Balls to Vitaballs!

I put in a long day's work yesterday, struggling with a painting involving two of my worst Achilles' heels: horses and blue things. (My worst job-related nightmare, I think, would be having to paint a blue horse. Bloody good thing horses are more, you know, brownish-coloured.) At any rate, I worked all day and far into the night, and found myself on the couch shortly before sunrise, watching the telly. I hate those scraggly edges of the day, when I'm too tired to push on with work, but not quite dozy enough to fall asleep. Since I bought the TV set, I tend to watch it at such times. Television has a better success rate than sleeping pills, but nothing's infallible. Last night, for instance, in spite of soporific programming and droney-voiced actors, I couldn't drift off. My brain clung to wakefulness, finding disturbance in the buzz of a dying lightbulb and in the squawking of a night seagull over the harbour.

Maybe it was too quiet, without the usual shouts and car noises drifting up from the street. Or maybe I'd just eaten too much pasta. Yesterday morning, I discovered six pounds of noodles hidden behind a mountain of diced-tomato cans. I was very excited about them...possibly a little too excited. I didn't really need to eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I'm going somewhere with all this. Really, I am. See, there I was, curled up on the couch waiting to fall asleep, and the telly was on. It was on one of the network stations, not Movie Central, so there were loads of commercials. Most of them were quite innocuous (to the point that they'd be forgotten by the end of the ad break), but there were a few doozies in there. I'm talking horrible, here, commercials so dreadful you'd boycott the product simply to avoid being reminded of the commercial:

FOLKS TALKING WITH THEIR MOUTHS FULL

The three worst offenders on the grossness front involved people with deplorable table manners. I'll do a mini-countdown, here, in the interests of drama.

The third-worst commercial's for Smarties Bars. Even if I did like chocolate, which I don't, I'd never buy a bloody Smarties Bar. This commercial's put me right off. There's these two doofuses in an office, eating Smarties and shooting the shit. One doofus says to the other, "I thought you were supposed to eat the red ones last!"

"Well, that's what the Smarties people've been telling us for years," says his friend, only it comes out as "Well, thash watta Schmarties people've been telling ush for yearsh!", since he's packing in Smarties as he talks. Repulsive! Loathsome! Five out of a possible ten piles of puke in the gutter!

The second-worst is a Subway commercial, something to do with one of those fad diets where you don't eat any carbohydrates. Some poor cunt's stood standing in the kitchen, enjoying his sarnie, when his horrible wife (who doesn't look like she needs to lose any weight, by the way) comes storming in, screaming at him for cheating on the diet they're doing together. He protests vociferously, spraying bread particles all over himself, the kitchen, and probably the hallway to boot. You can't even make out what he's saying. Not only is the commercial repugnant, but it's completely unintelligible as well. Seven piles of puke and a pair of earmuffs.

And now, for the worst offender in the category of Folks Talking with their Mouths Full: Healthy Harvest pasta. You've got these two old people, presumably a married couple, digging into heaping plates of pasta. (Eating that much pasta can't be healthy, whatever the brand!) The man shovels in a big bite and immediately starts talking around it. "I'm a man," he tells his wife. "I'm not going to eat healthy." He proceeds to rant at length about granola-crunchers, people going braless, and juicers, all the while continuing to stuff his face. They must've had the microphones jammed right in there, up by his mouth, because the sound quality's so good you can hear the half-masticated noodles sliming around his teeth.

You'd think it couldn't get any worse. But then the Healthy Harvest slogan comes on: "So good, he won't know it's healthy!" Christ! I'm offended on the behalf of men AND women, on that one! I mean, in one tiny slogan, they've managed to imply a) that men are mannerless buffoons who'd rather die of heart failure than come across as...what? Gay? Effeminate? Health-conscious?--and b) that women should be docile creatures with time on their hands to spend catering to such Neanderthals! Ten great, smelly, steaming piles of puke, with some of the noodles still recognisable. Faugh! I doubt I could afford Healthy Harvest anyhow, but if I could, I still wouldn't buy it.

UNSAFE CHILD-REARING PRACTICES

Vitaballs--they've got to be joking! According to the ad, a Vitaball is the latest thing in children's vitamins. It isn't a pill, or even one of those chewable Flintstone's jobbies. No, a Vitaball is a gumball with a full dose of supplemental vitamins in it. Does no-one see the problem here?

I'll spell it out. Vitamins are good for you, in the recommended doses. But if you take, say, a month's worth of them in a day, they're not so brilliant. In fact, they're rather unbrilliant, possibly to the point of killing you outright. So, yeah, explain to me again why vitamins disguised as candy are a good idea! Chewable fruit-flavoured vitamins are bad enough, but at least they look vaguely pill-shaped. A gumball-shaped vitamin is, as ideas go, about on a par with the hydrogen-propelled zeppelin: it might fly briefly, but before you know it, it's all "Oh, the humanity!" and billows of smoke in the sky. Oh, yeah. Someone's kid's going down.

Any parent stupid enough to buy a product like that deserves a bit of a scare, maybe a spectacular spewage incident, or something. But sooner or later, someone's going to get a hell of a lot more than that. Thus, I rate this commercial twenty piles of puke: ten for the commercial itself, and another ten for the product.

VOMITING

Everyone knows what Gravol is for. (Well, in Canada they do. For non-Canadians, substitute your local brand of dimenhydrinate.) Do we really need to hear some gleeful toddler with a loathly lisp tell us about the time he "barfed all over the teacher's desk?" Apparently, the makers of Kids' Gravol think we do. Earth to Gravol: Vomit references are never, ever appealing to consumers! Ever! No, not even when you're selling anti-nausea pills!

I found this commercial doubly disturbing because I am a frequent Gravol-user. It's one of the few drugs that can put me to sleep without keeping me sluggish the following day. This had me very worried until I remembered I can't afford actual Gravol, and have been buying the generic version for years.

The Kids' Gravol commercial gets only six piles of puke. It isn't particularly offensive aside from the vomit stories, and Kids' Gravol does not come in gumball form.

Eventually, I fell asleep. I dreamed of a leaf-canopy hundreds of feet in the air, and myself cradled in a branchy fork just beneath. I watched sloths sleeping upside-down below me, and monkeys the size of ants on the forest floor. Nothing happened. I exulted. Then, I woke up, worked a lot, fed Stella, almost got bitten (oops), played with Stella, worked some more...and now I'm thinking about bed again. In ten minutes or so, I'll have brushed my teeth and plopped down on the couch. I'll be watching ads for Vitaballs and Healthy Harvest go by as my brain winds down for the night. I might even use some Gravol, if I don't fall asleep straight away. I hope I don't see any commercials with naked babies in them. I hate babies. I hate the noises they make. I hate how fat they are. Their faces look like albino tomatoes, squashed ones. Why do people think human babies are cute? People must be crazy. I must be...tired.

Goodnight.