Jingle Blahs

Lately I've been getting a lot of commercial jingles stuck in my head.  It's probably just an advance symptom of a malignant brain tumor.  Let's see, there's the "One and only Cheerios" song, which for the longest time I thought was "1-800-Cheerio."  You know, like a hot line or something?  I told my wife that I wished that there really was a number.  I'd call them up and tell them, "Hey, all my Cheerios have got holes in them.  The milk goes right through them!"  She got a kick out of that.  Admittedly, the joke is probably funnier in person.  See, I do this voice and...well anyway, moving on.

Then there's that stupid hhgregg jingle.  "HELP!  I need somebody.  HELP!  I need someone.  HELP!"  Ah, hhgregg.  Not only does your company's name look like the result of two monkeys fucking a typewriter.  Not only do your stores have all the sense of style and presentation of a bombed out warehouse in a third world country.  But now you even have a jingle that perfectly captures the exasperating experience of trying to get a floor salesman's assistance in one of your fine stores.  Your journey to the dark side is complete.  Gee, I can't figure out why you guys aren't giving Best Buy more of a run for their money.

Oh, but the absolute worst of the worst, the destroyer of lives and minds, has to be the song from that Susan G. Komen for the Cure commercial for their breast cancer foundation.  "And it's BOO TEE FULLLL!"  Oh my sweet Lord.  It's so cloying and relentlessly sappy that it actually starts to border on creepy.  It's like listening to the everlasting anguish of a greeting card that someone pushed down a well.  "And it's BOO TEE FULLLL!  It's UNDENI..."  Alright!  I won't deny it.  I won't TRY to deny it.  Just please make it stop or I'll never know peace again.

I get the sense that some people sat around in a boardroom and someone said, "Well breast cancer is a 'women's issue', so for the commercial we'll just yell at women over and over through the TV about how beautiful they are."  Then another guy with a cigar said, "Yeah, the dames eat that stuff up.", and then afterwards they went out for drinks or they wandered off and blew each other in a broom closet or something.  I don't know how these meetings go.  I'll tell you this, though.  Some instinct for self-preservation has kept me from looking directly at the screen whenever that commercial comes on, so I don't know what happens in it, but I'd bet good money that it's just a non-stop supply of cherubs made out of pink toilet paper raining from the sky like a plague on all mankind, just laying waste to everything everywhere.  I can't imagine anything else going with that music.  "And it's BOO TEE FULLLL!"

I guess you could say that these jingles accomplish what they set out to do; they get the brand or the product stuck in your head.  Well, you could try to say that, but I'd probably bludgeon you to death with a hammer before you got half the words out.  And as you swooned in and out of consciousness, just barely aware that I was wrapping you up in a plastic garbage bag and preparing to dump your body down the deepest, darkest, well I could find, the last thing you'd hear just as you were fading off would be that faint song ever so far away, "And it's BOO TEE FULLLL!"  *shivers*