Fandango's claiming that they spent a lot of money upgrading the Lowes theater chain so that it could handle new media ticket sales. And now it says that AOL has swooped in and gotten Lowes to back out of the agreement and sign an exclusive deal with AOL Moviefone.

Much worse are those ads for MovieTickets.com. I can't believe theaters show them before movies because they make the movie theaters look bad.

Other recent dumb ads: There's a commercial for contact lense solution that is supposed to do all the work. Never having had contacts, I'm not sure what's involved, I guess you clean them or something. This solution claims to do all the work automatically so all you do is drop them in the solution and voila. Well anyhow, it shows the little lenses going through car wash scrubbers while the song "Car wash" plays. The contact wearer grabs the case, opens it up and peers inside to see the contact just sitting there. She sets it down, walks away and the music starts back up and the case vibrates. Well, how could she see anything, at least with any detail? Her contacts are in the case and she doesn't have a pair of glasses on. See it here.

And Accuvue has this one with a kid bungee jumping while wearing contacts. Question... would that dry them out? Or is that the point? They're designed not to dry out while bungee jumping? In any case, the effect is so poorly done that it's just sad. It doesn't even look like she's bungee jumping. It's so obvious that she's just hanging upside down in front of a blue screen. I'm disappointed at how bad it looks. See it here.

For the second month in the past two years, less than 1,000 dot-commers were fired. That's because there's less than 1,000 people left with jobs. You've fired all the rest of us.

This is cool... maybe? A place to watch TV commercials online... and send feedback. www.ads.com. It would be a lot cooler if we could read other people's feedback.

The L.A. Times reports that Riordan, starting his own newspaper, says The L.A. Times is a monopoly. Irony or a lack of the alledged bias?