Overexposed

If you were alive and not comatose about two or three years ago, you remember that musical group Barenaked Ladies had a popular song about chimpanzee postcards.

I hate that fucking song.

It's not that I loathe Barenaked Ladies. In fact, I'm largely indifferent to them. It's not that I didn't enjoy the song or the subject matter. I found it rather catchy. Dare I say I liked the song.

I liked it...the first seven times I heard it. In one day. If you remember BNL's popular monkey tune, then you also remember that it was on every damn station every damn hour. In the radio biz they call it "heavy rotation". I call it "Canadians Must Die". I truly believe that hearing The Chimpanzee Song more than two or three times in a single day was the primary reason iPods became de rigueur just 18 to 24 months after their introduction.

Well, the same is true of TV commercials. Monk especially remembers with me Comedy Central's huge 1998 push for their series Pulp Comics, which featured a short clip of pre-Insomniac Dave Attell saying "Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story."

Now imagine hearing "Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story" four or five times an hour while you're watching TV. No wonder I mute commercials all the time.

Sometimes, however, I can't find the remote, and if there's a MythBusters marathon on The Discovery Channel, I'm set. Save for the commercials. In this case, there's a new series called Miami Ink and it only has one commercial. And they play it a lot. I'm thinking once every second or third commercial break. And I've grown to seriously, seriously hate the theme song they play in the background.

Where's that remote?