The television commercial I dislike most

...has nothing whatever to do with pharmaceutical companies that try to use you and me as their shills to persuade physicians to prescribe their products (as I described in the preceding post), and everything to do with cat food.

I must tread carefully here as I know there are several lovers of cats among the readers of this blog. Let me be clear. I do not dislike cats. In fact, there are three of them -- Gracie, Smokey, and Bandit -- who live with people whose formative years were spent with Mrs. RWP and me, and I myself had a yellow cat we called Kitty (okay, we never settled on a name) during my own formative years. My problem is not with cats. My problem is with one particular cat food company's commercial.

THE SCENE: A woman is sitting on a large upholstered sofa, reading a book. A cat is sitting partly on the back of the sofa and partly on the woman's shoulder. The woman's head is snuggled against the cat, and vice versa.

THE DIALOGUE:
Girl's voice (offscreen): "Mom!"
Woman snuggling with cat: "Yeah?"
Girl's voice (offscreen): "I fell!"
Woman snuggling with cat: "There are bandages in the cabinet."
Girl's voice (offscreen): "I'm bleeding!"
Woman snuggling with cat: "Grab two."

The woman makes no attempt to move and help the girl; she stays put on the sofa with her cat. To me, the rest of the commercial is immaterial. The product, Sheba® cat food, is something I would never buy for my cat, if I had a cat. I am highly offended that the makers of this commercial must think it is cute that a woman prefers snuggling with her cat to getting up and checking on her bleeding daughter, or that cat-owning potential buyers of their product will think it is cute that a woman prefers snuggling with her cat to getting up and checking on her bleeding daughter and that they will rush out to buy the product. I for one would never give them one cent of my money.

Ever.

I feel even more negative about this product than I do toward Teresa Heinz Kerry's ketchup.

If you wish, you may now try to show me where I am wrong.

Do you make product choices based on facts (the quality of the ingredients or workmanship) or on emotion (you like the commercial)?

Ask your doctor about...

I suppose this doesn't happen in the United Kingdom and other places where television is commercial-free, but in the good old U S of A commercials are ubiquitous (for readers in Alabama, that means everywhere) and thus a never-ending source of irritation.

Commercials that particularly offend my sensibilities are the ones hawking the wares of the big pharmaceutical companies, telling viewers to "ask your doctor about" this medicine or that. Here is a list of just a few of them that I gathered last evening in the short space of three hours:

vraylar
latuda
ozempic
dupixent
solara
ingrezza
prolia
tepezza
entresto
xeljanz
kerasal
nurtec odt
fasenra
opdivo + yervoy
jardiance
rinvoq
sunos
nuplazid

and there are many others I could name if I had the patience to sit and wait for them to appear.

Because they will [appear]. But I don't [have the patience].

I will put what really galls me, sets me off, "gets my goat" about these commercials into the form of a question.

Why do the makers of these drugs -- known affectionately or otherwise as Big Pharma -- market them directly to the great unwashed hordes of viewers (i.e., the patients) instead of to the medical community (i.e., the ones who do the actual prescribing of the aforementioned drugs)? Why?

It makes no sense. I suppose the answer is that this method works for their company's bottom line, or as both Cuba Gooding Jr. and Thomas Cruise Mapother IV said in the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire, "Show me the money". Other lines from that film include "You had me at hello" and "You complete me" but they are not germane to this post.

I would no more dream of asking my doctor about various possible medicinal remedies for what ails me than I would perform surgery. After all, the doctor is the one who went to school for all those years and spent all the money for tuition and deferred any compensation for a decade and gathered all the knowledge that makes it possible for him or her to make the big bucks today. (Again, this is a foreign concept to readers in the U.K., where they have the NHS).

Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments. Your theories are as valid as mine. Probably more so.

Nostalgia ain't all it's cracked up to be

From 1965 until 1975, a sitcom called Till Death Us Do Part ran on British television. Its success inspired similar shows in several other countries, including All in the Family in the United States from 1971 to 1979. All in the Family starred Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton in the roles of Archie Bunker and Edith Bunker, respectively, and every episode began with the two of them sitting at their piano, singing this song:

Boy, the way Glenn Miller played
Songs that made The Hit Parade,
Guys like us, we had it made,
Those were the days!

And you knew where you were then,
Girls were girls and men were men.
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

Didn't need no welfare state,
Everybody pulled his weight.
Gee, our old LaSalle ran great,
Those were the days!

It has now been more than 50 years since Archie and Edith began singing that song. The wonderful days they longed for and missed so much included the years of the Stock Market Crash, the Great Depression, and World War II.

The days many people today seem to long for include the Korean Conflict, the VietNam War, the urban riots during the Civil Rights movement, the AIDS scare. One can almost envision a few years down the road that millennials will be looking back with fondness on good old days like September 11, 2001.

Time plays tricks on people. Many human beings seem to remember only the good and forget the bad, while others do just the opposite, emphasizing the bad and ignoring the good. It is my opinion that both groups are unrealistic in their approaches to living. I will leave it to others to help both groups work out their mental health problems.

I, of course, have the answer. For a dose of real nostalgia, the good kind, let us return to the days of yesteryear (that's a phrase from The Lone Ranger radio program if you didn't know) and go back to the school playground, as we did in this post from 2014.

Now that I think about it, grade-school recess wasn't always such fun either. I distinctly remember Sidney Usleton sneaking up on me every day during recess in the second grade and choking me from behind. This lasted until I mentioned it at home, at which time my Dad showed me a little jujitsu move he had learned in the Navy that sent Sidney Usleton packing. He never bothered me again. I think our teacher, Miss Elizabeh Nash (younger sister of Miss Erma, the principal) was oblivious to the whole situation.

Do you have good memories or bad memories from grade school?

In which the author attempts to write a villanelle

A villanelle, in case you have never heard of one, is a type of poem. Specifically, it is a poem made up of 19 lines arranged into five tercets (3-line stanzas) and a final quatrain (4-line stanza). The ends of lines are rhymed in the following way, where 'a' represents one set of rhymes and 'b' represents another:

aba aba aba aba aba abaa

But that alone does not make it a villanelle. There's more.

All of line 1 is repeated word for word as line 6, line 12, and line 18. All of line 3 is repeated word for word as line 9, line 15, and line 19.

Easy-peasy, right? Simple as falling off a log.

In a word, no.

The best-known villanelle ever written is probably "Do not go gentle into that good night" by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953):

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Here is another villanelle, "The House on the Hill" by an earlier poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935):

They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray
Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.

You may note that the lines in the first poem are longer than the lines in the second one. There is no hard and fast rule about line length in a villanelle. Robinson used iambic trimeter; Thomas used iambic pentameter.

So anyway, friends, I threw caution to the winds this week and tried to write a villanelle of my own. Writing one sounds very hard to do, but actually trying to write one is even harder than it sounds. My poem looks incomplete, but I'm thinking of leaving it as is and calling it "Villanelle, Unfinished":

Who plucks a rose will know the prick of thorn.
Along with pleasure, one encounters pain.
Sometimes one wishes one had not been born.

No flock is fleeced till every sheep is shorn,
And those in charge regard all with disdain.
Who plucks a rose will know the prick of thorn.

The midnight calmly waits for coming morn,
The victims bide their time and live with pain;
Sometimes one wishes one had not been born.

...forlorn
...remain
Who plucks a rose will know the prick of thorn.

...torn
...contain
Sometimes one wishes one had not been born.

...adorn
...explain
Who plucks a rose will know the prick of thorn.
Sometimes one wishes one had not been born.

Any and all suggestions you might have (including throwing it away) will be graciously received, even though no poem was ever written by a committee. Having said that, I am reminded of having read the following also:

1. A camel is a horse put together by a committee.

2. A committee is a group of people, none of whom can make it on Thursday.

I must tell you before ending this post that today would have been the 115th birthday of Clifford Ray "Ted" Brague, who was born in Tomah, Monroe County, Wisconsin in 1906. He was the man who raised me, my Dad, though not my bio-Dad. I do not think of him as my stepfather. He is the only father I ever knew. His name is on my birth certificate although he is not my biological father. His name was put on my birth certificate when I was 5 or 6, although he didn't adopt me legally that I am aware of. I did not like living under his authority. I feared him greatly. I hated him for a long time because of the way he treated my mother and the way he treated me. I suppose he was a good man doing the best he could, but he had many flaws, as do we all. I have forgiven him. It is water under the bridge.

Trying to describe the relationship between my mother and my father brings to mind something Sir Walter Scott wrote in 1808:

O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!

There is no connection between my villanelle and my relationship with my Dad as far as I know, although a psychiatrist might believe otherwise. I do find it interesting, however, given my history, that the villanelles by Dylan Thomas and Edwin Arlington Robinson became two of my favorite poems.

If someone ever thinks I need to be placed in a lunatic asylum (which phrase is no longer politically correct), this post might actually serve as evidence.

My muse must have taken the last couple of weeks off

... and gone to Florida on vacation or something, because I cannot think of one solitary thing to write about. Well, that is not exactly true, Mabel. I thought of several things to write about and started off with high hopes, only to end in despair. I gave up on each one of them as a bad job, and discarded them all, gave them the old heave-ho. Had I been writing with an actual pen on actual paper instead of pecking away on this keyboard, there would be by now a large and growing pile of crumpled-up paper balls in the corner of the room, my inability to toss anything through the basketball hoop neé wastebasket in my office being legendary. Michael Jordan I am not, or Larry Bird, or Kobe Bryant, or Wilt Chamberlain, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Heck, Mabel, I'm not even LeBron James.

We are apparently in the midst of creating a new tradition at our house. For the third Sunday in a row we have not turned the television set on. The silence is wonderful, only it is not really so silent. I can hear the clock on the mantel ticking, and the grandfather clock competing with it from across the room, and the refrigerator running in the kitchen. I can hear the dog next door barking, and a little girl walking past our house talking to someone else, and our little dog Abby breathing as she sleeps in my arms. It is absolutely amazing what one can hear when one's television set is turned off. I remember reading several years ago that Larry Hagman -- surely you remember him, Mabel, he was the actor who played J.R. Ewing on Dallas and he was also in real life the son of Mary Martin of South Pacific fame, that Larry Hagman -- did not speak at all on Sundays because he wanted to rest his vocal cords, but he did whistle. Seems counter-productive to me, but what do I know?

When the well runs dry and the muse is away, there's always trivia.

I suppose young people today do not even know who Mary Martin is, or rather was, but she was the original Nellie Forbush in Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific on Broadway in 1949, the original Peter Pan in their Peter Pan in 1954, and the original Maria von Trapp in their The Sound of Music in 1959. She was not Anna in their The King and I, that was Gertrude Lawrence, nor was she in Carousel or Oklahoma!, but there for a while she helped Rodgers and Hammerstein make a lot of money. If people think of those musicals nowadays at all, they probably think of the film versions, not the theatrical productions. Mitzi Gaynor played Nellie Forbush in the film version of South Pacific instead of Mary Martin, and Rossano Brazzi played Emil de Becque instead of Ezio Pinza, although Giorgio Tozzi dubbed all the singing that was supposed to be Rosanno Brazzi.

No one has ever explained to my satisfaction why a French planter named Emil de Becque would be portrayed by an Italian non-acting singer in the theater and an Italian non-singing actor in the film version.

Moving right along on our stroll down memory lane, in the film version of The Sound of Music Julie Andrews famously had the role of Maria von Trapp instead of Mary Martin and many theater people were appalled. What goes around comes around, though. Several years later after Julie Andrews played Eliza Doolittle in Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady on Broadway, Audrey Hepburn was chosen to play Eliza in the film version (this time Marni Nixon dubbed the singing) and many theater people were appalled once again.

Why I remember this knd of stuff instead of, say, the last 25 winners of football's Heisman trophy or the last 25 Final Four in basketball's annual March Madness or the last 25 winners of the Kentucky Derby is anybody's guess. By the way, a horse named Medina Spirit won the Kentucky Derby last Saturday afternoon in what amounted to an equine version of the Final Four as you can see right here (0:44).

Speaking of whistling, Mabel, did you know there is a kind of whistling that does not involve the lips? Well, there is and it is called laryngeal whistling. Here, in fact, is an article about it from the late 19th-century, a presentation made by a Dr. J.O. Roe, MD, to the 1881 session of the American Laryngological Association in Rochester, New York.

You must admit, folks, that I go to great lengths to keep you entertained, even when my muse is on vacation.