What a wonderful world..
Now Playing: Queen: Bohemian Rhapsodie (with some help from Mike Myers)
Topic: Grunts, rants, and others
Television! The number one disseminator of misinformation, and not just in this US of A. However, the American networks seem to push this maxim to an all-time high nearly every night. And that's just the advertising.

During a recent bout of boredom yours truly took to a bit of channel-surfing. Do that in any given locale in this wondrous country and you are bound to come across a considerable quantity of advertising spots, most of them more entertaining than the program features interrupting the commercial airwaves. And not just on the greedy networks: with a very few notable exceptions the supposedly ad-free cable channels dilute their services with plenty of self-congratulatory campaigns. Naturally, each of them revels in hyperbole and similarly excesses, forever trying to outdo the competition.

Perhaps the most entertaining segments are the spots showing of the wonders of modern-day pharmaceuticals. Small wonder this is a pill-popping nation par excellence! One miracle drug after the other blares its miraculous cures on the air night after night - all followed by officially required disclaimers. And it is right at this moment they tend to hit the funny bone. For each and everyone of them comes along with as many (and often more) side-effects than cures. I am certain that one day there will be an all-curing laxative whose "mild" side-effect will include the demise of its user! Not surprising thus that such pharmacology is often followed by spots enlightening the viewing public to its need for life insurance - in particular for those viewers over fifty - since their rather expensive death looms just around the corner.

The car industry is, of course, equally bold in its overstatements: miles-per-gallon ratios are the latest gimmick to sell vehicles to the ill-informed and utterly confused. Strange and surely bogus ratings, paid-for-awards, and even the ever silent crash test dummies are all employed in what a conspiracy theorist might call the ultimate scheme of schemes: keeping everyone it perpetual debt.

In that the mobility manufacturers are greatly aided by the credit card companies, with American Express and MasterCard leading the mob. Were you to believe them, nearly everything would be "priceless". Still when it comes to outright lies and misinformation none are more culpable than the communications companies. Be it mobile phone services or cable providers, they all excel in overstating their case well beyond the bounds of truth in advertising by simply applying an old, old advertising trick: compare apples to oranges and you cannot be found guilty of actually lying - you are just not telling the facts.

In the end it was an amusing, albeit not to be repeated half hour. Boredom gone I turned to reading a sci-fi paperback (by none other than Terry Pratchet) - at least there the fiction is guaranteed to be just that. Fiction.