"I love advertising because I love lying," a tuxedoed Jerry Seinfeld told a crowd of ad people last week while accepting an Honorary Clio at the 55thAnnual Clio Awards gala in New York City. Known for his observational humor, Seinfeld seemed a little out of character with this sudden turn to truthy sarcasm.

Although I am an Amazon Prime subscriber of long standing, I am spiritually in solidarity with my friends in publishing who boycott the drone-happy company for its brutal, some say monopolistic, business tactics when it comes to selling books. So I justified checking out "Transparent," the new TV series now streaming on Amazon Prime, the way a PETA-person might defend wearing vintage fur, on the theory that those pelts were killed a long time ago.

Allow me to continue to beat an immensely rich, very stubborn -- but nowhere near-dead -- horse. Obviously, the NFL is in deep trouble over its badly bungled handling of the Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson domestic abuse scandals.

Apple gave us some bright shiny objects to focus on during one of the grimmest news days in recent memory, with a ghastly tape of a girlfriend-beating playing on a loop all day, and the prospect of world-ending iTrouble (Iraq, Isis) pushing out local election coverage everywhere.

On the surface, the idea of stealing the naked photos of young female celebrities and releasing them over the Interwebs is so culturally titillating and click-bait-y that the jokes just write themselves. The New York Daily News proclaimed the unveiling of the massive photo hacking scandal as "Bad Nudes for us All!," and called it a "Flesh Mob!"

Labor Day around the Mad Blog office offers some much-needed downtime to sit back, sip lemonade, and reflect on how the Internet has eaten our jobs, taken away our free time, and turned our once-powerful nation into a Task Rabbit economy. (But one with lots of cabs.)

You've no doubt heard about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. With its incredible success and somewhat annoying ubiquity, you'd think it would have kicked the you-know-what by now and been left in the dust by some other, hotter, social media trend. But this ice bucket thing sure has legs.

At one point on "30 Rock," NBC's show about a fake version of the NBC show "Saturday Night Live," Tracy Jordan, the demented comic played by Tracy Morgan, gives Kenneth -- the hyper-dutiful blue-blazered intern -- some advice. "Live every week like it's Shark Week," Jordan tells his mentee, gravely. That's pretty funny advice, and in any context, Shark Week gets a laugh.

As a meta-comment on TV itself, the phrase "jump the shark" is now the age of the average bare-chested contestant on "Survivor." Could it be, therefore, that as an expression, "jump the shark " has perhaps jumped the shark?

"This is the age of taking action," says the announcer in the Viagra commercial I caught on TV this week. And really, is there anything more awkward and poignant, more can't-win-for-losing, than showing these winky male actor-types preparing for a little "action" in a Viagra ad?