OK, well, JK Parkin, the Central Mailer for Phoenix keeps going on about how great this blogger thing is, and how we should all check it out, and how useful it's gonna be for bringing that quaint, old-fashioned thing called an APA into the 21st century. So I thought, fine, I'd try playing around with it. Get familiar with it. Maybe use it as an outlet for all the random thoughts that go floating around in my head which otherwise stay uselessly locked up inside my skull.

I've called this thing "Maximum Verbosity," which was the name of one of my Phoenix zines, which in turn was named after a phrase used in the old Infocom text adventure games. Man, those things were cool. Anyway, I'll doubtless be living up to that title, because once I start doing the random rambling thing, it's damned near impossible to shut me up. Especially when I'm working the night shift and feeling both bored and mentally incoherent due to sleep deprivation. Which, unsurprisingly, happens to be the case tonight.

So, uh, I guess I'll need some random thoughts to start off with, then, won't I? Here's something I've been feeling rather bemused about recently: the music on TV commercials. I was watching TV a couple of weeks ago, and this commercial comes on. And it's one of the cool instrumental bits from Tommy being played over an animated spacescape of stars and planets and whatnot. I'm pretty much grooving on this, even if it is a TV commercial and I normally hate and distrust all TV commercials. And then up pop the words: "Who knows what's out there? Your doctor does," and the name of some prescription drug or other. Upon which my first thought is "What does it do, bring eyesight to the blind?!" Followed by, "Wait a minute, weren't the doctors in Tommy pretty bloody ineffective?" After which the lines:

There's a doctor I've found can bring us all joy
There's a doctor I've found can cure the boy
There's a doctor I've found can CURE THE BOY!

kept running around in my head over and over. Which is probably a really good indication that I've played that album way too many times. I looked up the drug later on, by the way, and it turns out it's an allergy medicine. I'm disappointed. I would have expected it to be some sort of antidepressent or something, at least.

(Btw, is it me, or is there something just too weird about these prescription-drug commercials that don't ever tell you what the drug is actually for? It's just "ask your doctor about Drug X." I just have this image of me going up to my doctor, out of the blue, and asking about Drug X only to find out it's a cure for male pattern hair loss or something.)

Anyway, where was I? Music on TV commercials, right. A few months ago, I heard a familiar song playing over a car commerical, and burst out laughing uncontrollably when I realized it was Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick," a song containing such immortal lyrics as "I may make you feel, but I can't make you think/Your sperm's in the gutter, your love's in the sink." No matter how much I love Jethro Tull, I really don't think that's gonna make me want to go out and buy the car.

Not that commercials are usually very effective on me, anyway. Even good commercials. If I see an ad for 7-Up that makes me feel like, yeah, I could really, really go for a refreshing lemon-lime kinda soda right now, I'll go out and buy a Sprite. Just because I hate feeling like I've been manipulated. (And, yeah, I know, there are ads on this web page. I was really lazy getting it set up, and opted to have the blogger guys host it. I'll probably move it over to my SDC site at some point and spare you the advertising. Or spare me the advertising, since I may be the only one reading this.)

Well, I was gonna go on about the book I'm currently reading (Dune) and how I'm all excited about there being a new epsiode of Farscape this week, and all the other incredibly important matters that are concerning me right at the moment, but I guess that's verbose enough for a first post. And if you're actually reading this, I have only one word for you: Why?

Later!

Betty