Ha ha! Fun is hardly the word! I don’t know about you, but I’m going to be waiting on tenterhooks until the big moment comes when the Quaker Oats Co., in a national press conference, finally reveals what “tenterhooks” are. No, seriously, they’re going to reveal who Mikey is, so that the thousands of people who wrote to them about this important matter can go back to learning how to eat with real utensils.
Speaking of adorable and talented young actors whose moving commercial performances have tugged at the heartstrings of our minds, I wonder whatever happened to that little boy who used to do the Oscar Mayer commercials. Remember? The one who claimed his baloney had a first name, and it was O-S-C-A-R? I wonder if that child didn’t run into problems later in life. (“OK, pal. You and Oscar there are under arrest.”).
Another commercial personality I was wondering about is the man who used to promote Ti-D-bol brand automatic commode freshener by rowing his boat around inside the tank of a giant toilet. I mean, it must have been difficult for him, going back to normal life after having reached a show business pinnacle like that. So I called the Knomark company, which makes Ti-D-bol, and I found out an amazing fact: The role of the original Ti-D-bol man was played by none other than “Miami Vice” ‘s Don Johnson! Isn’t that an incredible celebrity gossip tidbit? I hope to see it reprinted in leading supermarket tabloids everywhere, although in the interest of fairness and objectivity I should point out that I just now made it up.
The actual truth, according to Bill Salmon, Knomark’s marketing director, is that there were a number of Ti-D-bol men. “The Ti-D-bol man,” he said, “was anybody who put on the blazer and the white hat and got in the boat.” The current Ti-D-bol man, he said, is a cartoon character who remains on dry land. “Right now he is not in a toilet tank in a rowboat, but that does not mean we would not use the Ti-D-bol man in the tank again at a future time,” Salmon stressed.
By the way, I was disappointed to learn from Salmon that the rowboat commercials were done with trick photography, meaning there never was a 50-foot-high toilet. I think they should build one, as a promotional concept. Wouldn’t that be great? They could split the cost with the jolly Green Giant. I bet he sure could use it. I bet he’s making a mess out of his valley. Ho ho ho!
I found our next news item in the Weekly World News, a leading supermarket tabloid, and it is just so wonderful that I will reprint it verbatim:
“The Coca-Cola Company has changed the name of its soft drink in China after discovering the words mean ‘bite the wax tadpole’ in Chinese.”
I called Coca-Cola, and a woman named Darlene confirmed this item. She also said the company decided to go with a different name over in China, which I think is crazy. “Bite the Wax Tadpole” is the best name I ever heard for a soft drink. Think of the commercials:
(The scene opens uP with a boy in a Little League uniform, looking very sad. His father walks up.)
FATHER: What’s the matter, Son? SON: (bursting into tears): Oh Dad, I struck out and lost the big game.
(Sobs.) FATHER (putting his arm around the boy’s shoulders): Hey! Forget it! Let’s have a nice cold can of Bite the Wax Tadpole! SON: And then I murdered a policeman.
The Rules
Recently I read this news item stating that the U.S. Senate Finance Committee had printed up 4,500 copies of a 452-page document with every single word crossed out. The Senate Finance Committee did this on purpose. It wasn’t the kind of situation where they got the document back from the printer and said: “Hey, Every single word in this document is crossed out! We’re going to fire the zitbrain responsible for this!” No. A 452-page document with all the words crossed out was exactly what the Senate Finance Committee wanted.
This news item intrigued me. I said to myself: There has to be a logical explanation for this. So I called Washington, D.C., and over the course of an afternoon I spoke to, I don’t know, maybe 15 or 20 people, and sure enough it turned out there was an extremely logical explanation: The Senate Finance Committee was following the Rules. As well it should. You have to have rules. This is true in government just as much as in sports. Think what professional baseball would be like if the pitcher could just throw the ball right at the batter whenever he felt like it, or the batter could turn around after a called third strike and try to whomp a major cavity in the umpire’s skull. It would be great. I’d buy season tickets. But you can’t have that kind of behavior in your government. This is why, back when we bombed Libya, the Reagan administration made such a large point of the fact that we were not trying to kill Moammar Khadafy. I think most of us average citizens had assumed, since the administration had been going around announcing that it had absolute proof that Khadafy was an international baby-murdering scumball, that the whole point of the raid was to kill him, and although we didn’t want to see innocent persons hurt, we certainly wouldn’t have minded if say a half dozen fatal bombs had detonated inside Moammar’s personal tent.
So I, for one, was quite surprised when right after the raid, President Reagan himself said, and this is a direct quote: “We weren’t out to kill anybody.” My immediate reaction, when I read this statement, was to assume that this was another of those unfortunate instances where the president’s advisers, caught up in the excitement of planning a major military operation, had forgotten to advise the president about it. But then other top administration officials started saying the same thing, that we weren’t trying to kill anybody, and specifically we weren’t trying to kill Khadafy. you following this? We announced we have proof the guy is a murderer; we announce that we are by God going to Do Something about it; we have large military airplanes fly over there and drop bombs all over his immediate vicinity; but we weren’t trying to kill him. You want to know why? I’ll tell you why: The Rules.
That’s right. It turns out that we have this law, signed in 1976 by Gerald Ford, who coincidentally also pardoned Richard M. Nixon, under which it is illegal for our government to assassinate foreign leaders. So we can’t just hire a couple of experienced persons named Vito for 100 grand to sneak over there one night in dark clothing and fill up Moammar’s various breathing apertures with plumber’s putty. No, that would be breaking a Rule. So what we do is spend several hundred million dollars to crank up the entire Sixth Fleet and have planes fly over from as far away as England, not to mention that we lose a couple of airmen, to achieve the purpose of not killing Moammar Khadafy. We did kill various other random Libyans, but that is OK, under the Rules. Gerald Ford signed nothing to protect them.
OK? Everybody understand the point here? The point is: You have to follow the Rules. Without Rules, you would have anarchy.
And that is exactly why the Senate Finance Committee had to print up 4,500 copies of a 452-page document with every single word crossed out. What this document was, originally, was the tax-reform bill passed by the House of Representatives. It seemed the Senate Finance Committee didn’t like it, so they wrote a whole new bill, with all different words. Their new bill is 1,489 pages long. Also they wrote another 1,124 pages to explain how it works. (Sounds like our new reformed tax system is going to be mighty simple, all right! I can’t wait!)