Commercials During Football Games Drive Me Crazy!

We have too many cars!

Well, Sam’s just gone to bed. Kathleen’s upstairs practicing on her recorder (flute-like thing). Time to write a blog about something that irks us, makes us nostalgic, makes us laugh out loud, or just seems too weird to be true.

TV and radio commercials generally irk me off. I know it’s necessary to run lots of ads in order to pay the over-inflated salaries of actors and actresses, sportscasters and pro athletes, but good grief! I never knew that football games – especially important playoff games – afforded advertisers so many “natural” breaks in the action to peddle their wares. I’ve long groused about the number of commercials aired between scenes of a movie – I’ve counted up to a dozen – but how can there be enough time between possessions in a football game for six (count ‘em, six!) commercials? Good grief! It isn’t bad enough my guts get tied up in knots during a Seahawks game where they’re doing their darndest to lose, but how many times is it moral to hang me on the sharp petard of suspense while I’m regaled with reasons to buy beer, chips, new cars or whatever.

Speaking of cars, how many of those things do we need? How can we puzzle so hard over the solutions to the deleterious effects of smog and global warming when the simple solution may be to get rid of so many motor vehicles? On my little cull-d-sac alone, where there are 13 houses, we have 39 (count ‘em, 39) vehicles. You can do the math, but that adds up to more than two vehicles per household!

Then I’m watching TV tonight (multi-tasking) when one local car dealer brags that it has eight acres of cars for people to choose from. Eight acres! Another dealer advertises that is has 400 cars on its lot. Multiply the number of vehicles those two dealers are trying to foist off on us times all the car dealers in this country and it absolutely boggles the mind. I confess I’m not ready to give up my two vehicles – I might have to walk or ride my bicycle (although Sam likes the bicycle), but dealers just keep pushing cars on us and they brag about setting new sales records!

Sadly, with the price of gasoline going down, people are going to be tempted to buy even more cars, and possibly less fuel-efficient cars. I can’t help hoping – like many of you – that just as the Seahawks pulled a miracle out of their helmets this past Sunday, that we’ll be able to pull a miracle out of our hats and find a solution to all this cars clogging our planet. Scientists have announced several times recently that it seems likely there are more planets like ours out there in the universe, so maybe when we’ve totally overpopulated our little orb with vroom-vrooms, we can just escape to somewhere else. I’m not counting on that day and frankly, I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see it, but who knows?