Things that friends don’t let friends do, according to Roger Ebert and other pundits...

A RECENT CONTROVERSIAL VARIATION ON A FAMOUS AD SLOGAN: “Friends don’t let jackasses drink and drive.”        Roger Ebert         American movie critic        This was a Twitter tweet Ebert posted on June 20, 2011 shortly after news stories announced that Ryan Dunn, the star of MTV’s wild Jackass series and movies, had been killed in a late-night, high-speed car crash in Pennsylvania. His tweet was a seemingly snarky variation on the familiar public service ad slogan “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.” Ebert assumed Dunn was drunk, given reports that he’d been drinking at a local bar that night with friends, though toxicology results were not yet available when Ebert wrote the post. Dunn’s friends and fans immediately attacked Ebert online. One responding tweet that grabbed media attention was by Dunn’s Jackass castmate Bam Margera, who said: “About a jackass drunk driving and his is one, f**k you! Millions of people are crying right now, shut your fat f**king mouth!” Two days later, in a blog post on the Chicago Sun-Times site, Ebert (a former alcoholic) apologized, but also stood by the point of his tweet. “I don’t know what happened in this case,” he wrote,”and I was probably too quick to tweet...I do know that nobody has any business driving on a public highway at 110mph, as some estimated – or fast enough, anyway, to leave a highway and fly through 40 yards of trees before crashing. That is especially true if [as reported in some news stories] the driver has had three shots and three beers.” The next day, a toxicology report showed that Dunn had blood-alcohol levels that were more than twice the legal limit.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FAMILIAR AD SLOGAN: “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.”        Ad slogan first used in 1982 by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America        This well-known slogan and the long-running ad campaign featuring it were created in December 1982 as an outgrowth of a presidential Commission on Drunk Driving during Ronald Reagan’s administration. The primary goal was to reduce drunk driving, especially during the Christmas and New Year’s Eve weekends, when drunk driving fatalities are traditionally at their highest. The campaign began with billboards and radio ads sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Outdoor Advertising Association of America and the Licensed Beverage Information Council. During the 1982 holiday season, “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk” ads were shown on 3,000 billboards and used in public service radio spots by 1,200 radio stations nationwide. The campaign was praised by President Reagan in 1983 and continued. In 1990, it was taken over by The Ad Council.

NAOMI JUDD’S FASHION ADVICE FOR WOMEN: “Friends don’t let friends wear ugly shoes.”        Naomi Judd        American country music singer, songwriter and author         A guideline included in her book Naomi’s Guide to Aging Gratefully (2008)

MAC LIFE’S FASHION ADVICE FOR GEEKS: “Friends don’t let friends wear their iPods on their belts.”        Photo caption in Mac Life magazine, August 2008

A FASHION OPTION FOR ZOMBIE MOVIE FANS: “Friends Don’t Let Friends Reanimate.”         Slogan on a t-shirt sold by BuyZombie.com

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