The ads you hate to love

It's late. You haven't found your muse for that five-page anthropology paper due tomorrow at 1:30. The caffeine from Brown & Brew has you too wired to go to sleep, but you're too brain-dead to do any actual work, so you turn on the TV. Undoubtedly, there is nothing on TV worth watching, except for infomercials.

Yep, you know you love them. It's the vilest guilty pleasure on the tube _ above Elimidate, Fear Factor and even reruns of Step-by-Step (yes, I know you watch that, too). Infomercials are the pinnacle of evil of our capitalist society. Yet, at the same time, they lift our spirits to think, "Hey, if this schlub can make loads of cash selling this junk, then maybe I can, too." Engineered to captivate and hold our interests, infomercials provide some of television's greatest entertainment. So now, as a special Daily feature, I present to you the top infomercials currently seen on your TV screen:

The Ronco Rotisserie Grill. "Set it and forget it" _ the five most legendary words in infomercial history. Ron Popeil is one of the great American entrepreneurs who has been hawking products since 1956, beginning with the Chop-O-Matic. While most of his products (for which he holds the patents) have been moderately successful, the Ronco Rotisserie Showtime Grill has been a fantastic success.

For just "five easy payments of $19.99" anyone can own the magnificent product. It "really cuts the fat" on anything you cook, from a prime rib to hamburgers, and with that special steaming tray on top, your vegetables can be steamed to, and kept at, "piping hot" (the most embarrassing part of this section is that I was able to transcribe all those quotes off the top of my head).

The geniuses like Popeil concoct their pitches to do just that, get inside your head. With silly catch phrases like "set it and forget it," the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie is engraved in your memory. So the next time you get rotisserie chicken from the supermarket, you're going to think about Popeil and the phony "chefs" who laud the kitchen appliance as the greatest invention.

The Turbo Cooker. In terms of phony chefs, the king of them all has to be the ambiguous Chef Randall of Turbo Cooker fame. He holds all the credentials of a cashier at McDonald's, and looks like the loser in high school who even the chess team rejected. His infomercial partner-in-crime, Cathy Mitchell, is even less appealing. Mitchell, in her excitement over the awesome power of the Turbo Cooker, comes across as Ethel Merman hopped up on speed.

The "amazing" machine can bake, fry, boil, steam, or stew practically any recipe, all at the same time without the tastes of the different foods mixing. In one appliance, a cook can make a four-person, three-course meal within an hour. The Turbo Cooker is the "all-in-one" cooking system destined to let you live a "healthier and simpler" life. While it is clearly not a blockbuster success like the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie, the mere simplicity of Chef Randall's product is the key to its popularity.

Miracle Blade III. On the Miracle Blade III infomercials (for those of you who missed out on Miracle Blades I and II), yet another famous chef, Chef Tony, shows his audience an amazing display of food mismanagement. In the course of one 30-minute spot, Chef Tony must throw out enough food to feed an entire horde of barbarians. While chopping aluminum cans into three pieces, he also slices up tomatoes, onions, chicken, bread and anything else you might want chopped. He subsequently dumps it all into a bottomless hole of trash hidden from the camera, no questions asked. Despite this blatant disregard for food conservation, the Miracle Blade seems to be a success. Maybe it is due to Chef Tony's claim that his knives are "so sharp, you can cut a pineapple in mid air."

Another one of the infomercial's greater moments involves Chef Tony's presentation of bread slicing. With his unique Blade Slicer, he masterfully slices three pieces of bread from a loaf. When he uses a regular, generic and altogether horrible knife, the slice of bread is a smushed breadstick with holes in it. Ignore the fact that it's visibly obvious that Tony destroyed the latter sample by poking holes with his own fingers, and you have one fine and dandy knife set going for you.

FoodSaver. While Chef Tony specializes in wasting food, the folks at Tilia _ creators of the FoodSaver _ want you to know how to save all the food in your house. Once again, the geniuses of home cooking have created an infomercial with a product so darn simple, it irresistible not to watch. Just put your food in a specially designed bag, put the bag under the FoodSaver and all the air is sucked out allowing you to put the food in a pantry or freezer and not have to worry about it going bad.

The FoodSaver advertisement brings about another key ingredient to the success of an infomercial. While the concept itself must be as simple as possible, the pitchmen must ensure that there is some scientific explanation for the product's success. According to its website, the FoodSaver bags have "special channels to remove the air plus an outer nylon layer to ensure the air stays out." The ambiguity of such statements fly right over the heads of the infomercial watchers, probably because its 3 AM and they are either too drunk/stoned/tired/stressed to figure it all out. Either that or they just found their inspiration for that damned archaeology paper.