Sham Wow!!

Perhaps we should take a moment and reflect upon my current medical malady of the “trigger finger”. No, I don’t mean the one that is bent and twisted from doing who the hell knows what. That one requires surgery that I can ill afford because my income doesn’t provide sufficient resources to pay for malpractice lawsuits, duplicitous government health regulations or endless tests to determine and repair what I already know is “trigger finger”.

I’m talking about the one I use to click the remote to remove annoying, repetitive, disingenuous, deceptive, advertising that funds the disingenuous, annoying deceptive, annoying cable news programs that are far more informative than the Big Three networks, who suffer under the delusion that they are telling us anything near the truth.

What I’m talking about are the ads that solicit more people to call in to a toll free number for free diabetes testing supplies, free scooters, free breathing apparatus, free consultations for any disability associated with asbestos, popular medications--that have been approved by the FDA-- or medical procedures that were necessary to save your sorry butts, but somehow went wrong for reasons that some slick attorney can staple to a doctors reputation in front of a sympathetic jury.

I’m talking about any TV ad that embeds the phrases, “do yourself the biggest favor”, “you can’t afford not to…”, “it didn’t cost me a penny”, “you owe it to yourself” or “ Hi, Billy Mays here, for……”.

I’m talking about ads that include the codicils, “If you call in the next 20 minutes”, “operators standing by”, “just add shipping and handling”, “call now, because we can’t do this all day” or have some random dupe proclaim that, “I don’t know how I ever lived without this”!

Could it be that the smell of corn dogs, cotton candy and rancid popcorn have given way to the antiseptic and sterile stage of video tape. Some would proclaim that the “Carnies” have gone digital; once respected co-hosts have sold their souls for house payments and has-been celebrities hawk term life insurance for bar tabs.

And we can’t cry enough for those that have fallen on hard times with the IRS or those nasty credit card companies, who want the money we promised to pay them when we applied for their usurious interest rates.
But by God, I will not submit to “Vince”, who is the spokes jockey for “Shamwow” the German substitute for American paper towels. Seems that the former barker for the weakest link in Carnival history has missed a few things that “Shamwow” is NOT good for. Yes, you can dry your car, boat or pickup with Shamwow, but you can’t you wipe the grease from your bacon pan, the fingerprints from you stainless refrigerator or the cat puke from your carpet. You can’t scrape last nights pasta from your casserole dish, the blueberry jamb from your new tee-shirt or the gun oil from your sawed-off, used to shoot Carnival barkers. Now I could go on, but I think you are getting the point.

Now, normally there would be some high and mighty government agency dedicated to telling us what NOT to believe on T.V., but Pelosi and Reid are far too busy saving our planet and destroying our country to lower themselves to dealing with false advertising. Besides, if they demanded credulity from Billy Mayes, it might just infringe on their pathetic attempts at selling their own agenda.

But hey, I could be wrong. The Dumbplumber