Amish heater infomercial - Still laughing...
Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2011 9:32 am
I was looking for something to watch this morning and stopped for a few minutes on an infomercial advertising supposedly Amish built electric heaters. They were careful to state quietly at one point to say that you were buying an Amish built mantel and that the heater was free. 
The whole thing was unbelievably phony looking. There is a large Amish community (actually several somewhat separate ones) just to the east of us and I have several Amish friends there. It is a fairly progressive group of Amish folks but none of them would be lining up to pose for pictures...
This silly commercial shows them all working in a barn going through all kind of phony looking woodworking motions. They keep showing this one guy setting a heavy old looking wooden level on the top of the heater (like that is going to tell him anything. One Amish (dressed) girl keeps pushing an old antique wooden plane absently around a board doing nothing. Another is using a rag to wipe something like she is bored to death. There is a stack of hay bales in the room and the topper is when they show a horse drawn buckboard with slatted sides leaving the barn with one heater sitting in the very back off presumably to deliver it maybe a 1,000 miles away...
Several of our friends there do do a lot of custom woodworking, much of it under contracts. They do most of it with state of the art equipment which may be ran by generator or compressed air but still modern stuff none the less. Electricity use is fine with them as long as it is not "from the grid".
I believe that if some of my Amish friends were to sit and watch that infomercial that they too would still be laughing...
.
The whole thing was unbelievably phony looking. There is a large Amish community (actually several somewhat separate ones) just to the east of us and I have several Amish friends there. It is a fairly progressive group of Amish folks but none of them would be lining up to pose for pictures...
This silly commercial shows them all working in a barn going through all kind of phony looking woodworking motions. They keep showing this one guy setting a heavy old looking wooden level on the top of the heater (like that is going to tell him anything. One Amish (dressed) girl keeps pushing an old antique wooden plane absently around a board doing nothing. Another is using a rag to wipe something like she is bored to death. There is a stack of hay bales in the room and the topper is when they show a horse drawn buckboard with slatted sides leaving the barn with one heater sitting in the very back off presumably to deliver it maybe a 1,000 miles away...
Several of our friends there do do a lot of custom woodworking, much of it under contracts. They do most of it with state of the art equipment which may be ran by generator or compressed air but still modern stuff none the less. Electricity use is fine with them as long as it is not "from the grid".
I believe that if some of my Amish friends were to sit and watch that infomercial that they too would still be laughing...
.
