A Jones for the Knife

1/8/06


Everybody hates local commercials. Whether it’s the lunatic car salesman bouncing up and down as if his ass is spring-loaded, the doe-eyed children hawking for the area’s psych center, or attorney’s with haircuts that resemble something created by a defective Flowbee, local commercials are the bane of all of our television watching existence.

Sometimes they’re just mildly annoying, like the one that has popped up around my stamping grounds for a community college. I’m not sure what two vaguely unattractive people dancing around like drunken toddlers in front of placard signs has to do with getting an education, but at least the commercial is ridiculously long. Like, almost a minute. Not to mention that it has an error in the middle of it where the tape stops for a full three seconds just as Tweedledum and Tweedledee are about to high-five. Just awful is what it is.

But then, once in awhile a commercial comes along that just makes me stare at the screen like a dog doing subtraction in his head. I sit there, watching the fever dream before me unfold and have to ask myself whether the director survived the amount of narcotics he had to ingest in order to make this monstrosity of advertising. The most recent commercial from Carol Jones is one such example.

Ms. Jones owns Carol Jones Realtors, one of the local bigwig firms around Springfield. Her commercial features Carol herself on a sped-up film set to music like a Benny Hill sketch. I guess she’s helping the family move out of their house, but they all look vaguely afraid and it sort of gives the impression that Carol is maybe forcibly evicting these people so she can sell their home out from under them. The psychotic circus theme music is the only sound, thereby topping off the drug haze feel of this marketing disaster. But that’s not the worst of it. The worst part is the mere fact that Carol appears in these TV ads, because Ms. Jones gives Michael Jackson and Joan Rivers a run for their money on unnecessarily excessive plastic surgery.


Gods. The woman looks like a Gremlin. I had to take this screen shot directly from the TV because, shockingly there is one and only one picture online that shows here clearly. It’s this one.

I can only assume that picture was taken awhile ago, because it seems like she’s a bit less hacked in it. I’d be curious to see a true “before” picture of her, just to get an idea of how far her surgeon had to chuck his ethics out the window in order to turn Ms. Jones into the Halloween mask we see before us. Up until this new TV ad came out Carol seemed to keep herself pretty much out of the spotlight. It’s clear the woman is very, very deranged and terrified of what people think about her appearance, because not only has she chopped her face to bejezzus and back, but the only picture of her on her home page is one a mere 82 pixels across and so blurred it makes the Zapruder film look crisp.

I don’t mean to pick on Carol for the simple fact that she’s so dramatically vain and terrified of aging that she turned herself into a living skull, but some of us like to develop a personality so we don’t go out of our minds obsessing over our looks. And should we decide to remove all the skin from our faces, I doubt most of us would be mugging for the camera inside a horrible commercial, with a smile that doesn’t so much say “buy my properties” as it says “I’ll eat your children while they sleep!” I mean, unless you wanted to buy a house from The Crypt Keeper, it just seems like an odd move, is what I’m saying.