The title has nothing to do with this. Some settling of contents may have occurred during shipment and (thankfully) none of this is sold by weight. I don't remember what I watching on TV last night but when I stopped clicking (something our parents didn't have, the remote; in my house, it would have been flung so hard against the living room walls we'd have a dry wall contractor on a cot in the basement) for a moment (my thumb cramped up), one character on some show was asking another one 'can I give you some advice' so which the latter responded with 'I'd rather get a lap...' And it stuck in my brain. I feel better now.....
Our son, when he was small, would watch television with an intensity I found frightening. Many afternoons, on my way home from work, I'd swing by his Oma and Opa to pick him and Sigrid up and we'd head home together. When we arrived, he'd scurry into the living room, turn the TV on and be surprised (and somewhat disappointed), that the program he'd been watching in Sigrid's parent's living room was over or farther along in the story line than when he'd left their house. He reached a point where he'd demand to know if a show was 'echt oder video?' (real or video), where video was anything not live. I always feared the next question would be about life, because I knew the answer to that one.
I thought about that while watching an infomercial for yet another knife that allows you to cut through chain link fences, hardened locks, cinder blocks, car doors and airplane engines as well as tomatoes and is only available, for a limited time in this special TV offer. You, like me, probably wonder as you watch these ads (there was one on for a new pasta cooker that goes in your microwave and doubles as a Winnebago I think), 'how can they do it at such a low, low price?' And, for only the next fifteen minutes, they're doubling the offer!!! Sell my clothes, I'm going to heaven (alert those Sisters of Perpetual Motion).
Instead of the bailouts and boxcars of money we handed out for the last eighteen months for the too-big-to-fail companies, we should have kept the dollars for ourselves while pledging to buy as much of this 'as seen on TV' crap as we possibly could. Of course, our landfills and incinerators would be choking on it-and, Billy Mays would (in all likelihood still be dead), but imagine ALL the economic development we would have stimulated buying this stuff, especially in the packing and shipping industry (I think that's where the profit really is).
You don't need a juicer? How about a woman's intimate shaver that doubles as a trailer hitch? A steam cleaner that also launches sub-orbital reconnassance drones? Or a fake chamois that could have sopped up the BP oil spill AND cooked a four course meal at the same time? All we would have had to do is pay separate shipping and handling. But wait! For reasons that are never given, if we had called right now, the company would not only make one of those three easy payments of $29.99 for us, they'd have doubled our order!
Okay, we might not have affordable health care, but every household would have not one, but TWO silver bullets, perfect for making whatever the hell it is you grind up in there and gets consumed with obscene gusto on low power vhf stations in the middle of the night, every night somewhere in this great land of ours. And why try to read by the glow of the electric fire when you can put your brain on hold and take a vacation from life's woes and worries without leaving your seat. Mother Superior and her posse are standing by, so have your credit card ready.
-bill kenny
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