While We're on the Subject of Absolutely Baffling Ticket Host Product Endorsements . . .

In the previous article I painstaking analyzed the All-Pro Foundation Repair and (to a lesser extent) Bakers Brothers Plumbing ads in which almost the entire galaxy of Ticket stars convert their apparently ramshackle houses into a nice endorser’s paycheck .

Today, I heard an ad that made my brain freeze, as though a Zen master had posed an insoluble dilemma that brought all the conundrums of the eons into a single concentrated point originating from SportsRadio 1310 The Ticket.

It was Bob Sturm’s ad for the 21-Day Full Body Cleanse.

Phrase after phrase, my neurons violently resisted the assimilation of what I was hearing.

Before I get to a point-by-point exegesis: the 21-Day Full Body Cleanse is a program offered by the Ticket weekend host of The Train Station Fitness Show, one Mr. George DeJohn.  You can find more information about it here.

George DeJohn, host of The Train Station Fitness Show,

Saturdays at 7 AM on SportsRadio 1310, The Ticket

If you visit that site, you can both see and hear a testimonial by Bob. By the way, I am a regular listener to The Train Station Fitness Show on my way to work at 7 a.m. on Saturdays, and I urge you to get up early and tune in as well.  I’m serious. It’s a fun show and George is a fascinating host. (And it is followed by the excellent TeeBox with Rick Arnett and Craig Rosengarden, who always engage in a jousting mix/mingle with George, and the TeeBox leads you quite naturally to The Orphanage with non-orphans Danny Balis and Dave Lane at 10 am.)

There are three things in Bob’s radio ad that make my brain tiny:

(1) Bob begins his testimony by stating that he goes for the 21-Day Full Body Cleanse when “I’m feeling a little doughy.”

Say, now there is one damned fetching image for you.

Bob Sturm, “doughy.”

That is, having about his person unwanted weight which puts one in mind of “dough.”

Look at this man. Fix his image in your mind. (Ignore the spare hand growing from his elbow. It belongs to Dan McDowell. I hope he grows on me, too.) Now close your eyes and imagine him “doughy.” I’m sorry, eventually you will have to open your eyes and rejoin a world that has been introduced to the concept of “doughy Bob Sturm.”

(2) The ad and even the website are rather coy on what a “21-Day Full Body Cleanse” amounts to, but since this is a weight loss program, we may surmise that it has something to do with transporting material – dirty material, material that requires cleansing – from the inside of one's doughy body, to outside of it, thus subtracting it from one’s total weight.

This may be one of the downsides of an active imagination, but when I hear Bob extolling the greatness of the 21-Day Full Body Cleanse, all I can think of is what dirty cleansable effluvia Bob is expelling from his Full Body (and a doughy one at that) in order to achieve Cleansing.

And now that I’ve pointed this out to you, you won’t be able to, either.

(3) Bob says that the 21-Day Full Body Cleanse “stops all unwanted cravings” (apparently leaving the desirable cravings intact) and breaks unhealthful addictions. That’s a good thing, is it not? Well, yes – but then Bob says that he’s done it five times.

One of the benefits of being a mature adult male is that you can remember a bunch of old stale jokes. And the one that comes to mind upon hearing this particular bit of testimony is the one that goes: “It’s easy to quit smoking. I’ve done it twenty or thirty times.”

Which – and check me on this if my logic is impaired – means that the 21-Day Full Body Cleanse does not stop unwanted cravings at all – it merely interrupts them for 21 days. After which time you do what all dieters do, which is to reward yourself for your 21 days of denial and newly scrubbed innards by binging on Gordon Keith-endorsed Hostess Cakesters and both servings of the Real Deal at the Hardline-endorsed Texas Land & Cattle, where you celebrate your liberation from the once-daily 21-Day Full Body Cleanse shake – Bob says there’s just one shake a day – by consuming both the cattle and the land.

* * *

I like and admire Bob Sturm. I like the Train Station Fitness Show and I wish I looked like George DeJohn and had his pipes. I very much regret the dough that has accumulated longitudinally and latitudinally around the manly core of my being, my image appearing on the upper left of this page notwithstanding.

But I ask myself whether Bob’s eeewwww-provoking endorsement of a one-shake-a-day diet that must be purchased with considerable frequency to combat chronic doughiness through appalling-to-imagine emetic processes is penetrating the beer/SoCo Lime/JR’s Steakhouse-Grill/Sean Salisbury Twin Peaks/Ticket junk-food-remotes consciousness of the dedicated P1.

As I sit here at a bar, finishing my second martini, composing this article and watching Nebraska kick the living bee-jeebers out of Kansas State, knowing that I have an eight-piece all-dark Popeye's chicken dinner congealing out on my back seat, I'm thinking that if God had wanted us to engage in three-week cleansing programs on a regular basis, He would have -- hell, I don't have the slightest fracking idea.