Archives for August 2011
Weird Shit in the Store
I have a bone to pick with stores. They discontinue some good stuff, but they use up valuable shelf space with some really weird products.
My stores no longer carry Lestoil, which was the only thing that could get oil and grease stains out of clothes, and Quaker Wheat Cakes, which were crunchy and delicious. But I really doubt that anyone is going to buy pigs’ feet in a jar or lye soap, yet the stores I go to have them right there for anyone who is still living in 1935. And who still eats head cheese?
About a month ago, I started taking photos of some of the stupider things I found in stores. I had to be sneaky, because I didn’t want any of the store personnel getting all suspicious. (“Code 8” means “blogger type taking pictures of the undesirable merchandise.”)
Bad Globes
I found this in Target’s home interiors department. Apparently, it’s not accurate, because there’s a big warning label on it. I think Africa might be missing. So if you’re a geography teacher, don’t buy it. If you’re a interior designer looking for something in the International theme, go at it.
Racist Book Shelves

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this in Target. Segregated books? Especially since it had been all over the news about Walmart separating out “black books” from “white books.” If it’s written by a African-American author and it’s about African-American characters, let’s put it with others of its kind, where it will be happiest. Walmart got bitch-slapped by the media for doing it. Target, apparently not wanting to reorganize its entire book department, came up with a solution: Fill its Recommended Reading shelf with all African-American authors, too:

That’s makes it all OK, right?
Dog IQ Tests

Who needs opposable thumbs to do puzzles? Don’t believe the look of pure joy on that dog’s face on the “Seek-a-Treat” box. No self-respecting dog I know would get a kick out of earning treats this way. What do you think he’s saying? I’m going with, “I’ll shuffle your bone . . .”
Squeaky One-Legged Chicken Pirate Dog Toys

For dogs who can’t play Shuffle Bone because of gasoline-fume brain damage, but who deserve rewards anyway.
Anti-Democrat Greeting Cards
Everything on the Spanish Shelf at Walgreens

Because it’s in Spanish, I don’t know what this stuff is, but none of it looks very appealing. Hispanics in America must have a terrible time with foot fungus, because there’s a lot of “hongo killer” and the like.
Some things, though, I wish would not translate so well:

Ah, placenta shampoo and conditioner! Just what the Guatemalan obstetrician ordered.
Toys for Young Jews

The ancient Hebrews really knew how to play, didn’t they? Today, your children, too, can play fun Passover games, just like their ancestors. You’ll love to watch them fight over who gets the firstborn dead baby finger puppet and who gets stuck with boils. This was in Publix, conveniently located right above the gefilte fish. L’chaim!
Gross Food
Canned meat is just not necessary. Unless you’re a soldier in Napoleon’s army or a survivalist living in Arizona and are planning to hide out in your underground lair until the second coming is over, what’s the point? This Hormel Roast Beef and Gravy looks more like dog food than dog food. And $3.89? Really? Good luck with that.
As scrumptious as “Squid (Pieces) in Ink Sauce” sound, I think I’ll take the “Cockles in Brine,” please, because I don’t have the foggiest notion what they are.
Octopus is the one sea creature that completes the series of Living Things That When Dead Should Not Be Put in Your Mouth.
Of all the fruits . . . Of all the fruits to mix with butter, why?
Well, of course the Cock Flavored Soup is spicy. Duh.
Even Grosser British Food
According to Wikipedia, Treacle is pudding in a can. According to the dust on the cans in Publix, no one is buying it.

It’s getting hard to leave the grocery store without visions of penises in your head. Come on, Brits, you can’t think of a better name for pudding in a can? How about “Treacle?” (Sometimes I think the English just want to be difficult.)
Shit No One Uses Anymore

I think my grandfather used this in 1959. If your husband uses shaving powder, maybe it’s time to upgrade to the 2.0 version of a man.

I haven’t seen blue water in a toilet since the year my grandfather stopped using shaving powder. You know how it says, “Leaves the bowl sanitary!”? Actually, it just leaves the bowl blue. Besides teaching young children a lesson in the color wheel (when yellow mixes with blue, it makes green!) I don’t see the point.
Food That is Gourmet to the Point of Being Sickening

Gourmets and foodies must love Publix. They have a gourmet mini-sub-section of every part of the store. Here in the condiments section, surrounded by the lowly mustard, trailer-trash ketchup and that fat-ass skank, Miracle Whip, sits Lemonaise. Lemons and mayonnaise are two ingredients that should not be mixed together, put in a jar and sold to unsuspecting shoppers.
Religious Food
I know we’re supposed to use the Bible as a guide for life, but someone decided it could also be a great resource for recipes. But is there really Spelt and Beans in this cereal? And what’s spelt? I’d look it up, but I’m afraid it’s treacle.
Let’s Stir Up the Boycott Pot
I am so, so, so, so, extremely so sorry to do this, but I have to get back to this Men Boycotting American Women thing.
I know, I know, I should just drop it, but the guy keeps coming onto my blog and posting stuff. He doesn’t allow comments on his blog, so I’m left with no choice but to voice my snarky opinions over here, where we’re all about free will and First Amendment rights.
He keeps saying that we’re whining about the boycott. {{awkward}}} because we’re not. We’re not upset about the boycott. We’re making fun of the boycott.
Anywho . . .
Just a little background here: Over at his website, he’s got all these American men chiming in on how bitchy and money-grubbing American girls are. And how we watch The Hills and Sex in the City so much. They bring up cats a lot; as in you American women will soon be lesbians living with 10 cats. (Like that’s something we wouldn’t want?) They also provide lots of specifics. One post talks about how annoying it is when American women heat something up in the microwave and burn little pieces of plastic in the corners of the food. (My husband is probably thinking, “Well, he does have a point there.”)
Daniel from San Francisco . . . Donald in DC . . . Paul from Elwinsger . . . they’ve all decided that they’ve been burned one too many times by an American woman and they’re not going to take it anymore, goddamnit.
I am fascinated by this site. Much like people are fascinated by stories of the Holocaust or that French guy who ate an airplane. You’ve heard the expression, “It’s like a bad car wreck; You can’t look away”? Kinda like that. This site off and on takes the place of Hoarders and Toddlers and Tiaras for me.
I’m about 100 percent sure it’s one prolific and extremely pissed off guy who’s writing all the posts. He makes an effort to make each one sound a little bit different, but there’s a common language style thread running through all of them that has me convinced it’s one man. Plus the spelling and grammar is way too good. Based on what I’ve seen on blog comments and message boards, more than half of these guys wouldn’t be able to spell their way out of a paper bag. And if I’m right and this boycott is just one guy, my hat’s off to you, dude. Between the writing and the spamming and following up with comments every few weeks – and I mean you’re all over the Internet, ALL over – no wonder you don’t have time to watch TV.
My sick interest in this site has me going over there every time he adds a comment to my blog. It’s usually the same old stuff, but then about two weeks ago, I saw this:
12 steps for American women to take before they get totally boycotted
This suggests that the current boycott isn’t quite 100 percent yet. That it could get worse and become a total boycott. So listen up:
To American women:
If you don’t want us American men to shun you, I recommend you:
1. Learn financial responsibility.
2. Stop running to the government to continue your little game of one-upmanship against us that allows you to be dependent on our hard-earned money.
3. Lose weight and learn how to stay in shape without doing drugs or developing eating disorders.
4. Stop cheating on us.
5. Stop claiming that you want a “nice-guy” while instead you only go for yuppies, pick-up-artists, players, thugs, badboys, and douchebags.
6. Stop selling yourself out to the latest trends and develop TRUE individuality
7. Drop the self-entitlement
8. Drop the American ego. America’s not perfect, so everyone has to stop strutting around like we are.
9. Stop watch all of that shallow crap (like the Hills) that everyone puts on TV. There’s more to life than pop-culture, and it has already messed up our society.
10. Learn to appreciate when a nice guy helps you with something, and remember him (don’t just throw on the charm just so you can use him and chuck him aside).
11. Stop complaining that you keep getting used, abused, fucked and chucked for someone else, Unless you stop chasing after assholes (like the ones mentioned in #5).
12. Repeal IMBRA. There are more effective ways of preventing abuse, and it violates our rights to tie the knot with whoever we want. This is obviously just an attempt to narrow the field for us. If you want people to be interested in American women, then get rid of these laws so you can prove that you are just as good as foreign women. If you don’t repeal them, you are just proving that you can’t compete and that you have no intention of improving yourselves.
* Keep in mind, every second you waste, you are only losing the respect of men. If you do not improve your ways, it will mean the end of this country as we know it. If it does, I will be in some other country before it all goes down.
I only have one problem with this list: There shouldn’t be a comma before “and douchebags.”
I’ve done #1-11, but I’m having a little bit of difficulty with #12, since I’m not a member of the U.S. Congress. Repealing IMBRA, which prevents criminals from bringing foreign women over to the U.S. as mail-order brides, might require at least a master’s degree and a big campaign chest.
I’ll work on it. Meanwhile, stay the eff off my blog.
Yappy Hour on the Beach
I take a walk on the beach just about every Sunday morning. It’s one of the things in the plus column on the list of why you might want to live in Florida. (That and we get the prize for biggest and best cockroaches in the U.S.)
Florida is a very dog-friendly state. People take their dogs with them to the mall, to the grocery store, out to dinner – You can’t run into CVS without seeing someone with a dog tucked under her arm.
But the beach is where you’ll get the best slice of a dog’s life in Florida. There’s about a mile stretch of shoreline not far from where I live, where dogs are not only allowed, but encouraged. This is where I walk on Sundays.
There are big dogs . . .
. . . and small dogs
. . . and every size and shape in between. We’ve even seen celebrity dogs. This is a dog who is locally famous for visiting sick people in the hospital. His agent gave us his card and said we were allowed to pose for pictures with him.
There’s lots of fetch going on at the beach. If you throw something – anything – a dog will go get it for you.
They like to walk on the sand because there’s a lot to find there.
Sometimes they luck out and find a decapitated fish lying on the sand . . .
. . . and sometimes it’s best to just roll in it, to be safe.
Some dogs on the beach will gladly pose for the camera.
They look out into the ocean with longing. I think they get that from us.
And they love their peeps.
They’ll follow them anywhere, especially into the water.
The dogs love the water.
But going to the beach is really all about partying with friends.
We try not to walk too far north, because eventually we’ll get to the beach that doesn’t allow dogs.
And as pretty a picture as this is:
I prefer this:
Gnashing My Flippers Over Toddlers and Tiaras
What can I say about Toddlers and Tiaras, the eweylicious show about child pageants, that hasn’t already been said?
Actually, a lot. So much material . . . so few adjectives to adequately express disdain . . .
This show has a Svengali hold on me. I’m a big fan of shows where I hate the people and I sit there hoping they’ll do more and more outrageously stupid things. Apparently I’m so lacking in self-esteem that I need to watch other people be worse than me, so I can say, ”Well, I’m not perfect, but at least I don’t: glue false eyelashes onto my 18-month-old baby / keep old Burger King straws / shoot meth instead of taking my grandpa to get his chemo like I promised.
Yes, I am comparing Toddlers and Tiaras with Hoarders and Intervention. They are today’s train wrecks that we can’t keep our eyes off of. (And since trains don’t often wreck these days, it’s all we’ve got. If public hangings are brought back into vogue, these shows are screwed.)
I have to hand it to these TV show producers. I thought they were doing a bang-up job with Nanny 911. I loved watching the mamby-pamby passive parents let their kids swear at them and hit them and demand Twizzlers for dinner and turn their houses into big boxes of anger and dysfunction.
But Toddlers and Tiaras raised the bar. Raised it high. Covered it with sparkles and spray-tanned it. Taught it how to pout-and-nod and most importantly when to pout-and-nod.
I’m fascinated by how long these shows can stay on the air. You would think that eventually the moms and kids who are in pageants would start to refuse to be on the show. I mean, they’ve seen the show, haven’t they? This isn’t a program about cute little girls in the pageant world. This is a televised freak show about psycho parents. Getting the call from the producers of Toddlers and Tiaras is like a corporate CEO getting the call from 60 Minutes: You know it’s not going to turn out well. But yet there’s always someone to go on camera the next week, episode after episode. Where do they find these people?
In the case of the pageant princesses, it appears the American South is full of moms (and dads) who refuse to believe that anyone would have the gall to make fun of their lil’ darlin’ daughters (and yes, sons . . . you heard me, sons) who look like the Vegas strip during pedophile week.
This is what happens when people don’t travel. They get all entrenched in whatever little subculture they fall into, they are surrounded by others of their kind, and no one is allowed in who will say, “What’s with the Marie Antoinette hair? That looks ridiculous on a 2-year-old, just so you know.” It’s a country club mentality for people too trashy to get into the country club.
If they could just step outside their microcosm and notice that everyone else’s kids are playing soccer and doing their homework, they might see how absurd their kids look with fake teeth, an unseasonal tan, a stripper costume and anklets.
On second thought, God forbid. I’d be stuck with the History Channel and Ice Road Truckers. And they’re usually on their best behavior.
Pregnancy Can Be a Beautiful Thing. Or You Could Ruin That, Too.
Everyone loves a pregnant woman right? According to these photos that I found on iVillage and Awkward Family Photos, being pregnant doesn’t exempt a woman from making bad photo pose choices.
I, for one, am glad that pregnant women are allowed to show the shape of their stomachs. When I was pregnant, we had to wear the costume of a 12-year-old Catholic school girl to disguise our pregnancies.
But then pregnant women had to go and take it one step further, and start showing their naked stomachs. Three words: T.M.I.
And then there are these people:
Get that feather away from me. And take off that bracelet, or I’ll let my water break on your side of the bed.
“I can do it, but I’m gonna need a semi-automatic, a watermelon and a maternity peasant dress.” (If MacGyver were preggers.)
Janice never showed her true feelings about the fact that her husband had a bigger bump and bigger breasts than her.
Hockey moms gone wild! No, really, the third son pushed her right over the edge and she’s actually lost her mind. If this isn’t photo evidence, I don’t know what is.
Greg always felt like an out-of-focus background character in his wife and daughter’s life.
Thank God for maternity sports bras.
I don’t like that look on her face at all.
You’ll want to show this photo to the baby when he gets older and begins to question just how big of a dork his dad is.
While you’re at it, picture yourself with bangs and more defined pecs, too. (Your baby isn’t going to look anything like that, by the way.)
The worst part is, these are tattoos. Alert the circus: Couple with baby coming in for audition.
The pregnancy gave Melissa the temperament to play both the White Swan and the Black Swan almost simultaneously.
Florida Governor Rick Scott, in a photo that never came out in the campaign, miraculously.
“Honey, could you pleeeeeease change the tire this time?”
“Oh, honey, I can’t. I’m naked and pregnant.”
Is it just me, or does this guy seem to be more interested in the boobs than in the baby?
Sometimes it’s hard to find a comfortable position when you’re pregnant. So take a tip from our friend the sloth and try balancing on a tree branch.
The women I can almost forgive: Between the hair loss, face break-outs, mood swings, loss of bodily functions, and deprivation of all alcohol, caffeine and a decent cold medicine, you can hardly blame an expectant mother’s choice of photo poses. But the husbands? No excuse.
Carol soon realized that a game of hide-and-seek was going to be much more complicated for the next few months.
Celebrating our love . . . and celebrating the fact that my husband’s gut is bigger and more full of beer than mine.
What’dja do, put Skittles in there?
☙