Trim Jeans - Watch your dignity melt away.

When the Research Brigade dropped this ad on my desk, I couldn't believe my eyes. This journalist has seen a lot of bushwa, but the reality of Trim-Jeans hit me like Neo having a robotic tracking device pulled from his belly button. "Jesus Christ! That thing's real?!"

My cigar fell from my stunned mouth. I thought the Monty Python sketch was made up. Nope. They used the actual product, product name, and even the name of the Trim jeans spokesfraud, Jean Wennerstrom. I should have known the inflatable pants were real: Python was produced on a very slenderized budget and couldn't possibly afford to invent the props just for the show. Cripes, those limey teabags had a lot of moxie.

Here's the Python bit, below. The Spanish subtitles are a little gift for Cinco de Mayo. The P.A.G. Translation and Cultural Understanding Board assures me this means "Five of Mayonnaise". A rich and mysterious cultural tradition has moved one step closer to our understanding. I don't allow myself to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, because I lost a week's cash at a poker game in college when I used the Five of Mayonnaise. It still stings every May 5th.

There's a reason you don't find "slenderizing" products based on sweat any more. It's a lie. Water loss is not fat reduction. But don't spread it around, because the world will be a better place if stupid people are allowed to give away their money.

A few things to note:

-Graham Chapman makes a good Jean Wennerstrom, but his BBC costume department wig is not "ample" enough to measure up to the real deal.

-In the Trim-Jeans ad, the two women are, ironically, holding knitting needles, instruments which could spell the end of their slenderizing, through terminal decompression.

-Trim-Jeans were either definitely designed by a woman or definitely NOT designed by a woman, judging by the massive labial structures sculpted into the front side of the product.