Queen of the Infomercial

Television is rife with advertisements for all sorts of random, unnecessary, convoluted and useless products. If it’s something people actually like the ads usually appear as commercials during our favorite television programming. In the event that it’s too new, obscure or irrelevant it ends up as an infomercial crammed into a commercial space during daytime programming or on less popular cable channels. When that happens it falls into the realm of the Monkey.

For some reason my daughter soaks up the information spewed out of the mouths of presenters hired to hawk goofy products in sixty second infomercials. It’s like a disease. If Billy Mays (RIP) touted it the Monkey knows all about it. That’s not all though. She doesn’t just catalog and store the information in her random trivia file, she treats it as gospel and behaves accordingly. The behavior consisting of immediately running to Mom or Dad and insisting that we absolutely need and must immediately own Debbie Meyers’ Green Bags, the Perfect Slice Brownie Pan or the Aqua Globes to water our non-existent plants.

For Christmas my mother bought me a silicone mold for baking a giant cupcake. Before I even know what it was the Monkey was excitedly spouting the virtues of the mold and explaining to me exactly how it works and why being able to bake cake size cupcakes was so awesome. A while ago I came home from the store with a Ped Egg that I picked up at Walgreens while waiting for a prescription to be readied at the pharmacy. The Monkey wanted to show me how to work it.

When PK was little I explained to her that advertisements were just companies’ way of trying to sell us things we didn’t want by making us think we needed them. She took those words to heart and has never been swayed to beg for something just because it danced on tv. I tried giving the same spiel to the Monkey to no effect. She’s an out of control addict.

The problem is that the cable channel with the programming I find most appropriate for her (QUBO) is also not the most popular so many, and at times most, of the commercials are for As Seen On TV products. I could take away television altogether if I really wanted to destroy my sanity by giving up that tiny window of time I have to do things like go to the bathroom, cook dinner, take a shower and other assorted life necessities. I could switch to a channel that offers less in the way of values and life lessons if I didn’t mind her mimicking Hannah Montana, Alex Russo, Carly Shaye and Tru Jackson. Or I can come up with a way to help her understand that commercials are a vast wasteland of junk that isn’t worth the money spent producing it. Anyone know how to accomplish that?