Tikkabik

Foxwoods Casino does a lot of advertising in our region. No wonder -- it's one of the few places in this entire part of the country where people can gamble, legally, outside of off-track betting houses and dog and horse tracks. It's a popular vacation spot for locals, and they and their competitors, Mohegan Sun (two Native American-owned casinos) heavily seed the local airwaves with television ads to draw people in.

Mohegan Sun's ad campaign, curiously, seems to focus on normal everyday people who start hallucinating they're at Mohegan Sun, or at Mohegan Sun and thinking about being somewhere else. A fellow watching the numbers spin on a gas pump, for example, thinks about one-armed bandits; another woman imagines herself to be rock-climbing a massive precipice someplace, only to come to her senses as she discovers she's actually scaled some kind of abstract architectural art object at Mohegan Sun.

But Foxwoods easily earns the prize for the most irritating ads, thanks to a catchy jingle called "The Wonder of It All" sung by jazz standards singer John Pizzarelli and a big band. The song is just catchy and Dean Martinesque enough to drill itself into your skull and wrap around your brain-strem like a Ceti Eel from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

The ad basically gives you a check Pizzarelli and the band can't cash -- that is, convincing you that a trip to Foxwoods will be a fantasy that will take you out of your dreary existence and transport you to a shimmering world of glamour and beauty. That's right. One roll of the dice and you're on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, baby -- champagne wishes and caviar dreams.

Somehow, though, the warped and twisted madmen who run Foxwoods' marketing campaign have found a way to make it even more irritating: Little people dressed as leprechauns, frolicking gayly at Foxwoods, bouncing merrily on the bed, drinking and carousing in the clubs, and generally having fun. And a cover of "The Wonder of It All" sung by someone who sounded like a backup singer for Alvin and the Chipmunks, with the lyrics slightly altered to suit the subject material.

I had hoped this was a fever-dream brought on by some spoiled New England Boiled Dinner and Guinness served for St. Patrick's Day, but alas, no. It is all too real. Then I figured it was only going to be on for a week or two to celebrate St. Paddy's -- a big deal in this region because of the big population of Irish-Americans.

Here we are, though, mid-way into April, and the damn things continue.

God hates me.