"Emerge Tremfiant" – And other commercials we love to hate

 

An informal poll on Twitter offers small comfort that you’re not alone when it comes to gritting your teeth through the half-dozen or more commercials that assault you between segments of any television program. Marketers lie awake at night trying to determine how to reach the lowest of the low with their nonsensical story lines, bad dancing (so much bad dancing!), and jingles guaranteed to create never-ending earworms. And then they believe that by airing them once every 5 minutes, we’ll buy their products.

It didn’t have to be this bad

 

 

Really. It didn't.

Thanks to the utter ignorance of a collection of tRump-adoring states mired in conspiracy theories, we’ve experienced another surge of COVID, delta flavor. We no sooner dared to shed our masks when the surge reared its head again. Now, as fall kicks, in we’re still ambivalent. Kids are back to school in person, masked (for the most part, amid bitching anti-maskers). In-person meetings are resuming. Restaurants are open for in-person dining. Things seem pretty much under control here in Connecticut with the infection rate hovering around 2 percent, though the clusterfuck continues in primarily Red states. 

Writing is the hardest thing I do

My trusty iMac

I don’t really know why I write. I don’t write quickly, except when I’m really pissed off or on a rant.

I’m a lousy typist. In college I was wedded to erasable typing paper, and later to the correcting tape in the IBM Selectric. I would take illegible notes; later I learned to transcribe quickly after interviews while I could still understand them. I still take illegible notes.