THE WORD “eternity” should be defined as “the amount of time between the first moment one of those screaming Billy Mays commercials comes on until you can get the channel changed to anything else.”

Why do people who sell cheap crap on TV commercials think yelling at us makes us want to buy the ordinary stuff they’re pushing? Are there citizens among us who are sitting in their homes, unmotivated until some ridiculous loud mouth blares into their ears? I don’t know who these consumers are, but I sure wish they’d do us all a favor and stop buying things that are advertised using such sales tactics.

The Billy Mays commercials are easily the worst on television. His high-pitched whine only exacerbates the annoying volume and absurd urgency. I can’t remember the last time I had a real emergency involving an immediate need for ordinary household products. And Super Glue is so hard to find in stores. It’s not like they sell that stuff in just any store. You have to find a store or 24-hour gas station that is open if you want to buy Super Glue.

I’ve never once looked for a particular brand of Super Glue, on the few occasions in my life I’ve felt a need to buy some. A tube lasts 10 years, or until you lose it, which usually comes first. And the expense! That stuff can’t be bought at dollar stores. Oh, wait, yes it can. For about a dollar.

THOUSANDS OF real actors are out of work, but Billy Mays still has jobs on television. What could possibly explain this phenomenon? There are only two reasonable conclusions to the inexplicable presence and excitement with which Billy Mays screams at us about ordinary household products we can find in any store: (1) he’s never had any other television gigs except his screaming commercials, so he’s very, very happy to have the work; or (2) he is wealthy and pays the sponsors to use him.

I suppose I should be happy he doesn’t have one of those fake British accents some of these TV snake oil salesmen evidence. Apparently some consumers, who can’t tell a phony British accent when they hear it, believe a badly presented London accent makes a product less mundane and more regal. How regal can something be which picks up lint or dust? Does The Queen use these products while dusting Buckingham Palace?

I imagine Her Majesty, flanked by those guards at the Palace, busying herself with tidying up the mansion for visits from other nobility, such as Sir Elton John or Sir Paul McCartney. Royalty! Hundreds of years of inbreeding, with no reason to exist other than to fulfill the emotional needs of gullible English citizens cherishing a past that never really was.

Changing the channel is just about our only option to avoid those annoying commercials when they blast suddenly and loudly into our homes. Of course, there is always yelling back, which I must admit I do with a certain glee.

© 2009, Pappy Moore, All Rights Reserved.

Pappy Moore is a humorist, a native son of East Texas who still makes the piney woods his home.

oaktreefm58@hotmail.com

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