Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus

by Dave Barry

  The victim survived, but this tragic incident serves as yet another reminder to us all that, when we feel stress or anger, we must NOT, in a rash moment, unthinkingly reach for the rigatoni. Instead we should remember the words of the great pacifist Mohandas Gandhi, who in a famous 1949 speech, said, “Me, I prefer the number nine capellini.” What is all the more amazing about this speech is that Gandhi actually died in 1948.

  So in conclusion, let me just reiterate my main points, which are (1) it is unprofessional to set fire to our supervisors, at least in Utah; (2) when pasta is outlawed, only outlaws will have pasta; and (3) we should not be critical of people who make extremely loud motorcycle noises in public if we are sporting penny loafers. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go listen to “I Write the Songs.”

  TUNED IN,

  TUNED OFF

  So I turned on my car radio, and the first thing I heard was the Shouting Car-Dealership Jerk. You know the one I mean. He sounds like this:

  “BELOW DEALER COST!! MAX SNOTWICK FORD DODGE ISUZU CHEVROLET NISSAN STUDEBAKER TOYOTA IS SELLING CARS AT BELOW DEALER COST!! WE’RE LOSING MONEY ON THESE CARS!! WE HAVE TO MAKE ROOM FOR MORE CARS!! SO WE CAN LOSE MORE MONEY!! WE HAVE PROCESSED CHEESE FOR BRAINS!! THAT’S WHY WE’RE SELLING CARS FOR BELOW DEALER…”

  I immediately did what I always do when the Shouting Car-Dealership Jerk comes on: I changed the station. I will listen to anything—including Morse code, static, and the song “A Horse with No Namt”—before I will listen to those commercials, and I think most people feel the same way. So the question is: Why are they on the air? Why are car dealerships paying good money for commercials that people hate?

  My theory is that these commercials are NOT paid for by car dealerships; they’re paid for by competing radio stations, who hope you’ll switch to them. I developed a similar theory years ago to explain the infamous “ring around the collar” TV commercials for Wisk. Remember those? They always featured a Concerned Housewife who tried and tried to get her husband’s collars clean; but when her husband, who apparently did not wash his neck, would put on a shirt, people would point out that his collar was dirty. You’d think he’d have punched them in the mouth, but instead he just looked chagrined, and these extremely irritating voices—voices that would kill a laboratory rat in seconds—would shriek: “RING AROUND THE COLLAR! RING AROUND THE COLLAR!” And the Concerned Housewife would be SO embarrassed that the only thing preventing her from lying down right on her kitchen floor and slashing her wrists was the fear that the paramedics might notice that she had waxy yellow buildup.

  There was a time when the “ring around the collar” campaign was arguably the single most detested aspect of American culture. Many people swore that, because of those commercials, they would not purchase Wisk if it were the last detergent on Earth. Yet the commercials stayed on the air for years. Why? Because somebody was buying Wisk. The question is: Who?

  My theory is that it was the Soviet Union. These ads ran during the height of the Cold War, when the Soviets would stop at nothing to destroy America. I believe they sent agents over here with the mission of purchasing huge quantities of Wisk; this convinced the Wisk manufacturers that the “ring around the collar” campaign was working, so they kept it on the air, thereby causing millions of Americans to conclude that they lived in a nation of complete idiots, and thus to become depressed and alienated. I believe that virtually all the negative developments of the sixties and seventies—riots, protests, crime, drug use, The Gong Show— were related, directly or indirectly, to Wisk commercials. I also believe that to this day, somewhere in the former Soviet Union, there are giant hidden underground caverns containing millions of bottles of Wisk.

  I’ll tell you another kind of ad I hate: The ones where they give you information that could never be of any conceivable use to you. For example, there was a series of ads for some giant chemical company, I forget which one, where they’d show you, say, a family watching television, and the announcer would say something like: “We don’t make televisions. And we don’t make the little plastic things that hold the wires inside the televisions. We make the machines that stamp the numbers on the little plastic things that hold the wires inside the televisions.” When I saw those ads, I wanted to scream: WHY ARE YOU PAYING MILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO TELL ME THIS?? WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO??

  I also do not care for:

  Any ad featuring a demonstration of a product absorbing an intimate bodily fluid.

  Any ad where a singer sings with deep emotion about something nobody could possibly feel deeply emotional about, such as cotton, Hoover vacuum cleaners, and Jiffy Lube. Builders Square has a commercial wherein the singer bleats this hyperpatriotic song that makes it sound as though the people shopping there are actually building America, whereas in fact they are looking for replacement toilet parts.

  Any of the endless series of ads by long-distance companies accusing other long-distance companies of lying. LISTEN, LONG-DISTANCE COMPANIES: WE DON’T BELIEVE ANY OF YOU ANYMORE. WE’RE THINKING OF GOING BACK TO SMOKE SIGNALS.

  Excuse me for shouting like the Car Dealership Jerk; I get emotional about this. I’m sure you do, too, which is why I’m inviting you to write to me at One Herald Plaza, Miami, FL 33132, and tell me—BRIEFLY—what advertisements, past or present, that you really hate, and why. I’ll write a column about this, which will benefit humanity in general by enabling me to write yet another column without doing any research. Don’t thank me: I do it all for you. At WAY below dealer cost.

  SNUGGLE BEAR

  MUST DIE!

  Whew! Do I have a headache! I think I’ll take an Extra Strength Bufferin Advil Tylenol with proven cavity fighters, containing more of the lemon-freshened borax and plaque fighters for those days when I am feeling “not so fresh” in my personal region!

  The reason I’m feeling this way is that I have just spent six straight days going through the thousands of letters you readers sent in when I asked you to tell me which advertisements you don’t like. It turns out that a lot of you really, REALLY hate certain advertisements, to the point where you fantasize about acts of violence. For example, quite a few people expressed a desire to kill the stuffed bear in the Snuggle fabric-softener commercial. “Die, Snuggle Bear! Die!” is how several put it.

  Likewise there was a great deal of hostility expressed, often by older readers, toward the relentlessly cheerful older couples depicted in the competing commercials for Ensure and Sustacal. These commercials strongly suggest that if you drink these products, you will feel “young,” which, in these commercials, means “stupid.” People were particularly offended by the commercial where the couple actually drinks a toast with Ensure. As Jamie Hagedorn described it: “One says, To your health,’ and the other says, ‘Uh-uh—to OUR health,’ and then for some reason they laugh like ninnies. I want to hit them both over the head with a hammer.”

  Some other commercial personalities who aroused great hostility were Sally Struthers; the little boy who lectures you incessantly about Welch’s grape juice; the young people in the Mentos commercials (as Rob Spore put it, “Don’t you think those kids should all be sent to military school?”); everybody in all Calvin Klein commercials (“I am sure they are what hell is really like,” observed Robert E. Waller); the little girl in the Shake ‘N Bake commercial—Southerners REALLY hate this little girl—who, for what seemed like hundreds of years, said “And I helped!” but pronounced it “An ah hayulpt!” (Louise Sigmund, in a typically restrained response, wrote, “Your mother shakes chickens in hell”); Kathie Lee Gifford (Shannon Saar wrote, “First person to push Kathie Lee overboard gets an all-you-can-eat buffet!”); the smug man in the Geritol commercial who said, “My wife, I think I’ll keep her!” (the wife smiled, but you just know that one day she will put Liquid Drāno in his Ensure); the bad actor pretending to be Dean Witter in the flagrantly fake “old film” commercial that’s supposed to make us want to trust them with our money; the woman in the Pantene commercial
who said “Please don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” (as many readers responded, “Okay, how about if we just hate you because you’re obnoxious?”).

  Also they are none too fond of the giant Gen X dudes stomping all over the Rocky Mountains in the Coors Light ads. (Matt Scott asks: “Will they step on us if we don’t buy their beer?” Scott McCullar asks: “What happens when they get a full bladder?”)

  Also, many people would like Candice Bergen to just shut up about the stupid dimes.

  Also, I am pleased to report that I am not the only person who cannot stand the sight of the Infiniti Snot—you know, the guy with the dark clothes and the accent, talking about Infiniti cars as though they were Renaissance art. As Kathleen Schon, speaking for many, put it: “We hate him so much we wouldn’t buy one even if we could afford it, which we can’t, but we wouldn’t buy one anyway.”

  Speaking of car commercials, here’s a bulletin for the Nissan people: Nobody likes the creepy old man, okay? Everybody is afraid when the little boy winds up alone in the barn with him. This ad campaign does not make us want to purchase a Nissan. It makes us want to notify the police. Thank you.

  And listen, Chevrolet: People didn’t mind the first 389 million times they heard Bob Seger wail “Like a rock!” But it’s getting old. And some people wish to know what “genuine Chevrolet” means. As Don Charleston put it, “I intended to buy a genuine Chevy but I couldn’t tell the difference between the ‘genuine’ and all those counterfeit Chevys out there, so I bought a Ford.”

  But the car-related ads that people hate the most, judging from my survey, are the dealership commercials in which the announcer SHOUTS AT YOU AS THOUGH YOU ARE AN IDIOT and then, in the last three seconds of the ad reads, in very muted tones, what sounds like the entire U.S. tax code. Hundreds and hundreds of people wrote to say they hate these commercials. I should note that one person defended them: His name is George Chapogas, and he is in—of all things—the advertising business. Perhaps by examining this actual excerpt from his letter, we can appreciate the thinking behind the shouting ads:

  “I write, produce and VOICE those ads. Make a damn good living doing it, too. Maybe more than you even. And would you like to know why? Because they move metal, buddy.”

  Thanks, George! I understand now.

  Well, I’m out of space. Tune in next week, and I’ll tell you which commercial the readers hated the most; I’ll also discuss repulsive bodily functions in detail. Be sure to read it! You’ll lose weight without dieting, have whiter teeth in two weeks by actually growing your own hair on itching, flaking skin as your family enjoys this delicious meal in only minutes without getting soggy in milk! Although your mileage may vary. Ask a doctor! Or somebody who plays one on TV.

  WHUPPING

  MR. WHIPPLE

  Last week I promised that in today’s column I would announce which commercial, according to my survey, you readers hate the most. So if you have an ounce of sense or good taste, you’ll stop reading this column right now.

  Really, I mean it…

  This is your last chance …

  You’re making a HUGE mistake …

  Okay, you pathetic fool: The most hated commercial of all time, according to the survey, was the one for Charmin featuring “Mr. Whipple” and various idiot housewives who lived in a psycho pervert community where everybody was obsessed with squeezing toilet paper—or, as they say in Commercial Land, “bathroom tissue.” Americans still, after all these years, feel more hostility toward that ad campaign than they ever did toward international communism.

  Of course some people will say: “But those ads sold a lot of Charmin!”

  Yes, and the Unabomber produced high-quality, handcrafted letter bombs. But that doesn’t make it right.

  The Mr. Whipple ads are related to a whole category of commercials that, according to the survey, people really detest—namely, commercials that discuss extremely intimate bodily functions and problems, often at dinnertime. People do not wish to hear total strangers blurting out statements about their constipation and their diarrhea and their hemorrhoids and their “male itch.” People do not wish to see scientific demonstrations of pads absorbing amazing quantities of fluids. People also cannot fathom why this fluid is always blue. As Carla and Bill Chandler put it: “If anyone around here starts secreting anything BLUE, the last thing we’re going to worry about is how absorbent their pad is.”

  People do not wish to hear any more about incontinence. Rich Klinzman wrote: “I have often fantasized about sneaking up behind June Allyson, blowing up a paper bag, and slamming my fist into it, just to see how absorbent those adult diapers really are.”

  People also do not wish to see actors pretending to be mothers and daughters talking about very personal feminine matters as though they were discussing the weather. Richard J. O’Neil, expressing a common sentiment, wrote: “If I was a woman, I would walk on my lips through a sewage plant before I would share this kind of information with any living soul, let alone my mother.”

  People do not wish to see extreme close-ups of other people chewing.

  People are also getting mighty tired of the endlessly escalating, extremely confusing war of the pain relievers. At one time, years ago, there was just aspirin, which was basically for headaches; now, there are dozens of products, every single one of which seems to be telling you that, not only is it more effective than the other ones, but also the other ones could cause a variety of harmful side effects such as death. It seems safer to just live with the headache.

  Many survey respondents were especially scornful of the commercials suggesting that you can undergo an actual surgical procedure, such as a Caesarean section, and the only pain medication you’d need afterward is Tylenol. As Gwen Marshall put it: “If my doctor had given me Tylenol and expected me to be pain-free and happy, I’d have jumped off of that lovely table that holds your legs ten feet apart, grabbed the twelve-inch scalpel out of his hand, and held it to his throat until I got morphine, lots of it.”

  Another type of advertising that people detest is the Mystery Commercial, in which there is no earthly way to tell what product is being advertised. These commercials usually consist of many apparently random images flashing rapidly past on the screen, and then, at the end, you see a Nike swoosh, or the IBM logo, or Mr. Whipple.

  People are sick and tired of seeing actors pretend to be deeply emotionally attached to their breakfast cereals. People also frankly do not believe that the woman in the Special K commercials got to be thin and shapely by eating Special K. Patricia Gualdoni wrote: “I have eaten enough Special K cereal to sink a battleship, and I look a lot more like a battleship than the woman in the ad.”

  People are also skeptical of the Denorex shampoo commercials. “How do we know that that tingling sensation isn’t battery acid eating through your scalp?” asked Alyssa Church.

  Here are just a few of the other views expressed by the thousands of readers who responded to the survey:

  —Andy Elliott wrote: “I hate radio ads that say, ‘Our prices are so low, we can’t say them on the radio!’ WHY??? Will people start bleeding from the ears if they hear these prices?”

  —Michael Howard wrote: “I live near Seattle and there is one channel that runs commercials approximately every five minutes advertising the fact that they have a helicopter. Can you believe it? A helicopter!”

  —A.J. VanHorn theorized that “the increase in suicides among young people is due to the beer commercial showing a bunch of rednecks in a beat-up pickup swigging beer from cans and telling everyone ‘It don’t git no better’n this.’”

  —Kathy Walden objected to “Wal-Mart commercials that shamelessly try to portray all Wal-Mart customers as poor, uneducated, rural, and concerned primarily with reproducing themselves. Of course this is true, but STILL …”

  There were many, many more strong comments, but I’m out of space. So I’m going to close with a statement penned by a reader identifying himself as “Flat Foot Sam,” who I be
lieve spoke for millions of consumers when he wrote these words:

  I’d like to buy the world a Coke,

  And spray it out my nose.

  Here I am kissing a horse named Sid, on which I sat during a celebrity polo match in Florida. The other celebrities’ horses galloped up and down the field chasing the ball, but Sid just stood still the entire time. I was really grateful to him.

  BEWARE THE

  EAGLE EYE

  It’s time once again for our popular consumer health feature, “You Should Be More Nervous.”

  Today we’re going to address an alarming new trend, even scarier in some ways than the one we discussed several years ago concerning the danger of airplane toilets sucking out your intestines (if you had forgotten about that one, we apologize for bringing it up again, and we ask you to please put it out of your mind).

  We were made aware of this new menace when alert reader Edna Aschenbrenner sent us an item from an Enterprise, Oregon, newspaper called—get ready for a great newspaper name—The Wallowa County Chieftain. The Chieftain runs a roundup of news from the small town of Imnaha (suggested motto: “It’s ‘Ahanmi’ Spelled Backward!”). On March 14, this roundup, written by Barbara Kriley, began with the following story, which I am not making up:

  “A bald eagle sabotaged the Imnaha power line for an hour and a half outage Wednesday with a placenta from the Hubbard Ranch calving operation. The eagle dropped the afterbirth across the power lines, effectively shorting out the power.”

  This is a truly alarming story We’re talking about a bald eagle, the proud symbol of this great nation as well as Budweiser beer. We don’t know about you, but we always trusted eagles; we assumed that when they were soaring majestically across the skies, they were protecting us—scanning the horizon, keeping an eye out for storm fronts, Russian missiles, pornography, etc. But now we find out, thanks to the Chieftain, that they’re not protecting us at all: They’re up there dropping cow placentas. They’ve already demonstrated that they can take out the Imnaha power supply; it would be child’s play for them to hit a human.