No One Asked Me But… (August 3, 2022)

By DR. LARRY MOSES

No one asked me but… I just spent a week in Northern Utah. It was a little cool in the mornings but as the day went on it warmed up nicely.
We took a number of drives through beautiful mountain forests.

My friends raise a garden with the greatest green beans and corn in the world. We went up to help them bottle the beans. The corn was still a few weeks away.

We were able to bottle 27 bottles of beans which they will share when they come visiting during the winter.

Every where you look there are green trees, flowers, and grass. The rivers actually have water in them. The setting is serene and the evenings are cool. The people are friendly and gas prices are better than here.
Now you may ask: If you love it so much why don’t just move there?

Let me give you a dozen reason I prefer Moapa Valley to northern Utah. The first nine include September, October, November, December, January, February, March, and April. Another issue is that the oxygen level at nearly 5,000 feet is almost non-existent and for some reason everything seems to be up-hill.

This reminds me of the time the Pirates were playing Incline Village in the State basketball tournament. The Pirates were leading and the chant went up: “We have points, how about you?”
The Incline students chanted back: “We have trees, how about you?”
The Moapa Valley students countered with: “We have oxygen, how about you?”

I believe I will stay in my oasis in the desert here in Moapa Valley. I may not have a garden but I do have some of the best neighbors in the world.

No one asked me but… Have you noticed the commercials on your television? I have a great number of issues with the commercials.

My first issue is I pay over $100 a month to receive television programs which are, for the most part, commercials. I won’t go into the ones that border on pornography; but they are there. I am not sure how young teenage couples can watch T.V. together, because you never know when one of these commercials will appear.

My favorites are the ads for drugs. It seems that at least sixty percent of the ads on T.V. are for drugs of one kind or another. This is in a society that abhors drug addicts. However, when watching T.V. one begins to believe that we are becoming a drugged society .

These ads expound the virtue of the drug and then catalogue the side effects. If you take the drug your skin will clear up but you may suffer from a myriad of medical problems that far out-weigh the problems from the disease. You may have digestive problems, heart issues, rapid breathing and a thousand camel fleas will infest your armpits. But you skin problem will clear up.

These commercials will warn you to not take the medicine if you are pregnant or plan to be pregnant and I certainly don’t plan to be pregnant.
You must refrain from taking the medicine if you are allergic to it. That makes sense, but how do you know if you are allergic to it until you take it? Maybe you will survive your first allergic reaction.

The dumbest statement is that one should tell his/her doctor about the drug being advertised. One could only hope that if this miracle drug is available your doctor will know about it and prescribe it without the help of an ad that interrupts “Gun Smoke.”

That should indicate to you where my viewing is to be found. Just a thought: “Gun Smoke” was on T.V. for over twenty-years. Marshall Matt Dillon must have killed an average of 1.5 bad guys in each show.
Ever stop to think how many bad men the Marshall killed? He did not court-house many varmints. However, I digress as I was speaking about commercials.

One of the commercials I find most fascinating is about a drug to enhance sleep. The spokesperson is a well known ex-Governor of a southern state. He explains that the product he is endorsing is not habit-forming and is not even a drug. However, he takes it every night so he can sleep and has done so for several years. Is that not habit forming?

I am sure a large number of drug addicts are sitting in jails in his home state due to their drug habit. If one was to take all the pills advertised for one’s better health and mental well-being it would appear that one would live forever.

I went to a movie while I was in Utah. It was a film adaptation of a book I had just finished reading, “Where the Crawdads Sing.”
The movie was better than the book and I don’t say that about many movies. I would recommend that if you get a chance, take it in.

What does that have to do with commercials? Let me explain.
We arrived at the time that was advertised for the start of the movie. However, we sat through twenty minutes of previews and other commercials. There were ads for various products interspersed between the previews. Among other things, we were asked to buy popcorn, sodas, automobiles and to visit national parks. The final commercial stated that the movie was brought to us for our enjoyment by the owner of a car dealership who happens to also own a chain of movie theaters one of which we were sitting in. Silly me, I thought the movie was brought to us by the nearly ten-dollar ticket we each paid.
I will finish this column with some of my favorite quotes about commercials.

Thoughts of the week… Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
-Stephen Leacock.

We grew up founding our dreams on American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give me a perfect complexion.
-Zela Fitzgerald

“What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.”
-Vilhjalmur Stefansson

“You can fool all the people all the time—if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.”
-Joseph E. Levine

“Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.”
-Will Rogers