Noise: Endless chatter and bad ads during The Civil War

At the last minute, I opted out of two Civil War parties and headed instead to a local pub. That turned to be a good choice as the beers on tap were all new to me and the crowd at the bar not overly Duck or Beaver crazed.

Thanks to some good conversation and the aforementioned beer, what was supposed to be an exciting game, and wasn’t except for the first few minutes and the Duck’s wonderful fake punt, saved the day.

And as the day and game wore on, the people at the bar got a wee testy and the barbs flew. Their first target, the announcers who, like all college football announcers, talk way too much and never, ever leave some space for the viewer to make up his or her own mind.

Play-by-play announcer: Jones is hit and stopped for a two-yards loss.

Color Commentator: Well wasn’t that an interesting second down call. The Bearcats opted to use the old Red Highway 86 formation where the quarterback lines up under center and then moves to left tackle. The right tackle them shifts to right end and does a wing-nut reverse option with a double sliding sweep. But give it to the Mountaineers for picking up on it and using the Delta, three-backs up, two in the press box formation with the cornerbacks shifting back three steps and ten moving up two when the ball was snapped. Brilliant.

Play-by-play announcer: Speaking of Jones and that loss, he lost his English History three-ring binder on campus the other day and it was picked up by his grandmother who just had an ingrown toenail removed. Our thoughts go out to her and the rest of the family.

Boring, aimless and truly obnoxious.

The play-by-play guys roasted, the bar crowd turned to the television ads which were, be they national or local, bad.

“Sexy and daring,” a voice intoned over fast cuts of scenes from some melodrama,” says Rolling Stone about Neighborhood Madams, starring Justin Neverwas and Jessica Hasbeen starting this Friday on ABC.”

I can’t wait to waste an hour watching that overly inflated tour of bad acting, script and plot.

Then we got into the local ads where we discovered that having your ad voiceover done by a woman with a very proper Oxonian English accent is apparently supposed to make a product or, in this case, service seem more superior. Wrong, it made the company behind the ad pretentious and totally out of touch with the Central Oregon market.

But the fav of the day was the ad from the local car dealer featuring a spokesmodel we started calling “Hand Woman”

Why “Hand Woman?” It’s because of her stilted hand movements—a cross between someone doing The Robot, a baseball umpire making the “safe” motion and some sort of weird fraternal salute followed with the “safe” motion.

“Don’t make fun of her,” said the guy two seats down from me at the bar, “she paid a lot of money to learn that at a TV spokesperson school.”

Now if she only had a British accent.

This article appears in Dec 2-8, 2010.