I've been watching the second season of Mad Men on AMC, and am enjoying it as much as I did the first season. For those who don't know, Mad Men is about advertising executives on Madison Avenue in the early 1960's, and their spouses, secretaries, mistresses, children, and so forth. It is beautifully shot and costumed, and the acting is superb. There was a scene towards the end of the most recent episode where the entire staff of Sterling & Cooper, the advertising firm in question, are standing in a meeting room together to greet their potential clients from American Airlines, their best efficient customer service business faces on. It was a surreal but beautiful moment to me for some reason. It's like this was the way they wanted to present themselves to the world, and the look embodied their hopes and self-confidence, when every one of the characters is really quite a mess.

On a strange coincidence, I just ran across some old Jim Henson footage on YouTube which I'd never seen before. Henson, Frank Oz, and the other Muppet creators were apparently really big in the advertising world in the mid-1960s, not too long after where the timeline currently is in Mad Men. In particular, I found the La Choy Dragon commercials amusing. I can imagine the characters from Mad Men sitting in a screening room and chuckling at the adult humor in this sales pitch: