"Who's this guy?"

I was a little hungover from having watched the Superbowl last night and a certain 9 year old kid I know was at the computer desperately trying to find the Doritos advertisement that he saw on TV last night. You know, the one with the guy who bites into the Dorito snack chip and a lady's clothes fly off to reveal her foundation garments and silky unmentionables!
I wiped the sand from my eyes and instructed him to search "Superbowl Commercials 2009" and at the top of the results was a link to Tom Shales Washington Post 'style' column.
So...
The kid clicks on good old Tom and takes a quick look at his article on the advertisements.
The kid looks Tom's article over and askes me, "Who's this guy?", and I answer, "Oh, he's an interesting person with some opinions on our mass-media culture, maybe when you are older he'll make some sense!"
I remember being in a college mass media communications course and having to do complex 'content analysis' of what was being broadcast for a sample period of time... how many times did the idiots mix up "less" and "fewer" was not in the matrix, incidences of sexism were.
When Mrs. Potato Head loses her mouth and can't give Mr. Potato Head grief for his driving (in a commercial fo Bridgestone tires), the kid laughed and I winced.
I grew up in the mid-1970s reading my mother's Ms. magazine about the same time I was also reading the National Lampoon. My sensibilities remain somewhere in between these two.
In the CBS Sunday Morning TV show, Hugh Hefner's daughter lamented the days when they were lumped into the 'porn' that feminists were fighting against despite the fact Playboy magazine was in favor of women's rights, especially abortion. All these things and plenty more went through my mind in that hungover moment at the computer...
What was surprising was when, after the Doritos ad was over, he took the computer cursor and ran it back and forth along the slider so that it was 'video scratching' as a DJ would work a vinyl platter of a phonograph record, a blur of images, her clothes coming off and going back on in a flash, the bus hitting and then un-hitting the eager snack muncher over and over again...
The medium IS still the message.