This has nothing to do with autonomous language learning, but I wanted to blog it anyway.
I’m listening to Yahoo! Music. Every few minutes there’s a break for an ad. It’s always the same ad – for BT mobile phone rates – and while the ads are slightly different from each other, they are all cut from the same cloth: two or three young people are talking about absent “friends”. One ad is a dialogue between two boys, one of whom tells the other he just saw his (the other’s) girl-friend down the pub; she was with… someone else. “She’s not worth it. Plenty of fish in the sea…” he advises as his friend rages. Another is between two girls talking about a third who was sluttily dressed and yet who had the audacity to criticize one of them for being ugly. Little did she know that one of the two “friends” is going out with her boyfriend…

A few words are blanked out in all the dialogues, leaving the imagination to fill in, e.g. “she was wearing a (beep) that barely covered her (beep)”.

Then the voice-over comes on saying “make sure you know what your mates are saying. BT blah-blah-blah”.

Nice, eh? Who wants “mates” like these?
These ads so spoil my listening pleasure, I switch off immediately when they come on.