unfortunately gaslighting is my primary social skill

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The hotel TV has the following channels available:

- all nature footage all the time, with a soothing British voice telling you the likely mortality statistics of every baby turtle and fleeing gazelle depicted
- sports (car race)
- sports (baseball)
- sports (football, including a digression by the commentators about the concussion risk and the fact that many players are from poor backgrounds looking to support their families and then go on to hit the families due to accumulated brain trauma)
- sports (equestrian dressage)
- history, in the form of an extremely boring televised audiobook about the Meiji Restoration
- reality TV, at the moment a cooking contest where a contestant is explaining that he was really tempted to lob a fork into another contestant's soufflé but figured it would get him disqualified
- televised instrumental music concert
- a documentary about the cross-section of people who visit a particular laundromat, with each buttonholed and questioned in turn

"I have opened a new McDonald's franchise at 55th and Shawnee. It's got one of those indoor playgrounds you can release your children into to get a few minutes without them bothering you. The food is the same at this McDonald's as at all the other ones. I remembered to ask all my employees during their interviews if they were going to spit in the food and only hired the ones who said no."

"Do you have a dog? This kind of dog food has a lot of fillers in it so it's really cheap, and most dogs we tried are willing to eat it. As far as we know it doesn't cause any acute health problems but the state of veterinary nutrition science is dismal so this dog food, like any dog food, might have some kind of hard to notice chronic result. Now available in chicken flavor, which doesn't seem to matter to the dogs at all but might help you feel like you're offering them more variety."

"There's a new movie coming out about the Spanish Inquisition. It has disturbing content but some people think that's cool. If you like disturbing content, please watch the Spanish Inquisition movie in theaters this Sunday."

"The expected value of life insurance is negative, because if we couldn't charge you more than we expect to have to pay you accounting for investments, overhead, and transaction costs, we couldn't be in business. But if you die before most people like you do, or you're kind of stupid about managing money that you have on hand but okay at paying bills, then life insurance might make sense anyway, because it'd provide your family a big lump sum at the time of your death in case they need to replace your income or hire a nanny to account for you being dead. Allstate is an insurance company that sells life insurance, and if you want some, we're a decent option. This is the phone number you should call if you want Allstate life insurance."

"I applied Old Spice deodorant before filming this commercial. You can't tell through the TV, but if you want to have a more sensorily immersive appreciation for what it would be like to be near me in person, you could go buy some Old Spice, and smell it. You could even ask your man to use it. Then he'd smell like me, at least at times when I'm wearing Old Spice deodorant. To make this commercial more memorable, I'm sitting on a horse while I talk to you."

"We put Energizer batteries and Duracell batteries in some appliances and in some appliances, like clocks, Energizer batteries last about three times as long, but Duracell outperforms Energizer in flashlights specifically. I don't know why it came out that way and I'm kind of awed and frightened by how much there still is to learn about engineering. If you have a battery operated clock, you might want Energizer batteries for it. Unless it lights up. Then I don't know. We didn't test that."

"Average testers required 252 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie pop. If you buy a Tootsie pop you will be consuming a fairly small volume of candy but you can make it last for kind of a long time unless you bite it. Most people bite their Tootsie Pops, but you don't have to."

"This is the new Chevrolet Impala. It looks like this. It can make this noise," vroom! "but only under conditions you shouldn't try to replicate under normal circumstances because it's bad for the car. It's available in all these colors, but you can still buy an Impala if you don't like these colors, because it's possible to re-paint cars. It's expensive but not as expensive as the car, which is thirty thousand dollars up front or more than that if you prefer our predatory installment plan."

"Did you eat the Cheetos that I left here?"
"Yes."
"Why did you do that?"
"It's part of the advertisement we're filming that I eat them, and I volunteered to be the one to eat them because I really like Cheetos."
"I really like Cheetos too! That's why after the director says we're done with this commercial I'm going to eat one of the other bags we have lying around."
"I guess at least two people like Cheetos, and it wasn't hard to find the two of us, so probably a lot of people like Cheetos. Cheetos can be purchased in most stores that sell snacks."

"At Mattress Emporium, we have a lot of beds! You can lie down on them! Most of our staffpeople won't even tell you off for jumping on them! You can try to figure out which of them you would like to sleep on, but sometimes it feels different to lie on something for eight hours than to lie on it for a couple of minutes, so we have a return policy that looks pretty generous in principle but leaves us some room to decline a return if we think you're taking too much advantage. If you buy a mattress from us and have it delivered we can take away a mattress you already have at no extra charge and they usually make it to the landfill but once one fell off an overpass and the mover was too lazy to go get it. It fell in a pretty boggy area. I'd like it if you came and lay down on mattresses at Mattress Emporium and bought one! I am indifferent to the possibility that you will come lie down on mattresses and not buy any and I have an unhealthy amount of resentment about the possibility that you will lie down on our mattresses and then use what you learn to buy one from another seller."

"My political opponent, Ted Vicks, says he doesn't expect to be able to come up with a budget that satisfies everyone without raising taxes. I think it's plausible he's not being very creative! Sometimes people who make budgets don't make sure they stay up to date! Sometimes people can be satisfied with things other than money, like fancy titles and sexual favors! My wife is okay with it if I have to blow a senator to get something accomplished politically and the idea kind of turns me on. If you vote for me, I will try really hard to avoid raising taxes and still get everything the government needs to pay for accomplished!"

"If you feel you're stagnating professionally, one thing you could try is getting a degree. That would be pretty hard, but you can get a diploma mill degree much more easily. Many employers are lazy about evaluating resumes, so telling them you graduated from Kennedy-Western might work fine to get you a job. Visit our website for more!"

"It's a big ad. Very big ad. It's a big ad we're in. It's a big ad. My word it's big! You can see how big it is! It's a big ad! For Carlton Draught! It's just so freaking HUGE! It's a big ad! Expensive ad! This ad better sell some of ouuuuuuur beer!"

"One way people can fail to improve themselves is by giving up. The FS Army can circumvent that by making it illegal to desert, while almost all other industries are forbidden to kill people for trying to leave. In addition to the benefits of military training, we will also pay you, and use our political power to make it easier for you to get a civilian job after your discharge. You might die, but a lot of army personnel have non-combat roles even though we make them do basic, and it's not as dangerous as being a lumberjack. Some people find the homosocial environment really suits them and the restrictions on their behavior help them develop personal qualities they value. A lot of soldiers have mental problems instead. There's only one way to be sure which kind of person you'd be! Be all you can be."

"A lot of people are in too much of a hurry in the morning to make a hot breakfast. Cold cereal is fast and simple. Frosted Flakes is cheap and has a lot of sugar on it, so a lot of people like the way it tastes. We put a picture of a tiger on the box even though none of the ingredients appear in a tiger's diet and tigers aren't among the ingredients, because we think children will want to have a picture of a tiger in their home and bother their parents until they get it. Sugar is probably bad for you, but eating breakfast is probably good for you. Frosted Flakes: kids with a taste for sweets often think they're great!"

"My name is Sandra McLean. If you have been injured in a vehicular accident, or in a vehicular intention, you are likely to be legally entitled to compensation. It's annoying to deal with that while convalescing, so if you give me the information I need about the circumstances of the injury, I'll get the money for you and take a percentage of it. My business model doesn't involve charging you directly. I take a bigger percentage than some of my competitors but I'm less likely to be full up on cases at any given time."

"I'm washing my hair with L'Oreal Nutri Gloss Shampoo and the camera is angled so you can almost, but not quite, see my tits, because the director really wanted to look at them himself and thinks many viewers will also be intrigued. Hair is dead, so it can't really be nourished, but some of the same chemicals that nourish living things seem to do nice stuff for hair sometimes so the manufacturers put some in. I don't really understand it because I'm a model, not a chemist. It does smell pretty good, though. And my tits are great."

"This footage is from Six Flags at St. Louis except for the second clip which is from Six Flags Great Adventure. It looks like the people in the footage are having fun. That's what people come to Six Flags to do. If you like fun, you can try this way to have it."

"In addition to furniture, IKEA sells Swedish meatballs, stuffed animals, the same kind of bag you can use in the store but in a different color, housewares, and other random objects! We have the store laid out to make it really difficult to skip any of our displays because that seems to tempt people to buy more, so if you want to come and buy something, you should budget a lot of time. Our furniture is okay and at the low end it's the cheapest on the market for new purchases. All of it has names. This is a stuffed shark that we named BLÅHAJ."

"These sunglasses are FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS. An economist told us there's no objective sense in which anything is worth any specific amount of money, so we can charge FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS for these sunglasses. And because we're putting this commercial on really frequently, anyone who sees you wearing them will know that you had FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS to spend on sunglasses even though cheap ones cost very little. They're distinctively ugly, so no one will mistake them for cheap sunglasses instead of ones that cost FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS."

"Hi, Billy Mays here to demonstrate a knife sharpener. I've practiced with it a lot so I make it look easy. It's called the Samurai Shark because samurai wielded swords and sharks have a lot of teeth, both of which are sharp, and that's the association the producers want to create with their product. There's tungsten-carbide involved in here, and I'm putting a serrated bread knife in here even though normally you don't sharpen serrated knives. It's shaped in a way that lets me use it on scissors but I cut myself once when I was learning how to do that. It's pretty small and portable. You can get one for ten dollars, and if you do it specifically by calling this number in response to this ad, you'll get two for ten dollars, which is twice as many for the same amount of money. If you don't like it you can send it back at your own expense and customer service agents will try to avoid giving you a refund but eventually give you one if you're persistent enough in spite of it only being ten dollars and you needing to cover the cost of shipping. Here are some more things I can sharpen with the Samurai Shark."

"Look at these markers! They can change color! The chemistry is actually really interesting but I'm trying to appeal to kids so I won't get into that right now. The results look so cool because the people we have drawing with the markers for this ad have a lot more practice and talent than the typical elementary schooler, so most customers' art won't look this good even if you don't count the ones who never open the box, but the markers do in fact change color."

"Oxytrol is an incontinence medication! If you need an incontinence medication, you could suggest this one to your doctor; lots of doctors sacrifice depth of knowledge for breadth and won't have a better idea. Being incontinent is pretty embarrassing and taking Oxytrol is less embarrassing than that according to most people we polled."