Double Hamster on The Rocks

Days like this are made for television. Five hundred channels. Five hundred places to go. Most of those places are devoted to discount espresso machines and collectible plates but they are still places to go. I’d like to take a tour of the QVC headquarters. I could walk on stage and make my own commercial for a coffee grinder or a healing bracelet made from the ankle bones of a rare Burmese python. The trick is that I’d need to be able to wax on about it for hours. Spend an afternoon watching a telesales channel and you’ve been exposed to the equivalent of an entire college course on a particular home exercise device.

I’m not sure how the announcers manage to talk about a single subject for six hours at a time. How do they come up with material? Do they stand there panicking with a rictus smile, thinking say something, say something, say something, anything, please, I’ve never used these Elvis themed barbells, who cares that you can use them as a Karaoke device, help, I’ve been captured by aliens, send word to my family… or do they pop pills like we pop powerbars? They make the NPR fundraisers look like amateurs by comparison. Senate leaders train at QVC. The show producers offer finishing courses in filibuster.

Sometimes I think to myself that the telesales channel vendors are trying to tell me something; that they are trying to send encoded messages that too dangerous to deliver directly. The president of a foreign country has been kidnapped and the kidnappers are even now tunneling under the CERN accelerator in Switzerland, intending to steal the electron beam gun for purposes too terrible to mention. A knifemaker at the Ginzu factory in Taiwan has stumbled across this plot but is trapped in a basement at the Brazilian embassy and has been reduced to encoding secret messages on the knives he’s forced to produce in order to mask his absence from the factory. His last hope: that the QVC agents who advertise the knives will relay his messages to the right people at Interpol. Knives are received at the recording studio but the counterplot will unravel if the kidnappers, who are obsessed with commemorative Presidential plates, find that the plot is being broadcast. The QVC agents know this and so they cut potatoes ceaselessly using one of the new paring knives made at the Brazilian embassy. Freeze frame the prepped potatoes in the colander and you’ll see the circuit diagrams for the electron gun. The telesales actors relay the message endlessly while chattering on about antibacterial knife handles. Secret agents are all around us. You just need to know where to look.

brain haziness is one of the worst feelings. your bout of it is probably from that game of trivial pursuit last week--all of the thoughts were sucked out of your brain. it's barbaric, really.

It's true. I've been cutting my bread into miniature triangles all week long. Then I'm forced to retrieve the triangles from the toaster using tweezers. Order of operations problem, I think.