It rubs the Jello pudding pops on its skin

Last night we watched a little TV. “Last Comic Standing,” to be all up and up about it. They’d show a few minutes of the entertainment, then a few minutes of commercials. I swear to God, it seemed like the mix was exactly 50/50. Probably not, but it sure felt like it! We finally got sick enough to turn the damn thing off and go to bed.

I guess we won’t know who made it through to the finals until later. Hell, maybe we’ll never know. Horrors! How will we ever survive The Not Knowing?!?!?!?!?

After the mind-numbing hell of the commercials, we’d finally be returned to the show. As the entertainment continued, there, at the bottom of our screen, the asshole characters from some future show would dance and cavort around like escaped mental patients, trying to remind us that there are other shows in the universe besides the one we were currently watching. I’d wager that fully one-third of the screen was consumed by this bullshit. Advertisers know that movement draws the attention of the eye. As usual they are subtle as ever. Look for a new troupe of epileptics to start hawking products soon.

That’s the rub, isn’t it? We all already know that. We know there are something like 3,000 television channels now. And we all know by now, we’ve been sufficiently trained, that we’ll never, never, ever watch a show on the telly without having details about the next shows shoved down our motherfucking gullets.

We get that. It’s a sad fact of life if you choose to watch the idiot box. It’s called that for a reason.

We know other things, too. Like that you’ll pump up the volume on commercials until our ears bleed. (See: CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW!!!) Subtlety doesn’t count for jack shit when you have the ability to sacrifice my quality of life in the pursuit of lining your pockets with a few more pieces of silver. Got it, old chap!

So today I’m on the internet and reading Google News. I clicked a link I found compelling and was taken to the Washington Post web site. I don’t know if they are especially notorious about this or not, but that’s the site where it happened.

Before I could get to the promise land of Content I was forced to watch a television commercial. That’s when it hit me.

I was being forced to watch advertising before I was taken to a web page that just happens to be crammed to the gills with … guess what? More fucking advertising! Talk about double-dipping. That’s like paying $5 for a gallon of milk at the register, then paying another $5 at the exit for the privilege of taking it outside of the store.

Some future shock predictions that we can look forward to:

• The ability to sell ad space on the inside of your eye lids.
• Advertising on the walls of your home.
• Logos visible from the surface of the moon.
• Whoring out the name of your city.
• Printing commercials on the surface of the food you eat.
• Subliminal advertising beamed 24/7 as radiation across the whole planet.
• Product tattoos on your forehead.

Don’t worry. It’s no big deal what you have to endure as long as some asshole is getting rich.

Meanwhile I finally went to a web site known as MyLife.com and attempted to opt-out from their bullshit. Mind you that I’ve never visited this web site before or signed up for anything. I clicked the “Unsubscribe” link in their email and found, amazingly, that I was already subscribed to all of this bullshit:

• New Member Alerts: Notify me whenever new members join My Groups.
• Birthday Alerts: Remind me whenever a contact has a birthday.
• Special Offers: Notify me of special offers for MyLife services.
• Tips & Tricks: Send me tips & tricks on new and existing features.
• Partner Offers: Send me offers from selected marketing partners.

Each and every one of these “notifications” was turned on by default, for a site that I’d never even visited before!

Someone kindly direct me to the “opt-out forever for everything” checkbox. MyLife? What a friggin’ joke.