This Is The Best! Post! Ever!

Back in the day when men were men and women were women and I used to mosey on over to ye local video store to rent the occasional video, I noticed something. As I would peruse the aisles, hunting for my entertainment for the evening, picking up one video after another, and reading the blurb on the back of each, it seemed that each video touted itself as not just a merely good film, and not a merely great film, but nothing less than the best! film! ever! produced!

This was certainly nothing new -- if you watch trailers of movies going back as far as the 1940's, you'll see that many of them similarly wax ecstatic, using such euphoric phrases as:

• Like nothing you've ever seen before!
• You won't believe your eyes!
• A new triumph in cinematic entertainment!
• The greatest event since the invention of fire!
• More exciting than the resurrection of the dead!
• This film has magical powers to cure cancer!

Okay, maybe not that euphoric. But certainly the advertisers were literally going overboard (ha! of course, not literally!) to rope in their potential audience.

This advertising gimmick reminds me of one of my high school teachers, a then-young Rabbi whom my classmates and I all liked. I even know his age at the time he taught us, for he informed us one day that he was 37, and the thought that I would ever reach that age myself seemed unimaginable.

Unfortunately, our interest in the subject matter did not match our affection for our teacher. One day, as he, as usual, struggled in vain to capture our attention, in what on hindsight seems clearly an act of wild desperation, he suddenly proclaimed in a loud, ringing voice:

If you should learn nothing else this year, you should at least learn this!

That did it. We were riveted. We hung onto every word that escaped his lips. And, to a certain extent, the effect lasted for the rest of the class.

But not past that. By next class, we were back to our usual inattentive mode. Suddenly, the Rabbi proclaimed in a loud, ringing voice:

If you should learn nothing else this year, you should at least learn this!

Sorry, Rabbi. It works only once.