A someone who's highly active in post-crepuscular hours and has a habit of leaving the television on solely for background noise, I'm exposed to a lot of awful commercials. If I allow myself to listen one more time to the beating of those damned Caribbean drums in the Girls Gone Wild! spots that run on Comedy Central, I'm going to wildly bang away at something myself.

That declaration makes for an easy segue into a subject I'm surprised none of SB's resident bunkum-busters have addressed: grow-your-pen1s pills. (I always thought the "1" was an "i," but all the e-mail I get advertising these products has informed me otherwise.)

The other night I saw an infomerical for a product called ExtenZe, manufactured by e-Vita Labs (the Web site of which was "temporary unavailable" when I hit it) and promising to enlarge "that certain part of the male body." (Since no specifics were given, maybe they were talking about the prostate.) A medical doctor named Daniel Stein, a Florida-based laser surgeon, prated on about how he'd personally researched the product, which contains a mix of over two dozen ingredients, including L-Arginine, Ginseng-Eleuthero, Oat Straw, Saw Palmetto, Tribulus Terrestris, Sarsaparilla, Calcium, Yohimbe, Maca Extract, Catuaba, Miura Puama, Nettle, Astragalus, Cayenne, Ginkgo Biloba Extract, Boron, and Zinc.

"Christ," I thought as I started flipping through the 4 a.m. movie listings. "I feel bad for the poor single bastards lying awake and watching TV in the middle of the night." Fortunately, there's never anyone around, day or night, to monitor my viewing habits.

Anyway, I found the claims redickulous enough to check online for Randi-esque debunkings or whatever, but couldn't really find any. A haphazard guess as to why this is: Maybe no one who buys these products is going to publicly complain about their lack of efficacy, as we're talking about a subset of men who are (unusually) concerned about their junk as it is and hence don't want to, in effect, go public with the statement "I used to have a small unit and I'm here to tell you that I still do." But you'd think there would at least be anonymous complaints, given the stated sales volume of ExtenZe (over 100 million pills in the past years).

Checking the ExtenZe Website, I learned a new term -- "mail enhancement." This probably doesn't refer to the recent hike in postal rates in the U.S., so what was meant is as much of a mystery as why any half-educated person would buy the idea that an unregulated pill plainly targeting men's insecurity can live up to its promises.

The last part of the infomerical had me laughing my heads off. Seated in the studio were three good-looking women, giggly and bubbly but with an enough of an authoritarian bearing to resonate with the timid side of male viewers (you can watch and listen to one of them here), and every one of them said with a straight face that they had, quite frankly, broken up with long-term boyfriends because of the thimble factor. They spurted that bigger is better in every way, and that well-endowed guys are invariably successful at everything they do. Finally, to slam home the message, they each claimed that any alleged upper limits on ideal size are in fact mythical. In this awe-inspiring and orgasmic moment of phallo-woo I was half-expecting someone to lead a horse into the studio and get medieval on these capering bimbi.

In fact, one well-known vendor of inert phallotropics has found itself in trouble. (The headline of the linked article is priceless.) Surely you've seen the insanely upbeat mascot known as "Enzyte Bob" who wears a giant permagrin to match his presumably equine manhood. Well, his Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals employers might be feeling a little more droopy than he, what with the feds angling to jerk $100 million from the company's once-cocksure executives.

Interestingly, none of the various purveyors of pecker-pills bothers to explain the underlying physiology involved in mail enhancement. The manufacturer claims that the ingredients increase blood flow to the penis, but at a certain point this would merely cause "that certain part" to explode, not extend. Meanwhile, "that certain part" of users' bank accounts (i.e., the balance) would reliably shrink. Real growth would have to center on controlled expansion of the corpora spongiosa and corpus cavernosum, presumably modulated via cellular hyperplasia.

Simple enough in theory? Sure. But in the real world, such an idea doesn't amount to dick -- unless you happen to be a lying sack o' nuts with a medical degree like Dr. Stein.