That's right, I'm just going to complain (humorously, perhaps?) about commercials

You know, the truth of the matter is I do watch a lot of TV. I tend to have a TV on as background noise during the evening and I'm only slightly afraid to say that the food network, HGTV, TLC and Comedy Central are my constant companions. (My fright comes only from the off chance that someone from Comcast is reading this and that my profession of love for those channels ends up with them being in some sort of extra premium package).

Anyhow, I see a lot of commercials since I also live in the stone age and typically watch shows during their normal programmed time rather than recording and watching later. I don't mind. It gives my husband and me a lot of items to make fun of.

And one thing that cannot be pointed out enough is shampoo and conditioner commercials. Seriously, hair care products are kind of like cars - they all look slightly different and purport to have slightly different purposes but it all boils down to the fact that people drive cars to go places and use hair care products to look presentable. And whereas a car commercial might utilize the common "only car on the road" shot to somehow set it apart from all the other "only car on the road" shots, a hair care product does something remarkably similar - the claim that their product makes hair X times more Y.

You might recognize the formula. X is any percentage or phrase, such as "100% more" or "30 times more" to indicate the supposed betterness of the product. Y is whatever adjective people like to use about their hair - shiny, healthy, bouncy, not-looking-like-it-was-stuck-in-a-garbage-can-y.

You might also recognize that their claim is splashed across the screen in large letters and that underneath, the small print reveals the part that makes me want to scream. Almost verbatim from every hair product care commercial ever, the small print will read: "Brand Z Shampoo and Conditioner vs. non-conditioning shampoo."

How is this legal?

I mean, (and for most guys this doesn't count, but let's be honest - you're not the target market here) who here has ever tried to just shampoo their hair and that's it?

Personally, if I were to just shampoo my hair and then try to comb it out, I would probably remove a good portion of my hair that I would much rather have remain in my scalp. Conditioner, or at least a 2 in 1 shampoo, is pretty much a necessity for whatever adjective you're looking for in your hair.

My point is this - how can I compare brands when they're all comparing themselves to some useless, pointless baseline. It's like me saying that my blog is 30 times more popular and then in small print reminding you that this is compared to a blog that doesn't exist. Heck, I'm feeling great. Let's say my blog is 100 times more popular.*

*100 times more popular than most blogs that do not exist. A few non-existing blogs were found to be more popular than my blog but as outliers, these blogs were removed from my totally unscientific making up of data.