Waiting for Gouda

It’s baseball season, and I gotta tell ya, I have CAUGHT THE FEVER!

That’s right, I am contagious people. Stand back! I have the baseball fever. Do not get too close, and for God’s sake, do not try to kiss me. (You know you want to.)

Just ask my Lovely Wife ^TM… she also seems a tad feverish. But that might just be allergies from ALL OF THESE GODDAMN CATS.

I don’t know why MLB did away with their “Baseball Fever… Catch It!” slogan. Honestly, I’ve always thought campaigns that compare your goods or services to a communicable disease are quite successful. Who can forget the ingenious slogan “Put the ‘Hi’ back in HIV with AT&T!” or SlimFast’s brilliant “Almost as Good As Catching Malaria!”

Anyway, my Sox are off to a decent start, although I am not optimistic. That is just how we southsiders roll. (Yes, I live on the north side. So what.) No need to get your hopes up. If you get too excited about things, you end up sounding like a Cubs fan, and nobody likes Cubs fans. Not even themselves.

But this is not what I want to talk about.

Now that baseball is back, I find myself listening to an awful lot of AM radio. A terrible lot. An unhealthy amount, I bet. The worst part of listening to all the games is that there is a total of approximately seven radio commercials that they have to play. Between every half- inning. Of every game. All summer long.

White Sox baseball is brought to you by Miller Brewing Company. And this year, someone at Miller sat up and said, “Hey, let’s take a traditional Mexican beverage and totally bastardize it and see if the gringos will buy it.” And so the Miller Chill was born.

Beer with salt in it. Holy crap, does that sound bad. And I pretty much LOVE salt. But who wants a salty beverage? Doesn’t that completely run against the point of drinking something? Is there substance in the world that sounds less refreshing than salt? The answer is no. And this is why you can’t trust anyone who drinks margaritas or any kind of drink where you roll the glass in salt. These people clearly have no idea what the hell they’re doing.

On the other hand, though, I do like pouring alcohol on my popcorn, so maybe it all evens out.

But this is not what I want to talk about.

The radio commercials for Miller Chill are without a doubt the absolute worst auditory assaults I have ever experienced. I want to rip my ears off and stuff the bloody cartilage bits down into the holes remaining on the side of my head. The commercials consist of some young hipster douchebag telling us all about how he and his oh-so-cool douchebag friends spend their evenings. You know, hanging out. Talking. Telling jokes. Drinking salt.

Maybe I could stomach hearing this moron seventeen times in a three hour span… maybe, mind you… if he weren’t spinning his riveting yarns IN THE FORM OF CRAPPY BEAT POETRY. At least, I think it’s supposed to be beat poetry. I don’t know… it’s whatever you would call it when some hipster douchebag stands up in a smoky coffeehouse, probably in a beret, possibly wearing black nail polish, and spews idiotic lines in… a really halting voice?… that sounds so earnest?… and tries to rhyme but isn’t very good at it?… I’m not sure, maybe it’s a “poetry slam”. Whatever.

So, they’re drinking beer, and listening to music, and O.M.G. it is like, totally cool. And it rhymes, sort of. And I hate them all. All of these too cool people and their retarded salt beverages. Burn in advertising hell.

But this is not what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is this other radio commercial I just heard:

In which Verizon Wireless invites me to join some sort of program that encourages me to “text my thumbs off”.

Um, no thank you. I need those.