Mistress of the Darks Diary of Darkness

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The Commercial Hunter Presents...

October 14, 2001 - 2:14 a.m.

I'm Currently Avoiding:

Today, on the discovery channel, we shall be exploring the mysterious and confusing world of television commercials which either make no sense at all or seem exceedingly annoying, as well as other random phenomena from other places which I see fit to pluck things which seem strange to me. That means that today,

October 14 is ..... Be Bald and Free Day and National Dessert Day (okay, I can deal with the national dessert thing, I can even dig it, but what's the connection between being bald and being free? Are they eschewing the Hairclub for Men then? Is joining that club seen as enslaving yourself?)

And now, we present...Commercials That Confuse/Annoy/Scare Me

Commercial 1:

That/Those 1-800-Collect Commercials with Mr. T. The one I saw recently had Mr. T in an old ladies' hair salon, in a pink wrap (a frightening image in and of itself), and then the two old ladies and Mr. T going off together to find people on the street at payphones. The commercial concludes with Mr. T saying something to the effect that the two old ladies could be his SWAT team or something. Anyway, can you imagine an old ladies SWAT Squad? Now tell me you aren't scared. Just picture it, Gramma busting down the door, telling the bad guy to freeze, and then 10 minutes later, nagging him about how disrespectful he is to his mother and offering him cookies.

Commercial 2:

Any of those 1-800-Call-ATT commercials with Carrottop and then Wanda Sykes' voice at the end. Those just annoy the hell out of me. Besides the fact that Carrottop's an idiot and needs to die, what possessed AT&T to put those two together? They've got probably 2 of the most annoying personalities I've ever seen, and then they put them TOGETHER? Were they trying to annoy us into using their service or were they being idiotic and trying to drive us Away from using their service?

Commercial 3:

That jeans commercial where the belly buttons are singing just scares me. Singing belly-buttons? Yikes. And if you look closely, the singing belly buttons pass a little black boy, and the kid looks scared out of his wits. Poor kid, surrounded by singing belly buttons. I feel sorry for him. Besides, are their jeans *really* that low-cut or are all the women (notice how they were all women) just wearing shirts that ride up and are short to begin with?

Commercial 4:

There was this commercial for Prego spaghetti sauce that I saw tonight that was extremely disturbing. The spaghetti noodles (uncooked & standing in a container of some sort) were talking about how they'd just love to be covered in Prego sauce and enjoyed by the human family at dinner. They were overjoyed by the fact that they were about to be boiled, covered in sauce, and eaten. I really don't know what was up with that, but if I was a piece of pasta and happened to be able to speak, I'm fairly certain that I wouldn't be Happy about being boiled alive and then consumed by a bunch of giants. So cheerfully suicidal speaking pasta just isn't anything I want to see. And now I have to worry if I'm killing my food by boiling it alive, thanks a lot Prego!

Commercial 5:

This doesn't exactly bother me, well, it sort of does, but I just wanted to have 5, it seems like a nice number. Anyway, there was this commercial for the new Tommy fragrance (not something I really concern myself with, but still...) again during this two or three hour period while I was cooking/studying/painting my fingernails this evening. The commercial had a man and a woman & an American flag, plus the design is a clear bottle with a red, white, & blue T on it. American consumerism at its most parisitic perhaps. What fun.

Words Destitute of Paucity

destitute (adj. DESS-tuh-toot or DESS-tuh-tyoot)

1 : lacking something needed or desirable

2 : lacking possessions and resources; especially : suffering extreme poverty

You may be surprised to learn that destitute is related to such words as statue, statute, and even statistics. The Latin word status, meaning position or state, is the source of these and other English words. Some terms of this family are directly related to status, while others come to English through statuere, a Latin verb from status that means to set up. Destitute came from destituere (to abandon, deprive), a joining of statuere and the prefix de-. Statuere also gave us constitute, institute, and restitution, among other similar-sounding words.

paucity (n. PAW-suh-tee)

1 : smallness of number : fewness

2 : smallness of quantity : dearth

Paucity was first recorded in English in the 15th century, when it referred to smallness of number or a small number. The term comes to us from the Middle French word paucite, and is ultimately derived from the Latin word for little, which is paucus. It is not surprising, then, that paucity came to refer to a littleness not only of numbers (e.g., a paucity of facts or studies), but also of overall quantity (a paucity of evidence). One can even describe a paucity of abstract concepts, as a paucity of experience or knowledge.

The Quote of the Day is..."Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast." -- Douglas Adams

No song of the day today, just another one of those strange occurances. I went and bought a 2-CD set entitled "Pop Music: The Modern Era 1976-1999" and it arrived the other day. The front touts it as, "The biggest hits from today's greatest artists...", BUT on the second cd, the 9th song is "Step By Step" by New Kids on the Block! Now, even if they meant to say that they were the biggest hits from the greatest artists of their time, by no stretch of the imagination can you call the New Kids on the Block a great artist. A one-hit wonder, if that, a fad, sure, either of those work...but a great artist? I think not. That's akin to someone calling Carrottop the funniest man in history, and the greatest comedian of our time. It sort of sounds plausible to begin with, until you actually hear them. Then it becomes clear just how ludicrous those claims are. What I want to know is why on Earth did they choose to put that song on there? What were the music executives who chose the music thinking of when they did that? Better yet, what were they on, because I might want to be that delusional sometime.

Anyway, now that it's 5:30 and I worked on this for practically 3 hours while multi-tasking, time to go away.

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