Imagine you're a teenage boy whose parents are helping you move into your freshman dorm. Ooh, the excitement of starting college! You and Dad are hauling some cartons in, when suddenly you stumble across Mom having some kind of orgasmic têtê-à-têtê with your dorky new roommate. Ewww!

That's what Halls is serving up in a bizarre ad for its new product Halls Refresh, giving new meaning to the concept of "hard candy."

The roommate offers Mom a Halls Refresh and takes one himself. They suck their candies with exaggerated lip-smacking movements while they lock eyes and go into a mutual, implied reverie. They look like they've been to an opium den, not the candy counter.

That's when the son and his dad show up and respond with predictable outrage and disbelief.

With just a few weeks until the turkey hits the table, more ads are leaking out for Black Friday, including rumored deals from Old Navy and Lowes. In addition to Black Friday-only deals, Old Navy is celebrating with "Gobble Palooza" with deals starting on Thanksgiving Day at noon and continuing on Friday, when they open at 3:00 a.m.!

In June 2001 Apple introduced the world to iTunes, a music marketplace that largely changed the way we buy music. And now, almost a decade later rumor has it that Apple wants to revolutionize the way we get our television delivered by offering all you can watch TV for $30.

Before Apple can offer consumers the opportunity to ditch their cable subscriptions for an all-you-can-watch plan it has to convince the television networks that it's a good idea, just like it did with the music labels.

Given the numerous side projects of networks, like CBS' TV.com, and the attempts by cable companies to restrict online streaming to customers, Apple faces a big hurdle before it can offer a $30 unlimited TV package.

Chris Farley's brother Tom has weighed in on the controversial TV ad that uses Chris to help sell subscriptions to DirecTV. "Bottom line," Tom writes in response to my original Ad Rant post on the topic, is the line Spade says when he turns to the camera at the end: "It never gets old."

"Because I miss my brother so much, seeing him in a new creative light and hearing that great, taunting laugh of his once more -- it certainly doesn't ever get old. At least to me," writes Thomas Farley Jr., who is managing director and president of the non-profit Chris Farley Foundation.

Tom Farley confirmed via e-mail that the post comment #1048 was from him, and sent along contact information for the foundation as well for purposes of double-checking.

The pistachio industry wants to get nut lovers' minds off salmonella and onto sex.

Pistachios took a big publicity hit last year when 2 million pounds of the greenish nut had to be recalled due to salmonella contamination.

Now, as USA Today reports, the industry is striking back with a grabby campaign that casts the pistachio alongside winking innuendos ("Mobsters do it with muscle") and C-list celebrities like Adrienne Curry, Chris Knight and the curiously ubiquitous Levi Johnston. (One slightly creepy short stars the five-year-old Denny quintuplets hopping around on bouncy balls as the voice over proclaims that "Quintuplets do it with balance." See the behind the scenes video at the end of the story)

For the 14.5 million unemployed people with more time on their hands during the recession, watching Internet ads and answering online questionnaires may seem like a big waste of time. After all, there are job applications to fill out and jobs to find.

But spending about five minutes a day looking at ads can lead to a free flight by accumulating frequent flier miles through e-Miles, a Web site that gives hotel or airline loyalty points for watching TV ads and answering short surveys.

"There's some people who have more time than they did before to do this," e-Miles chairman and CEO Hal Brierley said of the effect of the recession on his company.

Most of us are aware of the dangers associated with posting lewd and inappropriate pictures to Facebook. But what about the many family friendly photos you upload to your profile? Thanks to a relatively new Facebook decision, not even your well-thought-out profile pictures are safe. Cheryl Smith, a consultant who blogs at Culture Smith Consulting, raised the alarm today after her husband was served up an ad for "Hot Singles" complete with her picture!

Over the weekend I read a great post on BillShrink.com about 16 depression era money saving tips that you can start doing to better prepare yourself for the realities of our current economic situation.

BillShrink does a great job finding the characteristics and behaviors that got our grandparents through the Great Depression and making them applicable to our lives in 2009. Arguably we should have been following these words of wisdom for the past few decades, but there's no time like the present to start.

The top four tips include:

Over the past year the economic downturn has created plenty of hardships for our schools. With increased costs, reduced funding from the government and a lack of public support for levies; schools are working to find new ways to meet budgets without sacrificing their quality of education.

So far we've already seen teachers forced to sell ad space on tests to make up for a lack of school supplies, school districts cut the number of standardized tests they give and others cranked down the thermostats last fall. Some school systems have even gone as far as cutting off kids with overdue lunch balances and asking parents to pitch in with cash to meet needs.

The Dow isn't the only thing shrinking as fast as your net worth; magazines have also been slimming down in recent months. Even Blender, which had always ran a song quote on its spine has given it up as it moves to fewer pages and a smaller binding. Blender isn't alone with the overall number of ad pages shrinking by 17% compared to the 4th quarter of 2007! Even with magazine content remaining constant, with ad pages drops this high it's no wonder the page counts are shrinking.

Last week, I went to an event here in Portland where Wieden+Kennedy (famous for coming up with Nike's "Just Do It" campaign) former creative director Jelly Helm was speaking about marketing and conversation. He declared that advertising was dead. No one, he said, looked at advertising any more and said, "I want to buy that!"

I didn't have a chance to shout out from the audience "huh?" He obviously hasn't been in a living room with my children. He hasn't watched TV while a perfectly noxious-sounding ad comes on -- the one parents tune out -- and my boys, all the way from the 17-month-old to the six-year-old, start jumping up and down with excitement over Horton Hears a Who or that game where hippopotamuses eat marbles. He hasn't seen them seated rapturously on the floor with a Target or WalMart circular, playing "I want that!" and fighting over who, exactly, gets to want the Spiderman/Power Rangers/Pokemon what-have-you.

And he would be shocked, and I am not proud of this but I have been known to lose my self-control when faced with the increasingly-frantic "can I have this PLEASE!?!" for the end-of-the-aisle displays in the grocery store, or the seasonal aisle in the drug store.

I finally found a solution that is both passive-aggressive and elegant in its simplicity. It works, and it saves me tons of money and (if one is possessed with far more will-power than me, you might be saving money but are losing this) sanity.

After a month filled with more financial turmoil than most of us can stomach, there is good news at the end of the tunnel: The first batch of Black Friday ads have begun to surface. In spite of -- and likely because of --the dour retail predictions extending through the third quarter of next year, retailers are cutting prices to coax consumers into their stores. Remember, you can keep track on our running scorecard of Black Friday deals and discounts.

Let's jump right into the leaked ads!

Sears

Sears is the first department store to have a leaked ad this year but the prices for HDTVs and GPS units are much higher than we expected. Thankfully I don't see Sears setting the bar for HDTV prices this season. Dan de Grandpre from Dealnews.com also weighed in on the rumored sales prices for us, stating, "Sears, which is struggling, has been irrelevant to most tech buyers since the 1980s. In fact, many of its purported Black Friday TV "deals" are the same as or higher than prices you'd find on a comparison engine like PriceGrabber."

That said, don't count Sears out of your Black Friday plans completely; Dan recommends Sears for shoppers interested in Kenmore home appliances and Craftsman tools. The leaked ad has great deals on a kitchenware set, several craftsman tools as well as incredible discounts on Kenmore washers and dryers; in fact too many to list here, so go look for yourself!

The Sears ad comes on the heels of Ace Hardware's leaked ad which has been pulled until a final version is released. It appears Sears may be going the same route. According to Dan, Sears is already working on pulling this ad from many sites as they say it doesn't represent their Black Friday offerings. This is one of the reasons why Dealnews.com doesn't post leaked ads. Let's hope Sears takes this ad back to the drawing board and starts cutting prices across the board.

What other stores have been leaked?