was no more creativity left. Grade: 4.5/10

Visual: The theme is that these guys are working at some fancy house party. I pray you tell me why then our star is walking down the huge staircase at the beginning. I can tell you one thing, the kitchen isn't upstairs. And if you look at those champagne glasses, they're full. Which means that either he is slacking off on the job by giving himself a tour of the house, or this scenario is totally unrealistic. Also, when our singer is bringing said champagne glasses to the two ladies, if you look at the dancing couple in the background between :10 and :15 in the video, that white guy is a worse dancer than Albert Brennaman. If you're trying to sell a service, you need to put good dancers in your commercial. They have failed. Grade: 5/10

Overall Grade: 13.5/30

Feel free to agree or disagree on any of the things I've mentioned, or if you feel that I have left some key things out that could affect the grade, please let me know. We'll see you soon with #5!

Shove in the right direction

I have not done this since we moved in to this apartment last July. The burners on the stove have gotten really gross, but since we don't have a dishwasher and have to wash everything by hand, I'm never in the mood to get this done! Anyway, tonight during dinner there was a bit of a mishap where something boiled over and we were basically forced to pull out the drip pan thing and clean the stove top. Since we started, we pulled them all out and just got things done. Sometimes it takes a little push to get yourself moving! I feel so much better now that it's clean though!

Reddish Knob

When we went to visit Lauren in Harrisonburg last weekend she took us to Reddish Knob. It's the highest point in northern Virginia, and absolutely beautiful. There is a tiny little parking lot on top of a mountain and you can see so far in every direction you look.
I highly recommend the trip if you're ever in the area!

President's Day/Stay at Home Day

So I had today off of work for President's Day, but Katie had to go into work, so I decided I would chronicle my day at home.

6:30 - Alarm goes off. I start to get up, then realize I don't have to work, and crash right back into my pillow. Katie gets up.

7:25 - Katie comes back into the room to say bye to me because she is about to head to work. In my sleepy state of mind, I mumble something back to her that probably sounds like 'take luck.'
8:15 - I wake up, grab some coffee and turn on Sportscenter. At a commercial, I make myself a bagel. Our toaster is currently not 100% functional; when you press the lever down, it won't stay down. So in order to toast anything, you have to hold the button down yourself until you have achieved your desired level of toastyness.

9:00 - Start watching another hour of Sportscenter, play Set game.

10:00 - Pull out the guitar and try to play a bit since I haven't played much at all since last year.

11:00 - Check out what's OnDemand. I hit the jackpot - All 3 Back to the Futures. I haven't seen them since I lost them in a cd case sometime before senior year (Also lost in that case: Zoolander, Anchorman, Cinderella Man, Starsky & Hutch, Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore [it was a sad day])

11:30 - Decide that since I'm home and Katie is at work, I'll take care of dinner tonight. I go looking through our crockpot cookbooks and find some things that look good. Then I realize they have about 20 ingredients and there's no way I could make them. Enter Maggie's 5-ingredient cookbook (which I think we were supposed to return about 2 months ago), and I find some good ideas. I check the freezer and we've got some chicken breasts, so I decide to try Chicken Stroganoff.

11:45 - Go to Safeway to get requisite ingredients for dinner.
12:00 - Begin preprations for dinner. I've never chopped up an onion before, so I have to call my mom to get very specific instructions. Stop laughing. I've heard that they can make your eyes water, and in my case, that would be an understatement.

If you can't quite see my eyes all watery, here is a better picture of what my face looked like:

12:45 - Finish up preparations and throw everything into the crockpot for 6 hours. Continue watching Back to the Future trilogy.

1:00 - Katie gets home, and asks what is cooking, but I want to surprise her with a (hopefully) delicious meal, so I don't tell her.

2:00 - Katie has some studying to do for a psychology test this week, so she starts studying on the computer. So I decide to head on over to the school at the top of our street to shoot some hoops and try to improve my heart health slightly. When I return home, I find Katie still hard at work in the books:

4:00 - The apartment starts to smell real good, so maybe my little dinner experiment will actually work out. Back to the Future 3 has started.

5:30 - Marty McFly has succesfully returned to 1985, and the Delorean is destroyed. I decide to check up on my Stroganoff, and when I look through the lid, I see that it is bubbling and foaming. I don't know if this is good or bad. Let's hope good.

6:45 - Dinner is ready. Let's hope she likes it!

6:47 - And the verdict is.....either it's good or she's lying to be nice.

7:30 - Time for some Mariokart.

8:30 - Walk to Wendy's for Frosties.

9:00 - Jack Bauer attempts to save the world.

10:05 - Katie usually makes the bed every morning because I'm normally out of bed first, and I'm also lazy. Since I was last out of bed this morning, I was going to make it. When I walk back in to the room tonight, I examine my effort of this morning. Not my best:

And that was my day. Hope you all had a great President's Day!

Cookies

If you can't tell from the earlier post, I like to spell things using food :) Anyway, we drove down to JMU for the day to visit my sister for Valentine's Day and watch the W&M/JMU game. These are the cookies I made for her for the holiday!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day! We made pink, heart-shaped pancakes this morning. Some people really get in the spirit though. Last night we found this house who had put lights up in the shape of a giant heart. Anyway, enjoy your day, we hope it's a good one!

Happy Birthday Mom!

The other day was my mom's birthday, so last night we all went out to Macaroni Grill for dinner. My brother made my mom this awesome video of pictures through the years. Check it out if you'd like:


Happy Birthday! from Rob Stratton on Vimeo.

Frozen

When we were in Leesburg last weekend, Chris and Eric went golfing. Lauren and I walked the course for the first 9 holes searching for golfballs. Hole 9 ends in the same area that hole 18 ends at (near the clubhouse) so that's where we split off to head back home. On the way out though, we saw a guy walking on the lake on hole 18!! It was an incredibly warm day, but I guess the lake had still been frozen over from prior weather. I wasn't quick enough with my camera to catch him in the middle, but you can see him off to the right. I don't know about you, but I am not brave enough to walk into the middle of a "frozen" lake on a 65+ degree day. No thank you.Anyway, apparently the lake helped Chris, because on his 18th hole, he took out an old ball thinking he would lose it in the lake. It did hit the lake, but bounced off and landed on the green. Talk about a lucky shot.

Food for thought

Is A-Rod slowly becoming an oompa-loompa? I think so...

A-Rod last year: A-Rod this year:

A-Rod next year?

Happy birthday, Eric!

Today is my brother's birthday! My mom went all out this birthday (as she does every birthday if you haven't noticed; see here, here, here, here or here) making Eric's cake. This year it was a laptop with a mouse. Pretty creative, I have to say! The mouse was attached with a cord, and was on two plates so my sister had to help carry it over to the table. Happy birthday, Eric!

Fogo de Chao

On Friday, my project team celebrated the end of our project by going out to lunch at Fogo de Chao. It's a Brazilian restaurant downtown and I was told to prepare for this meal the same way I would Thanksgiving dinner. So I had regular breakfast, a granola bar at about 10:30, and a few crackers at about 11 in preparation for our 1:30 reservation. The restaurant is a simple concept: Every person has a coaster that is green on one side and red on the other.

As long as your coaster is green side up, waiters dressed like this

will continually bring you different cuts of meat on huge skewers. And you just eat meat until you can't anymore. Seeing as how it's a pretty expensive restaurant, I made sure to get my money's worth. And I paid for it the rest of the day. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I didn't eat dinner, and didn't even want to because I felt pretty bad. But if I had to do it again, I'd do it the exact same way. I love meat.

Broken blinds

I walked into the bathroom and found a few pieces of plastic sitting on the sink. They looked like they were broken off of something so I asked Chris (I like to know when things break!). His response: "They fell off the bottom of those two dangly things on the blinds. When I opened the windows earlier one of them just kind of crumbled in my hand." Haha, guess he doesn't know his own strenth sometimes.

Strange day...

Yesterday morning the power went off around 7 a.m. while we were getting ready for work. I'm really not sure why. It wasn't windy or stormy or anything, but based on the clocks we think it was out for over two hours. Anyway, I had to get dressed in the dark and then went in to the office. It was SO sunny outside and unfortunately I broke my sunglasses a while ago, so I did my best to stare down the sun as I drove. The worst part was the glass. You know how when it's darker out or at least not super sunny you think your windshield is pretty clean? Then when the sun beams down on it you see how incredible dirty it actually is. Well, that happened to me as soon as I hit GW pkwy on the way to work. This wouldn't have been too bad except for the fact that the fluid that shoots out of the car to clean your windshield was FROZEN! I had to drive the entire way to work with no sunglasses, a glaring sun, and a dirty windshield. My visibilty was terrible! (It had unfrozen by my drive home, so that wasn't too bad.) Anyway, I reset all the clocks from the power outage when I got home and didn't know that the little clock on my bedside table resets its alarm when the power goes out. At 12:00 a.m. my alarm started blaring and I could not for the life of me figure out how to turn it off (I normally use the alarm on my phone). Chris actually got up out of bed because he thought it was the morning alarm. I must have somehow hit the snooze button and fallen back asleep because at 12:09 it went off again! That time I actually woke up long enough to figure out how to turn the alarm off. My alarm clock is definitely conducive to snoozing though...see how dominant that snooze button is?? It is the closest button to you and spans the entire length of the clock almost!

Bread is baked!

I successfully baked the first batch of Amish Friendship bread!

Today was day 10 on my batter, so when I got home from work, I got to work on the bread. It is delicious...and well worth having to leave it on your counter for 10 days to ferment. Anyway, I poured out my four new batters from the first one, one of which I'm keeping for myself, and to the three of you taking the rest, I'll try to get them to you as soon as I can!

I was actually surprised at how easy it was to make. The only kink in my afternoon activity was that after I had mixed up all the ingredients and preheated the oven, I realized I only had one loaf pan. So I had to cook one, let it cool, and then cook the second one. Still worth it though! Hopefully ten days from now I will have tracked down a second loaf pan for myself.

Funny kid

This video made my day today. Liz will you ever give kids pain medication that does this? Because I think you should.

Sweet jobs

Since many of you are still looking for a job, and Ashley posted this awesome one the other day, I figured I would post one that I applied for a couple weeks back. It's quite a long shot I feel, but also a really cool opportunity! I encourage you all to apply.. good luck! Island job.

Sunken counter top

Every time we go down to the burg, we end up going to this place called Manhatten Bagel for breakfast. It's cheap and delicious, and I love bagels. Anyway, we generally sit in the same place every time, right next to the coffee and drink machines. The soda machine is apparently really heavy because for the past couple years it has slowly been collapsing the counter top it sits on. I'm not sure how well you can tell in this picture, but it's really sunken down. Every time we get there I wonder if there will be a giant hole in the top of the cabinet...

Autographs

We went down to Williamsburg this weekend for another game. The team is not doing so hot this year, which is kind of disappointing, but it's still great to go down and watch. This game was free for boyscouts, so all the guys had to come back out of the locker room and sign autographs after the game. When Chris was on the team, I always hated these games because I had to wait around twice as long for him to get done. Now that I can be more objective, it's awesome to see all these kids so excited. They feel like they're meeting celebrities and you can tell it's a huge highlight for them. It's really cute.