Divisions and Precisions

Oh dear god

I just saw a commercial for Special K that tells folks they could lose a pant size in 3 weeks ("are you ready for fall fashions?" they ask) simply by replacing two meals a day with a bowl of cereal. Is this because Special K is a magical weight loss cereal? Of course not, but that's what's implied.

Special K has officially joined Subway in the "Buy more of our product and you will become magically skinny!" hall of shame. The newest way to increase your sales is to tout your product--whatever your product is--as a way to lose weight. How long before toothpaste and dish detergent can make us skinny?

It's so blatantly obvious. You'd think that people would see through it. You know, some reasoning process that says, "Hey, they're only telling me this so I double the amount of their cereal I buy in a week!" But it doesn't happen, because those commercials come during news reports that trumpet hysterical figures about how obesity is killing us all. (Figures, by the way, which are often misleading.)

It irritates me and frustrates me, particularly now that I'm trying to be less of a motionless lump and more of a health-oriented person. In my more paranoid moments, I have to stop and wonder how long it will be before fat people get rounded up into forced fat camps for the "good of society". With all the reports about how my body size is destroying civilization as we know it and costing my neighbor billions of dollars, I figure it can't be long.