Now that we're more than halfway through the '05 season, those of us who listen to the A's radio broadcasts have had a chance to hear every one of the current crop of commercials many hundreds of times, which means the really irritating ones have had sufficient repetition to scrape big festering sores into our consciousness. What was mildly annoying in April is absolutely maddening in July; by October I'll be reaching for a freakin' monkey wrench with which to crush my radio to dust when the dreaded voices of those shadow-government enforcers from Round Table, Matt and Marcus, foul the air for the 55 bjillionth time (a couple of weekends ago, while working beneath my car, I tore most of the skin off my back struggling desperately to reach the volume control on the radio- which I'd foolishly placed out of reach- because I knew I'd start punching my fist to bloody tatters against the transmission in a psychotic rage if I had to hear the punchline of the Baron's Jewelers ad just... one... more... time).

Now I'll admit that we've got it relatively soft in 2005; nothing we're hearing this season can rival the dentist-drill torture of Billy Sardell (Pizza Expert) or the Beer Poets (please, dear God, make it stop!) of seasons past, but that doesn't mean we can relax every time we hear "a pitching change and a break in the action." I'm sure that, working together, we can determine the Most Irritating Radio Ad of the 2005 Oakland Athletics.

I'm going to give my vote to Farmer's Insurance, because of that fiendish audio detail thrown in to punish us: the Muzak in the background as the two cubicle-dwelling clods chat about improbable car demise (I picture them in one of those hellish-office/soul-destroying Break Rooms, with the smell of burned microwave popcorn, angry "Remove your old food from the fridge" notes from the receptionist, etc) which subtly morphs into the background Muzak of the ad itself in a bit of brandin-arn-on-the-ol-cerebellum meta-advertising. I feel like organizing a massive billion-dollar insurance-fraud scam targeting Farmers every (expletive) time I hear that (expletive, expletive, expletive) ad. Though the Miller Prevent Taste Loss ads come in a close second for me, mostly because of the indecipherable line barked out by the Jim Jones-esque Miller Lite Compound Dear Leader as his subjects earn themselves shaved heads and bread-and-water diets for their failures: "Come on people! This isn't rocket science or ggzzzfdlksdfaoiw!" and the sinister "This message is totally choice" tagline at the end.