Saturday, March 26, 2005

We pause now for a word from our obfuscators

When I was in Germany, I saw an ad on TV for deodorant that featured wimmins’ bare-naked underarms alongside their bare-naked breasts as they bounced along the beach. Thirty years later, I still remember that ad better than I do the Oscar Mayer Weiner song. I can’t remember the actual brand name of the product but that is likely because they made the mistake of speaking it in German. “Rollenunterstenckremovenprodike” maybe?

Imagine the stink if that commercial would ever run in a more enlightened society today; say during a Super Bowl half-time show. Think of the harm that would cause to the children. The little freaks might grow up to be like me. Or like Germans.

Here in the good old USofA, the kiddies play with model racing cars splattered with the trademarks of products designed to help adult men accomplish something as basic as sport wood. I guess that is okay because the commercials for these products lead you to think they are designed to help you accomplish more innocent tasks like throw footballs through tire swings or bathe outdoors.

I can get innuendo but I hate having to when I’m being sold. Show me the product, tell me what it is for, show me some tits, and get back to the game. If you can’t do that, then I’ll just go on about sporting wood the old-fashioned way, thank you very little.

I’m just saying that if advertisers showed me some bare-naked underarms bouncing across the beach, I might make a more positive association with the product. Hell, they might even convince me to start using deodorant.

But American prudishness won’t allow that. This results in commercials for products to help women when they don’t feel so fresh “down there”. Down where? Georgia? And don’t get me started on “Natural Male Enhancement” (or, NME).

Too late.

What the hell is NME anyway? I tried to connect those dots but the picture never developed. I think I’m grateful for that so please don’t answer my question. I’m afraid the answer might be related to the cult of “Bob – The Sub-Genius”. That scary shit has been around since the Reagan administration. You don’t believe me? Then go see “Bob” at http://www.subgenius.com/.

My already male-enhanced brain immediately suggests that these products are meant to make a specific male-specific organ bigger. I don’t think Sybil (my wives) would be in favor of any further development in that department. She has enough in her life to put up with, what with being married to me, to have to deal with even more of me in any department. I could be wrong. And I usually am when it comes to figuring out what my wives is thinking.

My male-enhanced mind wonders further that NME might refer to increasing the duration of mating. I can’t speak for Syb, but I sure don't want to miss the second half kick-off. Maybe that is why these kinds of TV ads are shown so much during the Super Bowl. That half time show is long enough for a two-fer as it is.

Or maybe these NME products are being produced by less than male-enhanced minds. Maybe their idea of "enhancement" is to make males appreciate shopping for the sake of shopping, or get into those TV shows where people go and redecorate each other's living rooms to look like whore-house parlors. If that is the case then I’d rather have an extra measles shot, extra-mercury.

There are endless screeds and jokes made about TV commercials that don’t even give you a clue as to what they are advertising in the first place. I just figured those came about because some Darren Stevens character somewhere missed a deadline due to witchcraft-related shenanigans and had to pull this theory out of his ass at the last minute: “Since we can’t find any reason why anyone would want to buy your product, let’s not tell them what it is.”

Poor Larry Tate and some client product representative probably then rubbed their chins and thought that this was a brilliant idea. No doubt due to some nose-twitching on Samantha’s part.

I guess it must have worked or else this unfortunate side effect of Samantha’s coke problem would have died at the first launch. Instead this practice has thrived and mutated into the “personal hygiene” and “NME” ads, where obfuscation is used to peddle products that can’t be discussed openly unless you live in a free country, like Europe.

I imagine that European “football” games (or “matches”) would be filled with ads for “Der Bonnen Pillen” and feature all kinds of nekkid women. But no. They don’t even show commercials during their sports broadcasts. This is too bad because their football matches are dreadfully dull. You might as well be banging the Mrs. the whole match through for lack of any excitement you could possibly miss.

So imagine you have to choose. On the USofA side, you have exciting sporting events to watch that are periodically interrupted with confusing advertisements that you can go ahead and miss by having a quickie. On the European side, you just bang away throughout the whole match without the risk of missing any excitement in the broadcast.

It is a tough choice but I’ll opt for the American approach. Grab a quickie during half-time and then bang the drum all day during baseball season. Which does now seem to be upon us. I wonder where I can get some of that “Der Bonnen Pillen”…

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