Sore Pignals...

One of the first blogs I wrote was a rant against both fortune cookies and Sleep Number beds. I still feel strongly about both – in fact, I was thrilled to get an actual fortune the other day and also thrilled to find that there were real mattresses in this year’s room at the hotel where I first encountered Sleep Numbers. My life has strange highlights, and these were two of them. Notably, PF Chang’s still gave out one more cookie than there were people at the table.

Today, I want to talk about two other revolutionary products – only one of which I can actually remember. The first goes back a ways, to my honeymoon as a matter of fact. J. and I don’t have cable at home, so we tend to watch TV whenever we go anywhere that has it. Our honeymoon was no different. Although we spent many hours in the sun, at the beach, wandering around Bermuda, visiting sites, and generally enjoying the cruise – we also spent time in our stateroom watching a marathon of Law & Order: SVU. Romantic, I know. I still remember the occasional signal lost on the rolling ship and it wasn’t long before ‘Poor Signal’ turned into ‘Sore Pignals’ simply because it was amusing. We’re odd. This should surprise no one.

Anyway – during that marathon, there also seemed to be a marathon of infomercial ads for Aqua Globes. If you don’t know what an Aqua Globe is, it’s a glass ball on a tube that you fill with water. The idea is that the water slowly runs down the tube into your plants and waters them for you. It was only about the second time the infomercial came on that I began to deconstruct it. The rants relating to Aqua Globes left J. in tears, I’m fairly sure. The first issue I took with it is that if the people in the ad were truly as idiotic as it seemed they were, I don’t think I would trust them with any glass object, let alone one with a hollow glass tube that tapered into a point. These people were insane. They would tend to their plants with so much water that there’d be an inch-deep pond where their wooden end-table surface used to be. I kept waiting for the infomercial that sold end tables with the two-inch lipped edges to save your things from falling off or, in this case, water-damaging your carpet. If you put so much water in a plant that it completely saturated the soil and then created a reflecting pool on random surfaces in your domicile, then I’m not sure that Aqua Globes were going to solve your deeper problems. Just a thought. Also, if I cannot be trusted to water my plants every few days – so they wilt and die and turn my house into a black and white image from the Depression – then how am I going to remember to fill the Aqua Globe every two weeks? And how I earth will I manage to stop filling the Globe when it’s full, since I can’t seem to water a plant without rivaling the Great Flood?

The other item is the one I can’t remember, but it has something to do with shaving or, more accurately, unwanted hair removal. The only part of the ad I can remember is, of course, in black and white. It seems typical to cast one’s life in shades of grey when you don’t have whatever As-Seen-On-TV item they are selling at the moment. It’s like the ad industry’s version of the Wizard of Oz – though I’m fairly certain the ad execs have more drugs. Anyway, the woman in the commercial is sitting on the toilet in a robe with her foot up on the bathroom sink. She has about three inches of what seems to be men’s shaving cream slathered all over her leg and she’s dragging a dry razor up her shin bone with speeds rivaling an Ariel Atom V8 500 (I’ve been watching some Top Gear lately and that’s the car topping their leaderboard at the moment for Driving Really Fast Around the Test Track). The image then indicates somehow that the woman has cut herself. Every time I see this, I’m fairly certain this woman deserves to have her leg sliced up if this is how she’s choosing to shave it. I know they exaggerate these things for effect, but when it hurtles into the realm of absurdly comical, then it’s hard for me to take any of it seriously. In fact, this commercial sunk in so much that I cannot even remember what it’s for. All I can do is surmise that we are meant to feel smarter than these people and that if we see a small reflection of our own failings in them, maybe we’ll feel better about calling in the next 10 minutes and getting a second set at no extra cost.

The more I think about it, perhaps that woman is in such a hurry because she can hear water flooding her living room from the excess water she put in her hydrangea just minutes before going in to the bathroom to drive shave her leg with her husband’s Barbasol.

In any event, I need to go read a book or do something without advertisements because even thinking about these commercials is giving me sore pignals.