owning a tivo has its pros and cons. on the plus side, no commercials! on the other hand, i had to hear about the kfc double down from a friend.

when i got the news, i had all the expected reactions:

i pointed out to edward last night that kfc must have tried to invent the most outrageous thing they could while still making sure it had some semblance of food. and that presented us with a challenge. so i asked him if he could come up with something EVEN worse.

at first he didn't really get the spirit of my question and started suggesting unprintable things.

"no", i interrupted - "you have to make it something that you could actually sell as food."

“okay,” he said. and thought silently for a second. we both tried to imagine something that brad would bring home from 7-11 to eat cold the next morning.

“i know!" he said. "take a chicken breast, coat it in a thick layer of mayonnaise, and wrap it in a parchment bag!”

he even named it, so i've included some theoretical advertising here:

note the intentional lack of branding. look: all i’m saying is - popeye's, i'm looking at you. and since i've gone to the trouble of making the case for it here, i expect to receive the lion's share of the profits.

... as a result of my procrastination yesterday, i would be bothering edward to post about the new, amazing fast food item i forced him to invent last night. MAYBE if i get a respite this afternoon, i'll do it, since he likes to keep his posts all learned and political and highbrow.

did you know i co-author a second super-secret blog?

i'd like to say i'm sorry, but i can't. i love the wild freedom i feel with a program created for technotards like me ... creating my own background ... writing in html ... knowing how to post pictures.

oh, bliss.

ok, so every time the subject comes up, edward rattles on to me about how advertising doesn't work. frankly and intuitively, i don't believe it. my typical counter-argument is "why would companies spend so much money on something if it didn't work?" and yes, i realize that is a totally dumb counter-argument, but what do you expect? thoughtful reasoning? this is me we're talking about here.

and really - i do have this antagonistic, skeptical streak in me, though it generally just takes the shape of willfully disagreeing with whatever someone tells me is true and then scrambling to come up with the reasons why it might not be true.

so here's my dilemma. i've worked in my chosen (though that's a rather strong word for the process by which i found my way into it) field for over four years now. i would love to write a lengthy critique of what we do, and maybe i will if i gain the courage or stop caring, but i'm way too paranoid at the moment that every word is being monitored by a little robot programmed to inhale any negative phrases that appear on my screen and spew them out - chopped up and out of context - into a report that goes to my boss's boss.

so i won't. but i guess the heart of the matter comes down to variations of ... does what we do work? does it make any difference at all, negative or otherwise? i've never seen anything remotely like proof of that, which leaves me with taking it on faith.

honestly, i spent like two hours googling it the other day (e.g., "my job + efficacy", "my job + effectiveness", "my job + waste of money", "my job + are you there god, it's me tilda") and i have to say that not much came up, other than one or two opinion pieces.

thoughts? help? does it even matter (sadly, i think it does)? and don't f**king tell me that bing would produce better results, edward.

some call me a messy person. i call those people either "edward" or "obviously delusional", depending on my mood.

that aside, i've discovered the cure for any latent clutter management issues that may or may not be lurking somewhere deep inside my genes. seriously. the panacea - like all good things - resides on television. specifically (as much as i hate myself for saying this) TLC and A&E, in the form of hoarding: buried alive and hoarders.

i kid you not. watch the cautionary tale of a woman who was buried in her kitchen for three days under two-year-old piles of dirty adult diapers or see the cleaning crew pull the fifth 2-D dessicated dead cat from beneath mounds of trash and you too will want to compulsively scrub every surface in your house until you collapse into a puddle of clorox.