i am so not gellin.

I haven't had much to post about lately, since my life has been pretty boring. This is what has been passing for excitement in my life lately:

1. Saw Jonny Moseley at Bongo Burger

2. Found out that my labmate accidentally purchased $250,000 worth of latex gloves from the stockroom

3. Got stuck on BART for nearly an hour due to this

4. Found this website

I also got to hang out with some bloggers in real life at this and this, both of which were a lot of fun, and therefore not worthy of being included in the inane list above.

I've been watching way too much TV recently, including dumb commercials. Initially, I thought that the ad for Dr. Scholl's Massaging Gel Insoles was the most horrible commercial on television, but now I've seen it so many times that I'm actually starting to enjoy it in some sort of vaguely masochistic way. For those of you that haven't seen the commercial, here's a transcript:

Guy #1 (to Guy #2): You gellin'?

Guy #2: No tellin' how much I'm gellin'!

Guy #2 (to Guy #3): You gellin'?

Guy #3: I'm like MA-gellan, I'm SOOOO gellin'!

Guy #2 (whispers): Quit yellin', we're gellin'!

Guy #3 (whispers, nodding): Riiiiight.

At first I was angry with Guy #3 because of his clearly inappropriate use of simile, equating his use of the Massaging Gel Insoles with the act of circumnavigating the globe. But by now I've seen the damn commercial so many times that I'm kind of starting to love Guy #3. He just seems so excited about the fact that he was able to take the stilted banter to a whole new level of dorkiness with his Magellan reference. Even when smug Guy #2 tells him to pipe down, his enthusiasm for awkward wordplay and comfort insoles remains palpable.

For some reason I've also been watching Namaste America, which actually manages to show even worse commercials. Every episode of Namaste America appears to feature the same eight or ten commercials, most of which are for local desi-owned businesses. All of the local commercials look as though they were edited on the video camera itself, and they all have several things in common: the same guy does the voice-over for all of the commercials, even the ones for businesses that seem to be competing against one another (and I think the guy who does the voice-over is actually the same guy that hosts the show itself), all of the advertisements have the same ugly-ass graphics (they make this look like the apex of aesthetically-pleasing design), and all of them have an ancient Hindi song playing quietly in the background, sounding as though it's been copied from a copy of a copy (times twelve) of some bootleg cassette that someone found in an old shoebox thirty years ago. The dentist ads are particularly clueless. The one for Dr. M.K. Nijjar includes a shot of her performing dental work on a patient, which would be fine, except that the entire wall behind the patient is covered in radioactive material warning signs. Maybe all dentists have radiation warning signs displayed in their offices, but I don't understand why someone decided it was a good idea to feature them so prominently in the commercial. Did they think that the availability of radioactive materials would make people want to visit the dentist? Meanwhile, the voice-over for the competing dentist that advertises during Namaste America announces that he uses "the most up-to-date sterilization methods," which I didn't even realize was an issue when choosing a dentist.