It's a broken toy. I took a picture of it because it was weird. I think it sets the tone nicely.

After the incident described in the previous post -- a couple of days after -- I ended up at Walgreens for some reason. Mostly because we were on that side of the street, and it was there. I saw this product there that I'd seen before, and just had to take a picture of it, because...it had to be done.

Y'know those annoying plastic packages? They're...annoying. More annoying is this recent trend of selling various products specially designed to open those strangely unopenable plastic packages. Because, y'know, scissors haven't been invented yet.

What's wrong with this picture?

Yes. It's a special cutting tool for opening those annoying plastic packages...contained within the exact sort of packaging it's designed to open.

If you buy one of these, I hope you have the self-awareness to feel very, very stupid while cutting it open with a pair of scissors. If not, please take yourself to the nearest medical facility and have yourself spayed or neutered.

Or, if you suspect pregnancy within the first 72 hours after having sex, you can stop by the Safeway near my house and pick up some Plan B. Because they have it. I discovered this [and took a picture of it] when acquiring some real Sudafed.

I think I'd have been more comfortable buying the Plan B, honestly. Buying the Sudafed made me feel like a criminal.

And, because every post should end with bacon....

Push button. Receive bacon. In your mouth. Also, possibly, up your nose. It's face-bacon.

Yeah, I know, it'd work better if the wavy lines were red. But I thought it was funny. I saw this in a Burger King bathroom.

Update: I think it's officially been named. It's the bacon launcher. That's what Sly called it.

Laser Scissors You can cut a straight line! Just aim the pin-point laser and follow the line. No marking, no crooked cuts. Metal, 8 1/2 x 3 1/2 x 1".

Who came up with this thing? Are they still alive? Did they stop to think about how the laser only guarantees that you might cut it along that line, and not that it'll be from the point you want to the point you want?

From the bottle:

the water with all the answers

is it just us or do clouds get a bad rap? while we admit they're not as great to have around on a beach day, as say, the sun, clouds are unsung heroes because they contain nature's purest source of water. meanwhile, spring water comes from the ground and contains random stuff and whatever else the animals that swim in it leave behind. that's why we copied our white puffy friends by creating smartwater. it's vapor distilled so it is in its purest original state. it's a difference you can taste...unless, of course, you have no taste buds (then you're on your own). but, we don't stop there. we one-up the clouds by adding electrolytes just in case you do decide to hit the beach. unfortunately, we can't fix the whole men in thongs thing.

ingredients: vapor distilled water + electrolytes (calcium chloride, magnesium chloride and potassium bicarbonate)

made for the center for responsible hydration (aka glaceau) whitestone, ny 11357

Nutrition Facts
Serving Size 8fl oz (240mL)
Servings Per Container about 4

Amount Per Serving
Calories 0
Total Fat 0g
Sodium 0mg
Total Carbohydrates 0g
Protein 0g

enjoy the inside, recycle the outside

So I paid a dollar [two, actually, since I got two bottles] for 33.8 FL OZ of 'smart' water with a label that was typed by someone who couldn't find the shift key while they weren't fact checking....

The water we drink, bottled or tap, usually does not contain 'whatever animals leave behind'. And clouds? Pure? What, were these people asleep during that Earth science class, or did they just disregard it in favour of marketing?

For those who don't know, clouds are formed when the moisture in the air condenses around something called 'condensation nuclei'. That's dust in advertising-speak. Dust.

So, smart water is dust water. With those same random groundstuffs that might be in the regular water.

Smart water is not smart.

...but, at least I only paid a dollar for it. And now I've got this big bottle that I can refill. So yay.

I did it again. I drank the rest.

It doesn't get any better with age. Or with warming, since 'room temperature' in here is about 80.

Actually, thinking about it, the aspartameyness was slightly less at 80 than it was at...whatever it was yesterday. Perhaps something terrible has happened, because today it just tastes like ass. Orange ass.

If oranges were made out of chemicals in lowest-bidder type labs in a third world country, by disgruntled third-world workers, and those oranges had asses, this is what those asses would taste like. Especially if those oranges had poor hygiene, and you happened to come along for a taste about three weeks into the worst heat wave in Earth's history.

I'd bring up the part about how these oranges can only sweat through their anus, and how they sweat pure artificial sugar, but...you don't want to hear that.

Then again, maybe not. I don't think that a bit of warmishness and a day of being opened is going to move up the expiration date by that much....

This time, instead of drinking it from the cute little bottle, I dumped it into a plastic cup and got a picture of it. It took a few tries, because, apparently, my camera was horrified at what it was being asked to do, and it kept returning pictures of whiteness -- either this was due to the flash going off and the picture being overexposed, or it was the camera's way of telling me that it would much rather go into the light than be forced to have anything to do with this shit.

The 'New Orange Flavor' is...vaguely pink.

Which, again, is better than the strange antifreeze colour of the stuff Gremlin got, but...pink? For orange? No.

So, I bought a bottle. Actually, two, because Gremlin tried some. What the hell. We were out buying donuts anyway, right?

After careful consideration [read: "How much is this shit again?"] I decided on the NEW! Orange Flavor, because none of the other bottles had a flavour listed, and I couldn't imagine anything worse than opening up one of these and finding out that the natural flavour resembled a combination of feet, ass and ground up tylenol with a base of seven year old off-brand Tussin. Because what the hell else is something made out of Niacin, Folic Acid, a couple of B vitamins, a touch of Sodium, Taurine, Glucuronolactone, Malic Acid, N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine, L-Phenylalanine, Caffeine, and Citicoline going to taste like? Certainly not the 'purified water' they claim is one of the 'other ingredients'.

Gremlin's smelled and looked a bit like green KoolAid, which...I'm thinking was lime, except that it tasted like grape...which is extremely upsetting. So, yeah. NEW! Orange it is, then.

Opening the Bottle

You practically need an energy drink just to open the damned thing. First, you have to slice open the heat-shrinked plastic wrappy stuff that is the label, which should be made easier by the perforation, except that it's not perfectly aligned. And then the bit around the cap gets in the way, because you think you're making progress, except it's just the plastic turning, and not the cap.

When I finally got the cap off, I was a little disturbed by the strange brown crusty substance on some of the bottle's threads, but since they obviously hadn't reached the upper part...I ignored them. And, besides, the plastic bit was all sealed, so it can't possibly be anything bad, right?

...it smells like KoolAid again. Orange, this time. With a hint of Sunny Delight.

Unfortunately, it tastes like neither of those things.

It tastes like aspartame and regret -- two things that aren't on the ingredients list. There's Splenda, which, in my experience, has a aspartamey taste.

I think I'll, uh, save the other half of the bottle. Yeah. For later.

Maybe I'll pour it into a cup and see what it really looks like....

From the website:

Kitt-In Box TM
From the Manhattan Collection

We love our cats... and they seem to love walking across our keyboards! You can't blame them, they just want to be near us. With the Kitt-In Box, cats have a place to rest that's out of the way, but still an arm length's away from a scratch on the belly.

The Kitt-In Box can attach to the side of a desk or be placed on top it. Felt pads protect the desk top. Cats are drawn to the soft cushion and the high walls, which are perfect for nesting. The Kitt-In Box can support a 20 lbs cat and even small dogs!

Introductory Price: $49.99

Patent Pending Design

Do you know what's wrong with the picture yet? It's not that it's just a crappy wooden box that you sit on your desk that someone's trying to charge fifty bucks for and patent, or the pseudo-fanciness, or even the weird intentional floaty thing caused by the clamp.

It's the idea that this will do any good.

Have these people ever owned a cat, or do they just think that they'll make a bunch of money off people who just got a cat and don't know anything at all about them? Because I've got a cat, and I happen to know for a fact that there is no fancy bullshit overpriced wood box that will keep that cat from laying on the keyboard -- unless maybe you take that fancy bullshit overpriced wood box and mount it under the desk where the keyboard drawer should be...since you were stupid enough to not have the keyboard drawer on your fancy bullshit overpriced wood desk. Or you decided to take it off and make a special cat tray out of it.

Seriously, it's not going to work like that. What'll happen is the cat's still laying on the keyboard, and the fifty dollar misplaced keyboard drawer is going to turn into a fancy, overpriced paper tray. You'd have better luck trying to trick the cat into sleeping on the spare keyboard you keep there just for the cat to sleep on...but I doubt it.

Save your money. Accept the catness of the cat. Or don't. And by 'don't', I mean 'don't have a cat', or 'don't take the cat to your office'. Because cats just don't work that way. They're cats. They prefer bread [and hair] ties and those plastic things from milk bottles to expensive toys, and whatever you happen to be working on at the moment to any fancy bed.

When I wasn't posting about spam and pedophiles or chatting, I've mostly been reading about Scientology [still]. Except for those few surprisingly warm days when we went wandering around the local stores.

Except...it wasn't all that warm, and I was noticing that something very important was absent from my coat collection. Something for those transitional seasons, when it was windy and often wet, that wouldn't keep me too warm, but would keep me warm enough.

So, after checking out the new Play-n-Trade, we went over to Kohls. And after trying on every athletic sneaker in the shoe department in the quest for the perfect shoe, [Nike is comfortable, but...not quite perfect. Close, though.] we went digging through the rest of the store looking for coats that weren't entirely useless or completely ugly.

It turns out that coats that are both 'not entirely useless' and 'not completely ugly' are generally kept in the male-gender sections.

I found this in the boy's section, on the clearance rack.

I'm not too thrilled about the colour, but it's not the worst thing in the world. Obviously, I was okay enough with it to buy it.

I'm glad I did, too. I've been wearing it on every trip out since, usually only the outer shell. See, it's got this zip-out liner that's also a fleece that can be worn on its own. The shell then becomes a slightly-warmer-than-expected lightweight springish jacket. With an MP3 pocket. And a hideaway hood that I haven't even tried yet.

The fleece compresses down nicely, and can fit into one of the smaller compartments of my backpack [which I also never leave home without at this point], so when it gets too cold for just the jacket, I can zip the fleece back into it, and be...less cold. Except 'less cold' isn't really the word for it. Depending on what else I'm wearing, 'too fucking warm' might be a better representation.

On Tuesday, we made a nighttime store trip to get a few more cases of soda before the sale ended. Knowing it was below freezing, I wore one of my hoodies along with this Coat of Warm, thus becoming 'Too Fucking Warm.'

Which isn't always a bad thing, I guess.

Backtracking a bit, to pre-coat days, one of our trips to get soda brought us to this very weird scene:

What appears to have happened is that someone [probably a drunk someone] ended up driving on the sidewalk, flattened the speed limit sign [that would be the object opposite the snow], and then continued to drive down the sidewalk until reaching the grocery store parking lot.

The speed limit there is 25, by the way. Just so you know. So you can be the one person aware of it, because nobody else coming around the corner and trying to hit everyone who crosses there seems to be aware of it.

The last time I was down there during the day time, the tracks weren't quite as obvious. I don't know if they've replaced the sign yet, though.

That would be the 'last time I was down there and paid attention', that is. Which, unfortunately, was probably 'when I took those pictures'. Usually, it's night, although there were two day trips very recently.

The first was where I found out that carrying soda back on my bike hurts my delicate female bottom, and the second was when I bought a nice new bike seat, and found out that the bike store near here is actually pretty competitive in its pricing.

This was my old bike seat -- the one that came with the bike. It'd hurt you, too, I'm sure.

This is the new one. I haven't tried it yet, because it's been too cold.

So cold, the aliens are stopping by and leaving funny patterns in the snow.

Also, I'm wary of riding my bike at night. I wouldn't want to end up a smear on the sidewalk between two wheel ruts on my way to the store to get some more soda, or Yan Yan.

I couldn't help myself. They were just sitting there, looking like a chocolatey dipping sauce/cookie stick kids snack that I used to enjoy. And then I found out that there were entertaining engrishey phrases on the cookie sticks....

Which is almost as entertaining as:

Good home my for my gray ferrel cat, must keep indoors, have vet.

Overlooking the 'my for my' thing as much as possible, 'ferrel'? That's one of two things, a typo for feral, or a typo for Ferrell. The cat's either wild, or Will Ferrell.

I wouldn't keep either of them in my house. The feral one would be upset, and the Ferrell might upset Zombi.

I wouldn't want to upset Zombi.

Wouldn't even want to keep her from stuffing her head so far into Gremlin's [empty] cup of milk that she gets it kinda stuck....

I think that's all the images I wanted to use, except for one.

That'd be the size tag of my new coat.

Just to prove that life isn't fair: it does work. A little. A very little.

It's homeopathic bullshit, though. If you don't understand what homeopathy is, you can probably try wikipedia. There's also this article at quackwatch, but if you want to believe, you might not like it. I refer you to these articles because there's some math involved, and I have a hard time working it all out. I just know that there's almost nothing of the 'Active Ingredients' in this stick of guck.

The Active Ingredients?

Iris versicolor (Blue flag) 12X H.P.U.S. 0.1%
Kali bichromicum (Potassium bichromate) 6X H.P.U.S. 0.05%
Bryonia alba (White Bryony) 12X H.P.U.S. 0.4%

What's H.P.U.S. mean?

The letters H.P.U.S. indicate that the components in this product are officially monographed in the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States

And what's that? I don't really know. I'm not paying for the access.

Access to the HPUS Online Database
The HPCUS currently provides three subscription options:
(Prices are in U.S. Dollars)

• 1 Day (24 Hours) $29.00
  (1 user)

• 30 Days $99.00
  (1 user)

• 1 Year $1000.00
  (1 user)

• 1 Year Corporate $15,000.00 (unlimited number of users)

What I do know is that, in a normal product, you could probably opt to not list those 'active ingredients', because, like I said, they're barely there. It's like the 'acceptable levels' of nastiness in drinking water you always hear about, or the 'rat hairs' in your Snickers. Sorta a bonus instead of something they intentionally put in.

I'm trying to make this as clear as possible: I do not believe in homeopathy. I am not saying this because I have been fooled into thinking this product works. This is not a 'placebo effect'.

And it has nothing to do with the bonus rat pieces.

To understand why this product works, you have to slide your eyes on down to the bottom of the box, past the 'Use' and the 'Warnings', a little ways past the Directions, just under the Other Information.

Yeah, there. The Inactive Ingredients.

diazolidinyl urea, ethyl alcohol, iodopropynyl butylcarbamate, menthol, menthyl lactate, propylene glycol, sodium stearate, steareth-21, tetrasodium EDTA, triethanolamine, water

My bet? It's the menthol. Menthol is the typical active ingredient in heat rubs, like Bengay, Icy Hot, and Tiger Balm, all of which WORK when I rub them on my forehead in desperation. Unfortunately, they all smell. A lot. And smells? Not so mixy with the migraines, unless they happen to be a pleasant, helpful smell like lilac, or something. Something that, for some reason, helps you. And, hey, if Tiger Balm does, good for you.

If not, maybe one of the odorless, slightly less greasy type creams could help, although it might be even more helpful if you apply it to the back of your neck, because the strange heating part of the heat rubs can sometimes be counterproductive.

I do wonder about the alcohol in this thing -- if that's what leads to the strange cooling sensation. It's not really worth the six or seven bucks a stick of this costs. A big thing of your favourite topical rub and a cold washcloth or ice pack would be better.

I'm very sorry I helped to pay for one of their very annoying ads. There. I said it. Now, please, don't buy it. Buy something else. Vicks VapORub and noseplugs. Anything.

Looks good, doesn't it?

You can kinda see the thumb stylus in this shot, and the classic Nintendo logo. The Nintendo DS logo is on the other side of the strap, and since it's really the only thing on the DS that screams 'Nintendo', I'm pretty okay with it.

Also, the strap is really nice and smooth and silky feeling. Very pleasant. Once I hooked it onto the back properly, it seemed to work just fine for...whatever it's supposed to do. I can't be entirely sure yet, because I have to either clean or replace my screenguardz.

It was 5.95 with shipping, which isn't exactly horrible. I ordered it late on Friday night, got a shipping notification on Tuesday after five, and it was here today. Not bad.

They could probably save even more on shipping, though [and not have to charge the $2] if they put it in a little, thick envelope instead of a hyooge box. I bet it wouldn't have cost a whole .83 cents, then.

Okay, so I'm a little bitter about that, but I wasn't even expecting it to show up until next week. I figured I'd have to wait to make my DS look slightly more official and Nintendoey....

I should go find my screenguardz now. Or at least my special lens cleaner wipes....

I got two different kinds of 'guardz' from them -- iPod Nano full face and Nintendo DS. The Nano 'guardz' fit nicely, though there's a bit of an irritating bubbling issue around the wheel -- but that's just fine by me. It's hard to get something to smooth over perfectly when it's smoothing over something that isn't staying put to begin with.

The other set, the DS ones, I couldn't do anything with them until just a few days ago. I discovered that they weren't sized properly at all -- the big ones were too big for both the top and the bottom screens, and the little ones were just too damned little.

So...I emailed them, explaining the problem, and not really expecting much of anything. I didn't even tell them who I was, or give them an order number.

Smart bastards they were -- they looked up my order based on my email address, and sent me a new set of DS 'guardz'. These arrived today, and they fit much better. Yay.

I'll probably be looking to see what else I can pair up with the PSP guardz I'm going to buy. Too bad they don't work on that little Palmtop thing Gremlin has, or I could custom-order some for that.

So, um, feel free to shop at screenguardz.com, if you want to take my word on it, or whatever. They've expanded their 'guardz' inventory since my last visit -- more phones and whatnot. If you've got something with a screen these things will work on [they're static-cling, so no sticky residue, but also, no workee on things like laptops], you should really look into something very much like this, because a scratched screen is a sad screen...and a really irritated screen-viewer.

Or something....