How about … a buzzing cell phone?

According to neuromarketing research expert Martin Lindstrom, we love the soft hum of a silenced cell phone—or, at the very least, we can't ignore it. And that means Madison Avenue won't be ignoring it for long, either.

According to a story on Time.com, about 83% of all advertisements focus, primarily, on visuals to entice us to buy something or go somewhere. Oh, sure, we hear waves crash and seabirds call in certain beer commercials, or the sound of a sizzling steak for a restaurant chain or two. But really, when was the last time you heard sound used as a top-notch subliminal selling point for, say, window cleaner?

But the sounds we hear can be just as influential, if not more so, than the things we see. And there are certain sounds we're programmed, one way or another, to respond to.

The sound of laughing babies blew the doors off every other auditory cue in Lindstrom's arsenal: We listen to a baby laugh, and we can't help but pay attention. And that makes sense on a whole host of levels

The buzzing cell phone, next on Lindstrom's list, was far more intriguing. While I think we're probably genetically programmed to pay attention to whatever sounds babies make (we, after all, have to take care of them, so it'd make just good biological sense that the sounds they make would trigger certain reactions in us), the cell phone couldn't be a pre-programmed relic from earlier times. This is new neural wiring for us: The sound, to our modern ears, may signal connectivity and community. We hear the phone and we think, "Ah, someone wants to talk with me! And I might even want to talk with them, too!" Lindstrom's theory is that our auditory programming is now so tuned in to the phone buzz that, should we hear it during a fast-food ad, we'll be more likely to crave a double cheeseburger.

In fact, a double cheeseburger sounds good right about now. But I digress.

Lindstrom found the third most impossible-to-ignore sound was the fluttery shoosh of an ATM machine doling out cash—which perhaps says something about the premium we place on money. Fourth was the sound of a steak sizzling on a grill. No word as to whether vegans found the sizzle equally enticing.

With Madison Avenue always looking for new ways to sell us things we don't really need, we can expect to hear lots more of these sounds in our future. Lindstrom, frankly, seems a bit surprised that advertisers have largely downplayed our eardrums thus far.

To that, I have two words of explanation for Mr. Lindstrom: mute button.

"I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems," John told interviewer Dotson Rader. "On the cross, he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don't know what makes people so cruel. Try being a gay woman in the Middle East—you're as good as dead."

Jesus, gay? Pretty shocking, right? But here's what's interesting about this quote. It wasn't that long ago—maybe 10 years or so—that such speculation about Jesus' sexual identity would have seemed even more scandalous and provocative. But when Plugged In's staff talked about Elton John's perspective on Jesus, it didn't seem culturally scandalous so much as it seemed like another example of a celebrity remaking Jesus in his own image.

Celebrities (and many others) have a narcissistic penchant for latching on to some aspect of Jesus' teaching or identity and reshaping it to fit their own perspective on the world—never mind if their assertions are counter what we see in Scripture. It's a common enough phenomena, in fact, that the Washington Post's "Under God" blog recently ran a poll featuring nine such comments about Jesus from people such as Jane Fonda, Madonna, Marilyn Manson, Elvis, John Lennon, Heidi Montag, Bob Hope and Archie Bunker.

The more our Plugged In staff talked about John's quote, the more we felt that the real story here is not so much his comments about Jesus' sexual preference—unscriptural and unsupportable as they are. No, the real story is that in our postmodern, spiritually syncretistic culture, celebrities' outlandish statements about Jesus are so common they hardly seem newsworthy at all.

That said, opinions like Elton John's do matter in a culture that invests celebrity with so much authority. But we would do well to remember that those opinions generally say more about the person voicing them—in this case, a high-profile singer who's been out of the closet a long time—than they do about who Jesus actually is.

As stormy and dark as

This was the biggest opening weekend ever for both director Martin Scorsese and his star Leonardo DiCaprio. Scorsese's previous big dog was the Academy Award-winning crime drama The Departed, with $26.9 million on its opening weekend. And DiCaprio's best opening take before this, including Titanic, was $30.1 million for 2002's Catch Me if You Can.

Now, as the Plugged In reviewer, I've got to say that this is one of those flicks that has its appeal. Being an Alfred Hitchcock fan, I can't help but see stylistic fingerprints of the old master all over this well-crafted psychological twister. It's just unfortunate that Scorsese couldn't have taken some other cues from some Hitchcock classics and restrained from the bloody, foul-mouthed slurry he ended up shellacking this chunk of celluloid with.

Call me old fashioned, but I'd rather see heroes scaling precariously on the faces of Mount Rushmore any day.

Facebook. Free speech. High school.

Mix them together and what do you get? A volatile combination. Just ask Katie Evans.

In 2007, then 17-year-old Evans set up a Facebook page to complain about an instructor she dubbed "the worst teacher I've ever met." Her principal at Pembroke Pines Charter Schools in Florida wasn't amused. Not even a little bit. He suspended Evans for three days and had her removed from Advanced Placement classes.

Evans later sued, arguing that the discipline she received could have impaired her academically and in her career. Her lawsuit stated that the punishment she received was unwarranted.

Two years later, Judge Barry Garber has ruled in Evans' favor.

"Evans' speech falls under the wide umbrella of protected speech," Garber said in his ruling. "It was an opinion of a student about a teacher that was published off-campus, did not cause any disruption on campus and was not lewd, vulgar, threatening or advocating illegal or dangerous behavior."

It's unclear how Evans will profit from all this: She graduated, after all, so it's unlikely she'd want to re-enroll in her AP courses. But some experts believe the case could set an important legal precedent.

Sam Terilli, a media law and ethics professor at the University of Miami, said this case could impact how aggressively school administrators seek to discipline students in similar situations elsewhere. "I think there has been too great a tendency in recent years for public school officials to sort of reach beyond the classroom, reach beyond the school campus very often to try to regulate or punish free speech by students in the name of protecting order,'' Terilli told The Miami Herald.

He added, however, that any hint of violence in an online post has to be taken very seriously. "While we can all understand that, post-Columbine, there are limits. If a student is using [Facebook] or any other medium to threaten or even imply threats of violence, that's a different matter.''

As it was, The Wolfman turned out to be a pretty icky mess—which, for me, was disappointing. I've always had an appreciation for old-school movie monsters: You know, Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the original 1941 Wolf Man. Granted, these classic Universal uglies were always primarily designed to scare the shoelaces off moviegoers, but they had a couple of interesting points going for them, I think.

For one, their power to scare was rooted in a pretty traditional moral framework. The Wolf Man is a great example: The werewolf in some ways resembles, as I said in my review, the beast lurking inside us all—our rage and lust and more animalistic instincts that we manage to keep kenneled most of the time. For Christians, these werewolves might serve as metaphors for our hardcore fallen natures—what humanity would look like without the saving grace of God.

Also, old-school horror flicks were almost devoid of gore. Sure, we understood the 1941 Wolf Man was probably eating people left and right, too, but did we actually see it? No. These movies, if made frame-for-frame today, would've garnered a PG rating, if that—perhaps downgraded from a G for "menace and excessive facial hair."

The new Wolfman, to its credit, carries forward some of the old Wolf Man's philosophical underpinnings, for what they're worth. But it ramps up the gore something terrible and thus becomes something monstrous itself. And frankly, it's not like the film demanded all that extra blood: The Wolfman felt like a film that really wanted to be a gothic, PG-13 creepfest—but someone had other ideas and turned it into Saw with whiskers.

The result was, as I said, pretty disappointing—and pretty confusing, really. I mean, if your presumed core audience consists of teens looking for a little scare, why ratchet up the blood and potentially keep some of them out? Lots of studies have shown that PG-13 flicks are far more profitable than R-rated films. It just doesn't make sense—like hiring Hugh Grant to star in the next Rambo movie.

Of course, if you're a guy making the choice, you also want a movie with a little something extra that will keep you from nodding off and ultimately receiving a well-placed elbow in the rib cage. (Not to mention … the look!) So what's out there?

I personally love North by Northwest. Sure, it's more "romantic adventure" than "romantic comedy," but Cary Grant is top notch. And he always packs plenty of wit in amongst the suave charm. Speaking of Cary, An Affair to Remember is a universal favorite. A little slow at the top, but the big finale is one of the best acted and directed romantic moments to ever hit the screen.

OK, how about some other classics you might not have considered: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur are both funny and wonderful. Ditto Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck in Meet John Doe. And lest you think I've been bribed by the Frank Capra estate, Casablanca is perhaps the best unrequited love tale out there. (And for you guys, Humphrey Bogart is gritty and Ingrid Bergman is stunningly beautiful.)

So, there are a few of my suggestions. Anybody else have a favorite pic to offer for the romantically needy among us?

If you've never heard of Auto-Tune, well, that's just fine with the music industry. They'd prefer it that way. You see, without altering a vocal performance in any other discernable fashion, Auto-Tune (the creation of Antares Audio Technologies) manages to correct intonation problems, giving a singer perfect pitch. Tired voice? Feeling sick? Mediocre talent? No problem. Now those vocal flaws can be smoothed out in real time with no one being the wiser.

"It usually ends up just like plastic surgery," a Grammy-winning recording engineer told Time. "You haul out Auto-Tune to make one thing better, but then it's very hard to resist the temptation to spruce up the whole vocal, give everything a little nip-tuck. … Every singer now presumes that you'll just run their voice through the box."

Of course, we're all aware that tinkering goes on when an artist lays down less-than-perfect vocal tracks for an upcoming CD. In such cases, the producer, label and singer operate with an understanding befitting the Las Vegas chamber of commerce: What happens in the recording studio stays in the recording studio. And fans tend to accept that, eager to own the most polished product possible. But what about live performances?

Last week at the Grammys, Black Eyed Peas, Jamie Foxx and Lil Wayne all reportedly relied on Auto-Tune onstage. Foxx even felt the need to apologize for it. Some use the device overtly, for the funky, machine-like quality it can lend to their voices. But for others, this controversial technology is becoming to the music biz what steroids and HGH are to major league baseball: a shortcut to excellence. So far there's been no word on whether Jose Canseco will be naming names in an Auto-Tune tell-all book.

This practice isn't without its casualties. These days, when someone sings live and is a little out of tune (like Taylor Swift crooning one of her hits during a Grammy duet with Stevie Nicks), people cringe even more than they might have years ago. Why? Because so much music is doctored these days that audiences' expectations have changed.

We've become a perfectionist society, even if the perfection we crave isn't quite real. Beautiful women are surgically enhanced, then Photoshopped before being allowed on a magazine cover. Athletes get their muscles from a lab to compete at a certain level or produce the gaudy statistics demanded of them. And now singers are taking a shortcut that, while not as egregious as Milli Vanilli-style lip-synching, compromises authenticity in the interest of impeccable quality. Where does it all end?

When I was talking about Auto-Tune with a colleague of mine, he suggested the device might be more akin to spell-checking than steroids. Many of us use a variety of artificial means—be it our morning caffeine fix to our smart phones—to improve our career performance.

I'm not convinced. I think using Auto-Tune is, quite simply, cheating. It occurs any time a modern innovation is covertly used to cut corners and enhance performance. So why should we be shocked when students confuse the downloading of a term paper from the Internet with "research"? I don't support plagiarism. But is it really that much different? And at what point is it better for us, as a culture, to keep it real even if it's not perfect?

It was a clean hit—no flags were thrown, no fines were levied. And it was, I must admit, a clever turn for what at first appeared to be a slick-but-standard advertising spot. The Super Bowl was full of ads featuring screaming chickens and talking babies and underwear-clad men, but only one featured a son taking down his mom (in an extremely respectful and affectionate way, of course).

The Tebow/Focus on the Family spot proved to be controversially uncontroversial. On the way in to work today, I heard one media watcher criticize the ad because he didn't know what it was even about: The pro-life ad was about as polarizing as a room full of puppies.

For myself, I really liked it: It was light, professional and sincere—and it played even better than I hoped it would, quite frankly.

But then that's what you'd expect me to say, wouldn't you? After all, Focus on the Family is, literally, paying me to write this blog. While we here at Plugged In are all about dispensing fair critiques, perhaps my opinion is not completely reliable when it comes to our material.

So … what did you think? Did the Focus/Tebow spot score? Or fumble?

And while you're at it, tell me what you thought of the other Super Bowl ads, too. What was your favorite? Did anything shock and appall you? I personally didn't think the ads were quite as funny as they had been in years' past, but some were pretty effective. This morning I have a sudden urge to eat at Denny's and wander down to the vending machine for a Snickers.

As some of you may have heard, Focus on the Family (Plugged In's parent organization) will be airing a commercial during the Big Game this weekend. The ad—featuring former Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and his mom—has become a pretty big deal around here—so much so that execs have taken to wearing shoulder pads and doing chest bumps in the hall. Morning devotionals are sounding more and more like play calls ("Isaiah 26:12 … hike!"). And I'm expecting Dippin' Dots vendors to show up sometime today.

But if the Super Bowl ad has triggered a certain eccentricity on the Focus campus, it's made some folks positively apoplectic outside it.

I've not seen the ad. My boss has not seen the ad. My boss's boss has not seen the ad. Very few of us inside the building have seen it, much less outside our pleasant, cubicle-lined confines. Nevertheless, several groups have asked CBS to yank the thing.

"By offering one of the most coveted advertising spots of the year to an anti-equality, anti-choice, homophobic organization, CBS is aligning itself with a political stance that will damage its reputation, alienate viewers, and discourage consumers from supporting its shows and advertisers," read, in part, a letter to the network signed by a number of women's groups.

Sports columnist Gregg Doyel, who writes for cbssports.com, took a different tack: "If you're a sports fan, and I am, that's the holiest day of the year. It's not a day to discuss abortion."

The ironies, of course, abound. I mean, we're talking about a sporting event that features advertisements devoted to beer, scantily clad women and folks getting thwacked in the crotch.

"Objectionable, after all, is in the eye of the beholder," wrote James Poniewozik, television columnist for Time magazine. "It seems ridiculous to start saying that espousing religion … is objectionable in an ad environment of alcohol-pushing animals, slapstick violence and Danica Patrick's cleavage."

For a while, news-related searches for Focus' ad dominated Google. And maybe that's not too surprising since our media culture loves a good row. But my guess is that when folks actually see the ad their reaction will be along the lines of, "Wow. And groups were up in arms over this? An ad celebrating families?"

When I was a religion reporter at a Colorado newspaper, I covered Focus on the Family quite a bit. And I learned pretty quickly that some people love the organization and some people—well, don't.

Now, frankly, I can understand why some folks might disagree with elements of what Focus does: We don't shy away from wading through controversial waters when conviction calls and Scripture specifies. That's part of what the leaders here feel called to do. But back in the day, one of my sources told me something that feels pretty appropriate right about now:

"Focus is about as controversial as flossing your teeth."

And really, when it comes right down to it, that's how Focus perceives itself: a dispensary of oral hygiene tools—which might hurt a little at the time, but are designed to help and heal, not harm.

Now, you may not have heard of either of these two people. Or, if you have, you may be at a loss as to how they fit together. But bear with me for a few moments and I'll elucidate.

Let's start with Frank, the last living veteran of World War I. This aged "doughboy" just turned 109. As a soldier in the U.S. Army, Buckles was an ambulance driver for American forces in Europe, and he once met commanding Gen. John Pershing. The seasoned gent offered some thoughts on how he has managed to reach his second century: "The important thing is the desire to live, and a purpose for living," he told CNN.

Ke$ha, on the other hand, is all of 22. She's the latest party-till-you-drop chanteuse who made it big not too long after dropping out of high school. Of course, her life experience has taught her a thing or two. She's feeling a little sheepish about bumping Susan. "I feel like a jerk," Ke$ha admitted to the New York Post. "They act like I beat her up. She's sweet. I'd kiss her. Hasn't she never kissed anybody before?"

When asked about his long life, Frank told the Knoxville News that, "Longevity has never bothered me at all, I have studied longevity for years."

When Rolling Stone asked about her life, Ke$ha said, "Society has taught us to suppress certain things, but if I want to do something, I let the animal inside take over, no matter how uninhibited or irreverent it is. Who cares? Crazy people are what keeps life interesting."

"If your country needs you, you should be right there," Frank told the News about service and patriotism. "That is the way I felt when I was young, and that's the way I feel today."

"I think people can stand to take themselves just a little less seriously," Ke$ha said to Billboard magazine about her own battles. "I'm fighting the war against pretension."

"I had many different assignments and I was doing things that I thought were important … no, I didn't either: I didn't think they were important. But I found out afterwards when I read up on my history that some of the things that I did were quite important," Frank told Tampa Bay Online.

"If you come to a live show, it's a sensory assault. You will leave covered in sweat, beer, glitter, and, just maybe, you'll get a special edition Ke$ha condom. If it breaks, you have to name your daughter or son after me," Ke$ha recently told Billboard.

Anyway, I just thought you might like to hear from two people in today's cultural news—two distinct voices that ought to be heard, for one reason or another.

Oh, and Frank told The New York Times one other thing about the secret to a long life: "When you start to die … don't."

Just "don't." Well, Mr. Buckles, it seems to me that in a number of life's situations, your admonition is pretty wise. I wonder what Ke$ha would say?