Not so bright ideas

Eleanor's trying out a new product to keep the bathtub a bit cleaner. It bills itself as the ultimate in PHD^* technology. Ticky the button, shut the curtain, and it sprays the whole enclosure with descendants of the classic 80s Scrubbing Bubbles.

Watch on YouTube

^*Push Here, Dummy.

(Given that the makers of this product are also responsible for napalm, I'm not surprised they dropped the militaristic ad campaign.)

They are still sensitive to the needs of stupid people, however. For there, on the instruction label of the gizmo- similar to the one you see here



- is the line next to that red arrow, which reads, ....

[Poll #1737654]

(Answer later, below a cut)

----

Meanwhile, outside the house, things are just about as goofy. With the economy being so dodgy, all sorts of fly-by-night businesses are making names for themselves- in this case, a rather stupid one.  Yes, it's a new contractor, holding himself out- hopefully with a safety harness- as being your guy to go up and do all your overhead repairs.  He's gone round to most of the local major intersections, competing with the Still Going Out Of Business furniture store and other assorted scams, to get the new firm out there on those annoying roadside stake signs. The business name?



Oy!

Will he work from sunrise to sunset?

Can he do the whole job at once or will he want to put in a.... Par-ti-SHUN?

And think of the subcontractors that'll have to come in: If I need a winch man, heidel deidel deidel....

Thanks. I'm here all week. Put down those tomatoes.

Attention, Ladies and Gentlemen:

The "Sermon on the Mount" in your manual is being replaced with the "Mount of Olives Mission Statement." Please break up into small groups, where our leaders will copy down your buzzwords for the first draft while our facilitators will take two fish and five loaves of bread and turn them into several hundred baskets of utter bullshit.

Yup, that was my meeting at church tonight. I swear I am not making this up, but in the immortal words of Tom Lehrer, riffed on here just in the past week, we did.... fractions! Making it even more surreal was that the featured presenter was a demographics specialist from UB (and, I hasten to say, a perfectly nice guy) whose voice is a dead ringer for the Bahd of Hahvahd. And if he didn't actually use Tom's line from the video below about "if they REALLY want to sell the product," he came frighteningly close.

We had PowerPoint. We had charts and graphs. We learned all about the demographics of, and around, the rather economically and ethnically inbred community in which our church is located. And then we took the first steps toward using nationwide and local surveys of our town and similar ones, completely derived from the world of mass marketing, using "mosaic lifestyle portraits" that have been used to target ad campaigns out in the secular world for decades. 

Naturally, we focused on Our Own Kind- the dozen or so identified demographic groups which had the most people of that description within the four highly homogeneous zip codes counting for 75 percent of our membership.  These include, and I make none of these up, "Small-Town Success," "Suburban Optimists," "Comfy Country Living," and "Shotguns and Pickups." (Actually, I did make the last one up; it does exist as a defined demographic, and in fact I once lived in the Sweet Home/"Looney Acres" section of Amherst long associated with it, but demographers consider the term a perjorative now and don't really like to talk about it.)

Just one example from the text, and one chart, to help explain why large parts of my brain are still on the ceiling of the parlor above where the overhead projector was. The first of those demographics, fitting probably dozens of couples and families within our congregation, is described with all kinds of platitudes about what they like, and do, and believe. My personal favorite of them was this description of what these self-described "families of the most prominent citizens in their exurban communities"
like to watch on the telly:

Small-town Success households share a fondness for a variety of media. They like to watch primetime crime dramas and comedies on television, especially "CSI," "Law and Order," and "Two and a Half Men."

You betcha, folks. The primary governing body of our congregation seems poised to go after a group of people who enjoy watching Charlie Sheen.

A lot of other slides then flew by, but this one just caught my eye enough to make "Tom" go back and show it again to the entire group present:



"Pete, am I reading that slide right?" I asked "Tom" (cleverly using his real name). "Is it saying that in our demographic region, the trend is for income growth to only be occurring among people earning more than $100,000 a year and that the income of everybody below that level is expected to decrease?"  Yes, he said, that's what it says. And not one professed Christian in that room- well, other than the one smartass writing to you now- expressed a single problem with that.

By this point, though, my brain had mainly checked out. It was all I could do not to start singing aloud the anthem of religious marketing that the voice-sake of "Tom" had done for his own Catholic faith 40-odd years ago-

Watch on YouTube

- and I was beginning my own Protestant adaptation of it. While this is not specific to our congregation, neither is it entirely inaccurate, either. Demographics suck like that sometimes.  It's called.... The Methodist Rag.

First you sit down on your ass
Join in our New Member Class
Then it would be really great
If you'd... profess the faith, 'fess the 'faith, 'fess the faith

Believe anything you want- it's
Quite all right with General Conference
We're never pushy, just a little wishy-washy, we're
Doin' the Methodist Rag!

Make a dirge out of a spiritual,
Pass a dish of day-old casserole,
"Judge not, lest ye be thou judged"- til
You're out the door, then everybody will

Put you down if you are doin'
Something new- even weekly Communion
One-three-five-seven
Christ's headbanging up in heaven

So on Sundays, we'll be here
There's nothing for you to fear
Not unless you might not fit in with
Hypocrites, hypocrites, hypocrites

Say the prayers and pass the peace, then
Be an ass the rest of the weeks
Glory hallelujah!- then we'll stick it to ya
Call me a cynicist for speaking the truth, but it's
Doin' the Methodist Rag!