I *honestly* do not get it. All the celebrity baby news dominating the airwaves right now. People may be dying by the thousands somewhere, but oooh, so-and-so stubbed her toe! (PICTURES! I NEED PICTURES!)

I can see admiring someone--like, say, Mojo--for their innate talents or unusually kind demeanor. But aside from buying a teeny-bopper fan book about David Cassidy when I was eight years old (a tendency I quickly outgrew), I don't see why people are so ga-ga over them. They are human beings, people. Most of the time they are just the result of a happy accident of genes, not any sort of real talent.

I just saw that wretched commercial again, and I must report that I had a mental block, probably due to the irritation I suffer every time it comes on. It turns out, contrary to what I may have reported earlier, that the Dunkin Donuts product is very prominently featured in the commercial. In fact, pretty much every single living creature is toting a cup or bag. I suppose that's part of the joke.

All I know is, I find the whole commercial so appallingly stupid (right up there with the old Mentos commercials, with their odd "plots" (c'mon, it's thirty seconds; how much of a "plot" can there be?) and nonsense lyrics) it truly makes me never want to buy donuts again. All donuts.

This time of year I always think of Aunt Polly. Aunt Polly was my mother's father's sister, so my great aunt. She never married. She worked as an artist, illustrating the catalog for a company that made packets of seeds, like Burpee's. I forget the name of the company, which is now out of business, but my Favorite Older Sister probably remembers.

Am I the only person who totally HATES the new Dunkin' Donuts campaign? I'm sorry, I don't think even Christmas Squid is as bad of an earworm as that thing. (If you don't know about Christmas Squid, search this site for the phrase. I'm too lazy to link it up for you.)

Also as a copywriter I can't BELIEVE the awful writing. "Doing things is what I like to do." "I'm slightly more productive than I previously was". Are they trying to be funny? Are academics going to be writing papers about the genius of using ironic deconstruction to sell donuts? Because I'm not getting it. And on a pure single word sort of complaint, if there was ever an adverb to inspire you to say "eh" about a product, it's "slightly". I'm guessing they are trying to somehow wedge actual scientific statistics into song lyrics. Or they are making fun of themselves? I suppose I notice them and their product through the sheer inanity of their commercial. So I guess they did their job.

I'm probably WAY behind the times here (so what else is new), but my friend Sal posted this on our writer's newsgroup. It gets tiresome pretty quick.

http://dictionaraoke.org/index.html

Basically, you take an instrumental version of the song and add talking dictionary voices to sing the lyrics.

The link Sal posted was for "The Girl From Ipanema", which is rather long and tiresome, but has one funny line in it about three quarters of the way through. It would have been much funnier, I think, if they had continued the joke for a whole stanza, but that's just me.

So if anyone wishes to accuse me of wasting my time writing stupid stuff for eBay, I can always point to this site. I imagine downloading individual words from online talking dictionaries and piecing them together on a couple of tracks with the music behind it is pretty dull work. And while the effect is amusing for the first ten or fifteen seconds you hear it, it quickly becomes a stinky dead horse, if you get my drift.

While everyone else was visiting family and getting Easter gifts, I spent the day doing yardwork. And not FUN yardwork, either.

Two or three years ago we had a couple of acres of white pines removed. They were too close to the house, and white pines seem a particularly fragile kind of tree. Some of them were close to two feet in diameter, so I was too afraid to cut them down myself. (Chicken!) Plus when I made a rough headcount (trunkcount?), there was going to be well over 200 victims. So we wisely hired a logger who happened to be working across the street at the time to do it. For him it was a rather small job, but he was in the neighborhood, so what the hey.