No coupons?

I get all ready to make my bloggy comeback, and there are no coupons? What is wrong with this world? C'mon... kill ten thousand trees to print up toxicly-inked incitements that convince me I am an inferior mother because I don't gas my kids with Lysol when they come in from playing in dirt. (Dirt... ew... it's so... dirty.) Is this a Christmas reprieve for my ego? Will they recommence the assault on my sanity on the 27th? Or wait until the new year? Let us not forget that we will need to be bombarded with reminders that it's time to make our New Year's Resolutions. If we somehow weren't reminded, we might not only forget that it was a new year, but also forget that it's time for our annual self-loathing to begin and self-punishment to ensue. So, I certainly hope they don't leave us hanging for long. If the coupons don't return on the 27th, we'll be 3 whole days into the new year before we have our bright, colorful, low-fat instructions.

I do think they need to figure out just exactly what they want us to do. They seem to give mixed messages. On the one hand, we've all learned from commercials and coupons and print ads that fresh baked cookies = love. If I don't have a plateful of sugar for my children on a regular basis, they will grow up believing their mother didn't love them. They make it perfectly clear. And holidays will be remembered with tears in therapy if I don't include lots of rolls from a tubular can. But then they also want us to all lose weight. You can't have it both ways! I can either love my family or have them be thin. And I absolutely cannot love them at all unless I've been pampering myself properly. That requires layers of body products that mostly smell like all the food I'm not allowed to eat. Vanilla volumizing shampoo, chocolate mint intensive conditioner, berries-and-cream anti-wrinkle moisturizer, probably some sort of grape-extract eye-lifter or whatever other goop a dutifully-young-looking mother ought to use.

But if I did all that, there's always the risk that my poor starved children would eat me.

I'd better start baking some cookies.

Commercial Rant

It's like my good ol' Coupon Rant, but... minus the coupons. Just a different marketing angle. Let me start by pointing out the obvious... if your "food" requires marketing, it's probably not really food. If you have to be talked into eating something, because your natural instincts would not lead you to recognize it as sustenance... it's probably not real food. And if marketing gurus are buying their third Lexus from the money they earned to convince you (and thousands of others) to eat said... thing... I can guaran-damn-tee it isn't food.

Ok, so what got my knickers in a twist today? Dominos Pizza. What a shock. I hold a big grudge against pizza in general, but only because I can't have any. It is not inherently evil... but even if I made my own gluten-free crust, I'd have to sub the cheese with something, and well... after you've made so many changes to something, you can't really call it "pizza" anymore. It'd be bruschetta with sausage, perhaps, but not pizza. Anyway, the commercial I saw today, while sitting on my butt, being a proper American couch potato watching football, had my mouth literally hanging open. Once I resumed breathing, the rant began.

The commercial in question showed a busy Dominos location, phones ringing constantly, with a manager-type explaining that with the price so low for such a delicious lunch, the only bad thing they had to say was... they were imposing a limit of 256 per household per day. Then they showed the customers hauling away stacked boxes of pizza in every way imaginable, including an irate mom who had brought a semi and was mad about the daily limit.

Yeah.

And not one of them was fat.

While I hate to go along with media hype in any way... (even so much as to keep my mouth shut about my bout with H1N1 because I don't like feeding the hysteria), we are in the midst of a huge problem with our huge butts. Worst of all, our kids are getting fat. And no, I am not prejudiced against fatness. I *am* however concerned about the illnesses that go with it, or more likely cause it, and all of it stems from eating absolute CRAP like Dominos pizza. The government even recommends that we all make sure to get plenty of grains and carbohydrates every day, despite the fact that it has been PROVEN that more than 150 grams of carbs per day cause illness. And there are a lot of carbs in pizza, especially in the ridiculous quantity most people serve themselves.

Oh, I know, Dominos still needs to make their profit... I wouldn't want the poor dears to have a bad fiscal year and then fire all those poor delivery boys. We *need* people to gorge on pizza, for the sake of the economy. Or some shit like that. Just think how many jobs we can create when we get sick!! Diabetes employs so many... lab techs to take your blood, machinists in the factories that make glucometers, pharmacists, doctors, nurses, eventually surgeons... and then of course all the marketing gurus to design and sell you sugar-free, fat-free phood.

Maybe Dominos will come out with a fat-free pizza. Wonder what that would be made out of?