Tikkabik

As someone who watches a lot more TV than he should, I realize that marketers feed the American public buckets of horseshit as fast as they can shovel on a constant, round-the-clock basis, and I'm fairly immune to it. But every so often there's something that just pisses me off for some reason. The latest source of my angst is what I like to call the Magic Spread.

You see the Magic Spread every so often in ads for margarine products and bakery goods like english muffins. The formula goes something like this: Take some pastry -- a fluffy muffin, perhaps, or a delicately toasted english muffin. Using a team of advanced special effects technicians, carefully apply a swirl of margarine to it that looks carelessly yet perfectly applied. Now, while shooting the ad, have a hand model, butter-knife in hand, pretend to spread the margarine over the surface of the pastry while never actually making contact with either the margarine or the pastry. Now they've even started putting in audio effects to make it sound like the knife is scraping over the surface of the pastry.

I don't know why it bugs me so much -- maybe because it's pantomime, and, well, I fucking hate pantomime. Maybe it's just because I know most of the advertising I see is crap -- it's just that some of it is so much more obvious.