Ah! Remember the good old days when you were just potty-trained and as you marched out of the bathroom, having proudly done your duty, your mother was waiting to tell you to pull down your pants and prepare for butt inspection?

Me neither.

But apparently that’s the way it is with bears. God forbid that a young bear-child should have shreds of toilet paper clinging to its ass.(1)

At first the commercials were cute – using the old rhetorical question about bears and their excretory functions.(2) Ha ha. Very amusing.

But now they’ve gone too far. The you-don’t-have-to-use-a-lot-of-paper commercial was OK. Instructive in its way, and a lesson every young bear needs to learn. But enough is enough. We don’t need to know about bear butt checks.(3)

And we especially don’t need to know about bears and SKID MARKS. That’s right, the next commercial in the series was about how this miracle toilet tissue could prevent skid marks in one’s underwear.(4)

Never mind that bears do not generally wear pants and have never been depicted in the commercials wearing pants. Without pants, how can they have underpants? And without underpants, how can they have skid marks?

Now we’re in the realm of not just butt checks, but underwear inspection. I mean, ick. Think about it, bear skid marks would be HUGE.(5)

Of course that’s not the only disturbing commercial out there. My husband hates the ones in which sentient cereal squares eat other sentient cereal squares. Maybe that’s just him. We both hate the one where the guy has been in an auto accident and his mother appears, waiting on the phone with the insurance company. He says, “You’re not helping.” Hey, dipwad, at least she’s trying, instead of standing there making up dopey magic jingles. And she’s your mother – show some respect!

At this point I could go into a rant about how advertising agencies are incapable of making commercials without making someone look idiotic and helpless. It used to be women who were stupid and needed to be rescued by the über-masculine Mr. Clean. Then men got to be incompetent, with women bailing them out from assorted domestic dilemmas. Now the trend is for all adults to be complete imbeciles with children who must save them from technological and other disasters.(6) Even talking babies with investment advice. As if someone who hasn’t even graduated to skid-mark-able underpants should be trusted with our financial future!

But you can certainly fill in the blanks with your own least favorite commercials.

Just don’t get me started on how commercials try to deceive us, and often succeed.(7) We’ll be here all night, instead of drifting off to sleep with visions of bear asses, uh, dancing in our heads.(8)

(1) Obviously, bears don’t have to pull down their pants. That would be ridiculous.

(2) Oh, come on. You know the one I mean.

(3) You have no idea how hard it’s been writing this without dipping into the possibilities of puns involving bear/bare and but/butt. And duty/doody, for that matter. Now that I think about it, I could have probably worked “cheeky” in there somewhere.

(4) We all know what we’re talking about, right? We don’t? How shall I put this delicately? Streaks made by a substance of a certain dark color.

(5) Or don’t think about it. You’ll be happier. Except now that I’ve mentioned it, you’re thinking about it RIGHT NOW, aren’t you? See how I did that? Ah, the power of authorship. Tee-hee.

(6) Though not skid marks. Yet.

(7) You know what “virtually painless” means? NOT PAINLESS!

(8) You’re welcome.