I keep on seeing those stoopid television commercials for HeadOn: “Apply directly to the forehead!” The commercials feature plenty of folks praising HeadOn for its effectiveness (“it really works!”). Great. But, works at what? I thought it was kind of strange that they went to the trouble that “it really works great”, without telling you what it actually does that it does so well. I had no idea. Do you?

I just saw the commercial again a few minutes ago, and finally worked up the curiosity to look it up on Wikipedia, and finally found out what it does: nothing. It doesn’t do anything. Its manufacturers want you to believe that it treats headaches, but they can’t actually claim that on TV, because there’s no evidence that it’s true.

I don’t watch a helluva lot of TV, I’m more of a DVD-watching kinda guy. ‘Swhy I’ve got my Netflix. But, I love to watch The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Pucca. My wife likes to watch King of Queens, and the kids like various cartoons and such.

A disturbing trend I’ve been noticing, is the increasing use of distracting and interruptive advertisement techniques, used during the show, usually to advertise other shows on the same network. The slim bar animations at the bottom of the screen are barely tolerable, but they often obscure parts of the show I want to see. Some of them get around this problem by squishing the whole show vertically while they do their business on the bar below, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s worse. Several notches below that, is when they add audible noises to the stupid animations. Explosions are the worst.

But now, now they’ve not only crossed the line, they’ve smashed it into tiny, tiny pieces. While I’m watching Family Guy on TBS, a Bill Engvall bar comes across the bottom of the screen. He grabs a remote, reaches behind him, and actually pauses Family Guy while he pimps his new show, then unpauses it so you can watch the final 10 seconds before the actual commercial break starts.

Un-friggin-believable. Now, we not only have to deal with commercials between slices of our favorite show, we have to freaking watch commercials during our favorite shows.