Commercial Rebuttals

Americans are becoming a wildly unscientific bunch. Exactly why that is depends on who you ask. People blame video games, public school, the Internets, pop culture and heavy metal music for this state of affairs, but whoever you blame, the result is the same: Americans are turning into dunces.

I blame TV commercials. For example, one set of TV commercials tells us "grace is power" or "precision is power." I hate to quibble, but power is an amount of work divided by how long it takes to perform said work - P = W/t in other words. Grace is an unquantifiable term, and precision refers to the repeatability of successive measurements. And neither one is power.

Then there's the one with the breathy indie folk singer type who, over the plinkety-pink of "soulful guitar", gushes that she's green today and chirps with joy like crickets. Wait a second, I always thought crickets chirped with reproductive intent, not joy. They chirp, humans slather on Axe and wear jeans two sizes too small ("His batch," Crow T. Robot gasped in horror). But neither one has anything to do with the joy of being alive, or the insipid cloying sensibility of overwrought indie folk music. Blech.

My favorite is the one where the ominously self-possessed somewhat post-pubescent Young Thing tells us that these plant-based cleansers she's hawking don't contain any "nasty chemicals", presumably because they're plant-based. Sure. And plants never produce any nasty chemicals, do they? Curare, aconite, poison ivy, deadly nightshade, foxglove, oleander, heck no, I can't think of a single plant that produces a "nasty chemical."

Gawd.