Think with your dipstick

For people outside America (and especially those in Scotland), I would like to draw attention to this Castrol advert. America is usually a lot more sensitive about making fun of other cultures than the British, but the Scottish seem to be acceptable targets because the only funny colour we are is ginger.

You have to wonder how this came into being - perhaps somewhere in Castrol Towers, there was a slow meeting where the advertising committee were brainstorming how best to draw attention to the improved wear protection on their new engine oil, and a nervous executive woke up, peeled his face off his notepad and described a nightmare he'd had about a manic Scotsman belting people with a dipstick. And instead of "What? Get out", after some thought, the response from across the table was "Yes, let's do that."

I watched it multiple times in a sort of mixture of confusion and horror before it suddenly became strangely hilarious - these days I can only cynically think that they were going straight for Internet meme territory, but if this had been on twenty years ago we'd all remember it. It's like a modern-day Wine Gums advert.