There's a new TV spot for TurboTax and it is very, very interesting. Not because it's a tax-prep ad. What caught my attention about the ad was the story Wieden+Kennedy contrived to pound home the self-reliance message. The video opens tight on a baby girl, about 6 months old. Her face is covered in what looks like strained carrots and green beans. Then comes the voiceover.

Once again, those haughty French are mocking us. To fund its anti-imperial campaign of terror, the French government is greedily eyeing the coffers of our very own Google, our Netflix -- merciful heavens -- our Apple. Yes -- your iPhone will be more expensive so the world can have the next Marcel Proust, as if the world weren't already overstocked. That is war -- a French government-hatched insurgency against the American Cultural Empire.

Last night, my 12-year-old cried herself to sleep, heartbroken and inconsolable. Nobody had died. Her parents hadn't battled in a drunken rage. She hasn't been reading "Little Women." And there was no seventh-grade romantic melodrama afoot. It was just a case of lost innocence, more or less my fault. I don't know what came over me. She's still a little girl, yet I had told her something no child should have to reckon with: "Literally" is now deemed an acceptable synonym for "figuratively."

When it comes to digital mayhem, no medium has been more disintermediated than independent film. Twenty years ago, with the likes of Sundance and Miramax building both distribution channels and demand, indies briefly enjoyed something akin to an orderly marketplace. Now it is utter and nearly irretrievable chaos. I's kind of like an auto race. To prevent a mass pile-up, obviously, first everybody needs to be headed in the same direction.