If I were you, I'd do yourself a favor and shower.

I was reading a blog today and came across a sentence that the author felt ambiguous about (at least, so I infer, based on his writing):

If I were you (don't worry, I'm not), I'd do yourself (myself?) a favor download it

It's clear that the author was joking (based on the first parenthetical), but it doesn't seem entirely infelicitous to use either one.  So I did a little Google research, and searched some strings, the results of which are below:

• 47 hits: "you i'd do myself a favor" or "you i would do myself a favor"
• 24 hits: "you i'd do yourself a favor" or "you i would do yourself a favor"

While it's clear that people prefer "myself" in these situations, it's also clear that it is a grammatical utterance to say something like "If I were you, I'd do yourself a favor..."  But I wonder if there are any meaning differences, or other ways in which the choice of  "myself"/"yourself" affects the structure/binding.

What are your judgments? Do you have any thoughts about the distinction between the sentence with "myself" and the sentence with "yourself"?

california vowels

just saw this on tv. the vowels are so delightfully californian. the "no!" around 1:42 is just priceless.

both easy to share and not easy to share

burger king has a new ad campaign.
     (1)  BK minis are easy to share.  But that doesn't mean they're easy to share.

of course, using at-first-sight-ungrammatical/infelicitous slogans (perhaps to shock you into paying attention?) isn't anything new (campbell's "soup that eats like a meal" comes to mind).  but this seems dangerously close to the kind of ling-101-semantics-lecture level of contradiction that should be impossible for any speaker.

so why isn't it so bad?  it seems to me to be a case of two kinds of implicit arguments. they way i believe we're meant to interpret the slogan as (2), where i've put the interpretation of the implicit argument in square brackets:
     (2)  a. BK minis are easy [one] to share.
           b. But that doesn't mean they're easy [you] to share. 

that is, (2a) is a generic statement about the by-design nature of the product small and sharable -- for anyone.  but (2b) is a specific statement about the actual state of affairs for you, the listener.  the being-advertised-to.

perhaps this distinction between the two implicit arguments in (2a) and (2b) is clearer in a variation of (1), as in (3): 
     (3)   I know BK minis supposed to be easy [one] to share.  But that dosn't mean they were easy [me] to share when I bought them yesterday.

to be clear, the second sentence cannot involve a "I" controlling a PRO (there is no c-command in this case).  it seems that this context just facilitates a generic interpretation in the first sentence, and a specific one in the second.

these implicit arguments would seem to be what are generally put under the umbrella of PROarb.  that is, a PRO-like silent category that can have arbitrary reference.  what i think (1) shows is that PROarb can come in two different flavors: generic or specific.  does that mean that we need two different lexical items, PROarb-gen and PROarb-spec?  or, does semantics/pragmatics distinguish the two in the relevant way so that (1) is not a contradiction?

i don't know much about the PROarb literature.  but this is my i-don't-know-much-about-this-topic-but-i'll-speculate-about-it-anyway answer.  as always: thoughts?