stop cancer

trapped on an exercise machine, with no beneficent tivo to edit my viewing, i see all kinds of adverts aimed at not-me. over these last weeks, i have seen tony orlando toss away his fat pants at least a hundred times. clearly i am sweating during old-lady tv time, because i heard valerie bertinelli has also thrown away her fat pants, yet i've never seen that. tying a yellow ribbon must resonate better than the hottie from a long ago and for-the-time racy sitcom. (divorced mom! 2 crazy daughters! in the city!) a show i loved (even though their clothes were decidedly mid-western and not as cool as mine, ahem) and i wanted to be valerie bertinelli and i liked her tv mom better than my real mom and then she went and married a guitar god and, well...

anyway...

over the course of my course, i see dozens of ads for diet plans and pills but none for gyms or at-home machines, so presumably the folks watching at home are fat and disinclined to exercise, but sufficiently guileless to buy a months' worth of delivered diet meals, along with "free silver serum powder" (or some such crap, sweat is in my eyes, ya know?) even though all the before and after model pics have a disclaimer: "RESULTS NOT TYPICAL". i know those jenny craig meals are tiny, so i'm guessing lots of folks just sneak around to snarf up the ben & jerry's later in the night, then bitch their diet isn't working.

i also see lots of dysfunctional penis ads, so some retired tired-out men must be watching cnn in the late morning. or maybe those ads are for the wives too? although, without the sound, those ads aren't nearly as hilarious. we all know few men would call their doctor about a 4-hour hard-on. they'd more likely call everybody but their mother to brag about it. (would i call the md on his behalf? better ask me in a few more years, cuz right now if i met a guy who could keep solid for that long, i might just request a contract amendment.) an inability to distinguish between blue and green would be a mere trifle with such relentless wood. (brand new meaning to the "splendid splinter.") the dizziness and fainting might be a bit more troubling, but hell, just stay horizontal with your perpendicular manhood. without the sound, it's hard to tell what they're all on about. there is one with this couple sitting in side-by-side bathtubs, holding hands, on a hilltop, watching the sunset. wtf? is there water in the tubs? wouldn't it get too cold to enjoy unless it was over 100 degrees outside? (we all know for me the ambient temp would need to be upwards of 120, in which case my partner would be the holder of a badly poached sausage.) is that foreplay when you're 60? sunbeams, porcelain and pollen?

sandwiched between the ads and the promos are the shreds of news. one of the *top* stories today was of a prostate cancer study. did men not formerly live long enough to get this ?

recommendations for prevention (bullet point lists hold far more gravitas {as do latin words}):

• eat more fruits, vegetables and whole grains
• eat less meat
• stop smoking
• exercise regularly

other than the not-ready-for-daytime-tv advice of more fucking missing from the list, i ask you, is this not the kind of thing that makes you go "DUH!"? even homer simpson knows he *should* exercise, lol.

i think from now on i'll bring a magazine. or at least for 2 weeks until i can gloat watching looped espn highlights of the pats kicking the giants' collective ass. :)