If you’ve seen any ads for the German travel agency Trivago, you’ve no doubt taken note of their oddly disheveled spokesperson, known in Internet circles simply as “Trivago Guy.”

While I’m supposed to be listening Trivago Guy’s pitch for finding the best price on a hotel room, I’m instead transfixed by his “sad divorced dad” vibe. I find myself asking questions not about how to find the best fleabag hotel room in Terre Haute, but more important things like, “Where did this guy come from?” “What unspeakable tragedy befell him to make him show up to an ad shoot dressed this way?” But most importantly, “What the hell happened to Trivago Guy’s belt?”

Turns out the answer was there all along, and it can be found in The Sopranos.

In the season one episode “Down Neck,” we find out that Trivago Guy did in fact have a former life and a clean-shaven face. He was once known as Mr. Meskimmin, gym teacher for Verbum Dei Catholic school in New Jersey.

It was Mr. Meskimmin who reported A.J. Soprano and his friends for showing up to gym class loaded on sacramental wine. While A.J. was only briefly suspended for his offense, Meskimmin’s life was effectively over.

Unbeknownst to Meskimmin, the chubby underachiever he reported was the son of DiMeo Family Capo Tony Soprano. In retaliation for getting his son into trouble, Soprano pressed Verbum Dei into firing Meskimmin with no severance benefits.

With no money and no job prospects, Meskimmin’s life collapsed. His wife of many years left him. He was forced to skimp on basic necessities like razor blades, shirt buttons, and belts (although he always found money for booze). He bounced from hotel to hotel, developing a keen sense of the cheapest place to stay in whatever town he happened to drift into.

Eventually, his misfortune became his salvation. Armed with this hard-earned knowledge of finding cheap accommodations, Meskimmin tried to find employment with companies like Expedia, Priceline, and Orbitz — to no avail.

Feeling that his life in America was going nowhere, and facing continual harassment from Soprano and his crew, Meskimmin decided to flee. Without the means to purchase a plane ticket, his desperation led him to stow aboard a Lufthansa flight to Germany — even the knowledge that he could die from sub-freezing temperatures was no deterrent.

Once in Germany, the details of how he ended up in the Düsseldorf offices of Trivago are still unknown. But something about this sad, empty husk of a man with a very particular skill caught the eye of Trivago executives.

The rest is advertising history…

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I don’t often do political humor here, but I’ve been dying for an opportunity to work this guy into a joke for a long time. I’ve been watching these odd Binder & Binder ads and wondering if Charles Binder really wears those stupid hats around the office, or if he just busts them out for commercials. Anyway, binders full of women, lulz.

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I can tell what Tupperware was going for in this ad — which ran in a 1969 issue of Field & Stream by the way — but here we have a demonstration of how a very subtle thing can turn a photo from cheeky to creepy. The wife is supposed to convey a mixture of surprise and mild annoyance. To my eyes she looks like she’s stifling a scream while her husband polishes his rifle and mutters something about making them all pay.

If you ask me, that woman about two seconds from dropping that soda and plate of cheese and running out of that rumpus room as fast as her legs can take her.

(For more Almost Ads, click here.)

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It’s been a long time since I shared some classic postcards from my personal collection with you. Just over three years in fact. That’s going to change, since I scored a pretty sizable haul during my last trip to Cape Cod. Most of them are standard motels and tourist traps. But two stand out, and I present them for your enjoyment today.

Being from New Jersey, my first instinct was to get all indignant at yet another cheap shot at my beloved home state. Then I realized that this is pretty much spot on. By the time the summer ends, my legs look like a relief map of Asia.

You might think that the ice delivery guy is having sex with the other guy’s wife, but you’re wrong. No wait, that’s exactly what he’s doing. I wonder if cuckold humor was a sub-genre of postcards back in the day.

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In its September 29, 1952 issue Life magazine ran a piece on a new fad called “bop jokes,” which sounds absolutely awful. When you think of the popular cultural image of bebop jazz fans of the early ’50s (some of which went on to become the first Beatniks), you imagine someone really hip and into swingin’ tunes, but sort of detached and reserved at the same time. I guess dignity is implicit. But not so much here. From the article, with photography by Yale Joel:

From the world of jazz musicians and bebop players has come a new brand of humor: the bop joke. Until the last few months bop jokes have been limited, perhaps mercifully, to people in show business. But now bop humor is becoming something of a fad, and Life, feeling its readers should be warned of this wayward form of wit, offers a few examples which can be understood by referring to the glossary of bop terms (right). Examples are illustrated by performers from the Broadway show, New Faces.

Here’s that glossary, by the way:

BOP VOCABULARY

CRAZY: new, wonderful, wildly exciting

GONE: the tops — superlative of crazy

COOL: tasty, pretty

GOOF: to blow a wrong note, or to make a mistake

HIPSTER: modern version of hepcat

DIG: to understand, appreciate the subtleties of

STONED: drunk, captivated, ecstatic, sent out of this world

FLIP: to react enthusiastically

It’s not bad enough that Time has taken the route of cheap sensationalism with the photo for their latest cover story — “Are You Mom Enough?” — which depicts a young mother (Jamie Lynne Grumet) breastfeeding her 3-year-old son. Now that they’ve gotten dads in on the picture, it’s just too much to take.

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• Time Magazine Breastfeeding Cover: WTF? (PHOTOS)(blippitt.com)

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• Q&A with Jamie Lynne Grumet(dhamma4mama.com)

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• Breastfeeding mom Time cover wins applause, cringes and shrugs(vancouversun.com)

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Here’s a fresh batch of some quality interweb finds I’ve come across over the last 7 days month or so:

• Awesome internet meme of the day — Retro Spider-Man, bringing that classic ’60s animated version of our favorite webslinger back to life in the internet age (Know Your Meme)
• Yet another way to get the most out of Spotify — a ridiculous collection of shared playlists (ShareMyPlaylists)
• Not even the discovery of a fourth moon around Pluto can get it back in the big kids’ club. (Defective Yeti)
• An extremely detailed and thoroughly riveting account of the operation to kill Osama bin Laden (The New Yorker)
• Productivity + internet = No Productivity (The Daily What)
• 21 Google+ circles you can actually use (HappyPlace)
• A giant list of movie references seen in The Simpsons (Joey deVilla)
• Five tools to download anything from Google Books and save it as a PDF (Binary Head)
• A very cool vintage Space Age album cover from Dave “Baby” Cortez (LP Cover Lover)
• The Tea Party, the debt ceiling, and white Southern extremism (Salon)

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• 10 Internet Memes – And What Bloggers Can Learn From Them (blogworld.com)
• Pandora vs. Spotify (testingtruechange.com)

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Here’s a fresh batch of some quality interweb finds I’ve come across over the last 7 days:

• A rundown of the 15 best Burger King ad campaigns by Crispin Porter + Bogusky: Long live the Burger King! (AdFreak)
• Tommy Shaw sits down for an awesomely candid and funny interview about his career in Styx. Hint — it involves lots of drugs. (The AV Club)
• It came from Reddit — the Good Intentions Axe Murderer / Dating Site Murderer Meme. (Next Round)
• Here’s a less-than-memorable Budweiser slogan from 1922: “Stimulates the Appetite – Assimilates the Food.” (Shorpy)
• You just know this couple owns every Meat Loaf album and knows all the words. (Awkward Family Photos)
• So how does Libya’s air force compare to the coalition’s? (National Post)
• A series of excellent “Historically Hardcore” promotional ads for the Smithsonian (imgur)
• Here’s a very cool set of artsy fartsy photos depicting old TVs shutting off, for those who remember what that means. (Make)
• Twitter madness of the week — a bitter American named Peter Coffin stalks a vain Singaporean woman named Wendy Cheng. She does a little digging and finds out he has, among other things, a fake girlfriend that he has conversations with. (Xiaxue)
• The video meme that won’t die — another Hitler rant, this time against the commercialization of SXSW. (YouTube)

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• Burger King and Crispin Split After Seven-Year Run (adage.com)
• Alex Bogusky Reacts to the Burger King Loss (thedenveregotist.com)

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Here’s a fresh batch of some quality interweb finds I’ve come across over the last 7 days:

• Dana Carvey + Linkin Park = Satan shooting explosive diarrhea in your face! (You Just Made My List!)
• A look at the worst men in sports.  No Al Davis, strangely enough.  (Deadspin)
• Even if you don’t know what https is, change this Facebook setting now. (Gawker)
• “The arrow of time”, a year-by-year history of the unhappiest family ever.  (Zone Zero)
• Remember zany, watermelon-smashing comic Gallagher?  Now he’s paranoid, bitter, homophobic, right-wing nutjob, watermelon-smashing ranter Gallagher. (The Stranger)
• This is where TLC is heading, and you know it. (Urlesque)
• A graphic overview tracing the evolution of the Hipster (Gawker)
• Matthew Baldwin (Defective Yeti) is rating all the items in his office’s vending machine. (Vending Spree)
• Want to see a 100-year-old death threat mailed to a pitcher? (Bugs and Cranks)
• And now you know why IT support jobs get outsourced. (Passive-Aggressive Notes)
• Very cool one-man band cover of the Ren & Stimpy theme song (Laughing Squid)
• The greatest wedding invitation in the history of ever. (Brent Engstrom’s Blog)

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