rant is where the heart is

diaryland: sirilyan.diaryland.com: entry for 2002-05-06 (12:39)
In which our plucky young hero asks voulez-vous acheter avec moi?

I've finally found a way to spend a night of insomnia that's even worse than watching the Thunderstick Pro infomercial.

Now, I'm watching the Thunderstick Pro infomercial in French.

Yes, that's right, in French. All those years of Trudeaumania and this is what we have to show for it: a hand mixer doing the old dog-and-pony show on TVA.

The infomercial is dubbed over by two of the least enthusiastic voice actors I've ever heard. This only adds to the already-high comedy value of the existing infomercial.

A slight diversion now. Small-appliance infomercials all follow one of two scripts for selling their product. These two scripts are:

1. That's okay, you don't need to use our product, you obese, cancer-ridden slug! I don't want to pressure you, because the choice to not die in agony tomorrow is yours! Eat what you want, but it'll kill you!
2. You know how you work 22 hours a day and would love a good home-cooked meal but you never have any time for it? Wave our product in the general direction of food, any food at all, and it will become a gourmet meal fit for a king. A king, damn you!

The Thunderstick is firmly in camp #2. This thing, which I remind you is a hand mixer, with its 200 watts of power and three (or four, or five, they keep throwing in freebies that make it difficult to count) metal blades, will replace all your other small appliances: coffee grinder, blender, food processor, cat.

(According to my biology textbook, cats are not technically an appliance. But I bet that the Thunderstick could still replace them.)

One of the most hilarious script #2 elements in the Thunderstick infomercial is watching them turn a glass of water plus some instant coffee into a "delicious" treat. Now, I've eaten raw instant coffee in the past (by mistake), and there's nothing delicious about it. Heat is friend to all coffee, or so the proverb goes. But the Thunderstick replaces friends as well as blenders, and it is impressive (in that infomercial impressive way) to watch the shill aerate a glass of water and turn some cold water with coffee in it into some really airy frothy stuff with coffee in it.

And in French, it only gets better.

"C'est si simple, et si savoureux! Et vous savez... pas de calories! C'est tout plein d'air! Vous n'avez plus d'envie � manger!"

The dialogue, though, for all the energy the voice actor puts into it, might as well be "C'est un libre, et c'est sur la table! Je prends le libre et je l'envoie � la bibloth�que! Je ne payerai pas un amende!"

It's a good thing I'm no longer in school, because this would be a great teaching aid. (I was on track to teach high school French. No, I don't remember what I was smoking. Yeah, it would have had to be pretty good stuff.) Textbook commercial French (Mefiez-vous des imitateurs inf�rieurs!) combined with a subject anyone could love. My students would hate me. Until I handed out the frothy instant coffee drinks, anyway.

So... now how much would you pay? Entertainment, pedagogy, and coffee foam! Oh, and it's also a hand mixer with twenty thousand watts of cross-cultural power. Order your Thunderstick Pro aujourd'hui.

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