ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, March 5, 1997 TAG: 9703050053
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BEN BEAGLE
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
I can tell you right now, those commercials about exercise equipment are a clear and present danger to family life.
Listen. These things ought to have warning labels on them.
They are usually on early in the morning when your kids can sneak downstairs and watch them.
There was one the other morning about a treadmill and it featured this guy and a trim young woman - all the young women are trim in these things unless they show a before picture in a Mad Hatter Tummy Reducer and Buns Enhancer commercial.
These frankly weird people were fooling around with an egg. The guy, who kind of gave the impression he might have fallen off a treadmill recently and hit his head, dropped the egg on what appeared to be a concrete ledge.
The egg broke and he said that just went to show you that when you drop an egg on a hard surface it breaks.
To stress this profound observation, he picked up the broken egg in one hand - which is a pretty gross thing to do early in the morning, if you ask me.
Then the young woman dropped another egg from a distance of a foot onto the tread of a rival machine and it broke.
Just goes to show you, these two unreal persons said, that this treadmill didn't have enough give in it and would probably cripple you for life if you ran on it.
By this time, I may have been hallucinating, but I think she dropped another egg from three feet or so onto the tread of another competitor's machine and the egg went splat - which seemed to drive both of them into a curious kind of ecstasy.
Then these two yo-yos moved on to THEIR machine. The young woman dropped the egg and, so help me, it bounced three feet in the air and the guy caught it before it hit the ground.
Let your children see this foolishness, and (a) you're going to have a very messy treadmill; (b) your egg bill will go out of sight, and (c) your kids eventually will demand a treadmill that won't break eggs.
They'll say that little Mercedes' parents next door get extra exercise from dropping eggs on their treadmill and catching them on the bounce. They've been using the same egg for weeks and her mother has lost three pounds just chasing the egg.
You do what you want to do. They're your kids. My kids are grown and know enough about physics and gravity to realize that eggs break when you drop them.
Just keep your kids away from my treadmill. OK?
LENGTH: Medium: 54 linesby CNB