Rusty Saber: Barry pre-empts commercial musings

Golly, I feel snake bit. Oh, the obstacles I have faced in selecting a Rusty Saber topic this week. I had a topic all set, and then I read Dave Barry's column. Although he took a slightly different approach than mine, it was close enough to cause alarm. What to do?

Had I plunged ahead, I might be guilty of stealing an idea. Trust me on this, if I'm going to steal an idea, I won't steal it from the owner of the idea the same week he wrote it.

Readers are likely frothing at the mouth wanting to know what topic the Rusty Saber will not be this week.

Wait no longer: The now defunct topic was to have been TV commercials for companies no one has ever heard of and whose TV commercials offer no clues as to what they do.

I was going to use the commercials for a organization called "Cingular" as representative of TV ads that leave me asking, "What was that all about?" Dave Barry beat me to it. He said he was getting bills from Cingular but didn't know what it was. After watching its commercials, he still didn't know what it did. He finally found out that it was the new name of his cellular telephone company. Barry's column went on about other meaningless names conjured up by merged outfits.

The focus of my topic was not inane names of companies like Cingular, but inane commercials, such as those of Cingular, that never come right out and tell us what they are selling. For all I know, the product being hawked may be the Cingular logo; it certainly seems to be the focus of the ads. The logo looks like the splat a well-fed bird leaves on my car's windshield.

I'm so unsophisticated that I think commercials should leave no doubt about their purpose. It should be something like, "Use El Scrubbo toothpaste; it will clean your teeth, make you smell better and you will have to get a club to fight off members of the opposite sex who won't be able to resist you."

I understand and ignore claims like these. I hate it when I don't understand what it is I'm ignoring. Mine is too close to Barry's, I need a different topic.

Hey, I could make good on an error in a past column I wrote about enjoyable TV commercials. Among them was an ad for Jaguar automobiles which featured a vocal rendition of the old Glen Miller hit "At Last." I proclaimed the singer to be so good that I actually looked forward to seeing the commercial.

Without any doubt in my mind, I declared the vocalist to be the great blues singer Dinah Washington. Two readers called to thank me for the information. Each had wondered who that wonderful voice belonged to.

I looked and looked for Dinah Washington's recording of the song; I couldn't find it anywhere. Recently, I found out why. While listening to a radio station that actually plays music for people over 12 years of age, I heard the song.

Guess what? The vocalist wasn't the great blues singer Dinah Washington. Oh, no. It was the great blues singer Etta James.

The only rationalization I can offer for this misinformation is that on this recording, Etta James sounds remarkably like Dinah Washington. But I made a boo-boo, and I could use this column to apologize. However, since my readers thought I knew what I was talking about at the time, no need to rock the boat.

This Rusty Saber could rant about the weather. I mean, after all, this winter was the coldest, most disagreeable winter in years. At a time when it was supposed to get the heck out of the way so spring could be sprung, it was hanging on.

Sure, that would be a fine topic. Before I could lay fingers on my computer keyboard, winter hit the road and spring began busting out all over. By the time the column would have appeared, it would have been totally out of date. Another idea down the drain.

What I might do is rant about the zigzag price of gasoline. I mean, if anything deserves a good rant, it is the up-again-down-again-up-again price of gas. However, on the very day I thought of this topic, the price of gas jumped from $1.37 to $1.57 per gallon for regular. If I wrote the column now, by the time it appears, the price may have dropped to $1 a gallon or soared up to $2. Whatever I say now will be obsolete by the time I say it. I give up, I cannot think of what to write about. What a bummer!

(Joe McAdoo is former chairman of the communication department at Drury University and a Springfield public relations consultant.)