If watching college basketball with a bag of frozen peas on your crotch is your idea of good times, you’re in luck!
In a program dubbed Vas Madness, the Oregon Urology Institute is using this month’s NCAA basketball championships to advertise vasectomies, making March Madness sound more like March Lunacy.
It’s a two-tier program. Not only do patients get to watch basketball while getting snipped, according to the institute’s website, “most importantly” patients will get “a doctor’s note stating you need to sit on the couch and watch basketball!”
A clinic spokesman told local papers, “We try to create sort of a sports bar atmosphere without the alcohol and smoking.”
Yeah right, in the moments leading up to someone cutting into my scrotum, I will surely want to be in a doctor’s office with the atmosphere of a sports bar - that doesn’t serve alcohol!
I think we can all agree that this is a rather ballsy marketing campaign. Next sports stadiums will be promoting “Vasectomy Day” where the first 1,000 males get their vasa deferentia cut for no charge.
Oh Lord, what’s the holdup with those four horsemen already?
First, isn’t spending long hours doing nothing in front of the TV while filling one’s gullet with junk food a form of birth control in itself?
Second, what does this say about the creativeness of Americans? If B-ball fans have to resort to surgery to get out of work, we are all in big trouble.
We’ve gone from Ferris Bueller to Napoleon Dynamite in a generation.
Besides making basketball fans look like a bunch of lazy schmucks that place watching sports over their jobs, this can’t be great for the sport either. If fans have fewer children, there will be fewer fans in the future.
Furthermore, I’m no economist, but isn’t this the worst time since the 1936 Olympic Games to blow off work for athletics? The economy is tanking and unemployment is soaring - but what the hell, let’s all bugger off to watch basketball!
That makes about as much sense as Prime Minister Stephen Harper choosing someone who doesn’t believe in evolution as science minister… Oh yeah, apologies to Gary Goodyear.
All and all, in terms of birth control, it’s not too different from advertising condoms on TV. But in terms of surgery, now it seems it won’t be long before nose jobs, or any other minor, nonessential surgical procedures, are advertised on the tube.
Personally, my rule of thumb for picking a doctor is the same as picking a university: If they advertise on TV, they’re probably not at the forefront of their field.
Speaking of doctors - I swear I’m not making this up - one of the docs at the clinic is named Dr. Richard Chopp, as in Dr. “Dick” Chopp!
Let’s just let that soak in…
OK, now that we’re done cringing and laughing, I guess the last thing to say is I can think of a few other TV audiences I’d prefer to be sterile.
If vas clinics want to put an axe in the genealogy of TV viewers, please advertise during Fox News, any reality show, the 700 Club and, of course, House.
Contact Tom Patrick at
tomp@yukon-news.com