Uncle! Uncle!

Is there some kind of affidavit I can sign that will get me out of having to watch any more Vonage commercials? Seriously, I've seen about ten thousand of them and I'm starting to develop really unhealthy levels of hatred toward the people in the ads, the ads themselves, and Vonage as a company.

I was watching Most Evil today, one of my favorite shows, and every commercial break was dominated by Vonage commercials. And not the short ones either; we're talking the long, interminable, tedious abominations. And as if that wasn't enough, some of them were doubled! One Vonage ad wasn't enough, so they'd run a second one right after the first one!

After a while that yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo-hoo music and the dull throbbing sound of the Orange Membrane and the Wave-Emitting Magical Swelling Logo (watch the bottom of the screen if you don't believe me) start to drive me insane, and after the doubled Vonage ads started, I had to stop watching my TV show and leave the room. Really, it's come that that, I'd rather watch nothing at all than risk accidental exposure to any more Vonage ads. I'd rather have no phone at all than do business with Vonage. So I went to my computer and naively checked my email, only to find - wait for it! - Vonage pop-up ads on my web browser!!

It's too much! Make it stop! Please! I'm only one man, afflicted by weaknesses and foibles, I submit to the tireless oppressive energy of your multi-billion-dollar ad campaign! I give already! Uncle, for fuck's sake, Uncle!

I first saw the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey back in the late 1960s, and it (along with Major Matt Mason toys and other Space Age gewgaws) convinced me that the future would always be better than the past, because people with enormously powerful and clinically cool brains would always see to it that human society and human institutions moved in the direction of justice, rationality, fairness and peace. Oh how these Vonage ads would have made that little boy weep, because that little boy would have been forced to cry out "The future is not better than the past! The future sucks!"

Have you ever gone through a period in your life when you ate the same thing over and over and you thought you liked it until suddenly a threshold was crossed and projectile vomiting set in? My parents went to Europe for about a month when I was sixteen, and with my grocery money I laid in a truly awesome supply of beef pot pies. Beef pot pies were the thing, man; I'd never get sit of eating beef pot pies while watching Emergency on TV. Until I did. To this day I can't stand beef pot pies.

Is there a connection between beef pot pies and Vonage? The question awaits scholarship.