Tag: Misc

They all said I was crazy. But where are they now? That’s right, they’re down there, with them, and I’m up here, safe. Well, as safe as anyone could be in these times. Heck, I could be the only one left. Just me and this journal and…them.

If you’re reading this, you know how it all started. But I was ahead of the game. Guns, ammo, canned foods, fortifying my house; I was as ready as I could be. And when they came, it all went down just like I knew it would. It all went to hell.

But I’ve written about all this already. Now, it’s all about daily survival. I ate my last can of creamed corn yesterday. All of my supplies were running low. Much as I hated to do it, I knew I would have to leave the safety and security of my house to find more supplies.

Fortunately, I knew there was a Vietnam vet who lived right across the street. I found the “trespassers will be shot” sign on his fence and the fact that I rarely saw him leave the house to be encouraging. Maybe get some ammo; figured I might get lucky and he’d have some MREs or something. I knew I’d never be able to get to a store; there are too many of them out there now, and even with Lucy (my trusty shotgun), I wouldn’t stand a chance. Besides, I’m sure the stores have already been ransacked, before things got really bad. But getting across the street…I could do that. They are slow and I am fast and wily.

So last night, I made my move. I ran across the brick wall that I accessed via the tree next to my second story window. Lucy and I cleared a large enough path for me to run across the street and climb the vet’s chain link fence surrounding his yard. It seemed to have been an effective deterrent, as there were none of them in the yard. I wondered why they hadn’t knocked over the fence through sheer numbers. Once they smell fresh meat, almost no obstacle can stop them.

Once I’d broken inside, I immediately saw the reason why. Old man sitting in a ragged armchair, wearing his Army uniform, shotgun under his chin. Looked like he’d been there for a while. Guess this was one war he didn’t want to fight.

I grabbed the shotgun (trigger finger accidentally fell off in the process; sorry old man) and headed into the kitchen. Found a few cans of condensed soup and not much else. I was surprised; I figured that, like me, he’d be more prepared for something like this.

My surprise vanished when I hit the basement. Jackpot! More guns and ammo than I could fit in my pack. Evaporated milk. Jugs of water. But there was one thing that really caught my eye: the Tactical Sammiches.

They were in a box on the floor. On top of the box was a print-out from ThinkGeek’s website (Ha! Websites. Hadn’t thought about those in a while) giving some details about the “sammiches”. (That’s cutesy slang for “sandwich”; if anyone ever reads this, they may not even know what the Internet was, so I figured I’d spell that one out.) According to the paper, the Sammiches have a 2 year shelf life! The old man really was prepared. I wonder what made him give up so quickly. Too old for this shit, I guess.

I didn’t have much time for contemplation. I could hear the fence rattling outside. The Sammiches came in two flavors: Pepperoni and Honey BBQ Beef. My pack space was at a premium, and even in these lean times the thought of a Honey BBQ Beef sandwich that wouldn’t spoil for two years turned my stomach a little, so I grabbed as many of the Pepperoni Sammiches as I could and booked it out of there.

Lucy and I got back home pretty much without incident. Had to smash a little girl’s head in with the butt of one of my newly acquired pistols; she had no eyes but she knew exactly where I was. Her pigtails were cute, even if they were matted with blood.

Once I was safe inside my house again, I took some time to look at the Tactical Sammich’s packaging. It’s a shiny brown package with a label on the front that says, “CMMG Small Arms ^and Sammiches Manufacturing”. The “^and Sammiches” part was inserted with cutesy font. I remembered the company from when I was shopping around for a 9mm to add to my collection. I bet they never figured their little gimmick would be taken seriously one day.

The back of the package describes the sandwich as “shelf stable pepperoni in bread”. Bread! I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had bread, but I could remember the lovely smell of it baking in my mother’s oven like it was yesterday. My mouth watered at the memory, even though my brain knew that whatever bread was actually in the Tactical Sammich wouldn’t exactly live up to my mother’s.

An interesting note: while the print-out claimed the Tactical Sammich had a shelf life of two years, there was no expiration date on the package. The one’s I’d taken from the dead guy’s house could have been sitting there for five weeks or five years. I had no way of knowing.

The first thing I noticed when I took the Tactical Sammich out of its sealed pouch was that it had a face. Two eyes, jagged teeth pattern forming a rictus smile, cracked skin…I shuddered. It took me a moment to compose myself. It looked too much like…

Well, after I got past the unintentional face, I was able to examine it more closely. The Tactical Sammich was about the same size as a Pop-Tart. The bread was unnaturally smooth and dense; it felt almost oily, but left no trace behind on my fingers.

When I cut it open, I was rather surprised at what I saw. The back of the package wasn’t kidding when it described the Sammich as “pepperoni in bread”. I’ve been taking some pictures with what’s left of the battery power in my camera; if anyone ever reads this, you can find pictures of the Tactical Sammich on it. As you can see, it looks like someone shoved a Slim Jim into two cheap hot dog buns that had been smashed together.

And that’s pretty much what it tasted like, too. Obviously, only one out of every three bites actually had the pepperoni in it, leaving the rest as mouthfuls of dense, mostly flavorless white bread. I worry that I might blow through my entire emergency water supply just trying to get these sammiches down my gullet.

Unfortunately, having my mouth full of gummy enriched flour was the best part of the meal. Having been at this whole survival thing for a while now, I have eaten my share of stale, expired Slim Jims, and that is exactly what the pepperoni in my Tactical Sammich was like. Leathery and yet greasy on the outside, skin shriveled, and very tough to bite through and chew. The pepperoni flavor was faint; I would describe it more accurately as faded. It was also bitter, and there was a lovely subtle aftertaste of dirt. There was nothing redeeming about this pepperoni stick.

And that is the long and short of the Tactical Sammich. Dense, flavorless bread and tough, heartburn-inducing, just plain bad-tasting pepperoni stick. No sauce, no cheese, nothing to tie the two together. If the Pepperoni Tactical Sammich was this bad, I can’t even imagine what was going on inside the Honey BBQ Beef. Now I know what really caused that old Vietnam vet to off himself.

You may think I’m being too critical of the Tactical Sammich. After all, the world as we knew it has essentially ended, they have taken over, and survival is next to impossible. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve eaten worse in my struggle to stay alive, and with a two-year shelf life, these Sammiches will help me to continue to exist for a while now, if they don’t get to me first. But I’m still a human being, last time I checked, and I still have a palate. I will choke down these “food” products because I have to. But that doesn’t mean I’ll like it.

(Nutrition Facts – 1 sandwich (70 grams) – 270 calories, 130 calories from fat, 15 grams of total fat, 5 grams of saturated fat, 1 gram of trans fat, 20 milligrams of cholesterol, 580 milligrams of sodium, 25 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of dietary fiber, 0 grams of sugar, 10 grams of protein, 4% vitamin A, 4% calcium, and 8% iron.)

Item: CMMG Pepperoni Tactical Sammich
Price: $5.99
Size: 1 sandwich
Purchased at: thinkgeek.com
Rating: 2 out of 10
Pros: Can help keep you alive. Dead guys with convenient stashes. Two year shelf life. Lucy.
Cons: Dense, flavorless bread. Employing overused tropes to write a review. Bitter, tough pepperoni. Them. No expiration date on the package.

Whoa, a toothpaste review! I know what questions are swirling in your head. “Is it bacon flavored? Did I accidentally visit theresponsiblebuy.com? What’s next, advice on my 401(k)?” No, no, and you can’t go wrong with index funds. Occasionally, TIB likes to offer reviews for products that can cleanse your bodies of all the sweets and fats we usually recommend. And since all of our Taco Bell posts already double as laxative reviews and I refuse to try out the Shake Weight until after a third date, I figured a toothpaste review best fits the bill.

According to the Colgate website, the new MaxClean with SmartFoam can clean hard to reach places because it has 30 percent more penetrating foam than regular toothpaste. For the purposes of this review, I guess we’ll just assume that more foam actually is better for cleaning your teeth, even though a quick Google search provides unsatisfactory evidence. I’ll also assume that Colgate decided to use this specific combination of capitalization and spacing in the product title because it somehow makes the toothpaste better at cleaning your teeth, and NOT because they wanted to make me incredibly angry by randomly mangling basic rules of English. A quick Google search on this question also provides unsatisfactory evidence, so I’ll let you decide which of these assumptions is a bigger stretch.

MaxClean with SmartFoam had a classically pleasant electric blue color, and the intensity of its mint flavor was pretty standard toothpaste fare. But within 20 seconds of brushing, I could notice a significant difference in foaminess. “30% extra foam” may have been a serious underestimation, as I had a really hard time not letting the foam dribble out of my mouth. After I was done brushing, my mouth felt much cleaner and tingly-er than it normally does. I suppose the toothpaste actually could have cleaned more hard to reach places than my regular toothpaste does; more likely, the overflow of foam just reached a greater surface area around my face and left my mouth feeling zestier more on the outside than within. Even if it’s the second explanation, I think that’s a big positive – in addition to cleaning my teeth, I want my toothpaste to make me feel refreshed after I use it.

On the negative side, the overflow of foam means I probably left dried toothpaste spots all around the sink and annoyed my roommate. Sorry about that, David. Oh, and thanks for buying toilet paper last week. If I wrote for theresponsiblebuy.com I would probably remember to buy basic household necessities at the supermarket instead of walking around the snack aisles asking the store associates if they know whether the next shipment of Twinkies will include the Strawberry Crème ones. (They never know.)

Anyway, if you’re like me and want your toothpaste to help you feel awake and refreshed in the morning, definitely buy the Colgate MaxClean SmartFoam. If you’re skeptical about the assumption that more foam is actually better for your teeth, find a good scientific answer and let us know. And if you’d prefer for me to go back to reviewing greasy and ridiculous foods, come back in two weeks and I promise I’ll revert to form. Who knows, maybe those Strawberry Crème Twinkies will finally have arrived!

Item: Colgate Effervescent Mint MaxClean SmartFoam with Whitening
Price: $2.50
Size: 6 ounces
Purchased at: Kmart
Rating: 7 out of 10
Pros: Produces a lot of extra foam. Leaves your mouth feeling cleaner (even if it’s not really any cleaner). Theresponsiblebuy.com. Index funds for your 401(k). Shake Weight commercials. My roommate buying toilet paper last week.
Cons: Unclear if more foam is better for your teeth. Capitalization and spacing of the product title makes me angry. Leaving dried toothpaste spots everywhere. Creeping out the supermarket store associates.

When it comes to ogling young female customers and employees, getting close enough to smell them or maybe accidentally bumping into them at a shopping mall, Bath & Body Works is the third best store to do so. It’s right behind Victoria’s Secret and Forever 21.

Although it lacks lingerie, which the other two have, what places Bath & Body Works in the top three is the fact they’re the only one of the three that has a men’s section, which unlike the other two, gives men a good reason to enter the store. But it’s extremely small and I believe it’s only there to lure men into using the product testers so that the women in the store can use their sense of smell to detect if a possible pervert is nearby attempting to smell or bump into them.

Recently, Bath & Body Works added a line of signature collection men’s products, which include colognes, body sprays and body washes. The line consists of four scents: Noir, Citron, Ocean and Oak. Because the female Bath & Body Works employee I was ogling said she liked the Noir, Citron and Ocean scents the most, those were the ones I purchased in body wash form.

The same employee was also my cashier and I have to say it was fastest anyone has ever rang me up. There was no asking me if I need lip balm or if I want to sign up for their mailing list. I guess I should ogle the cashier whenever I buy stuff from Best Buy, so they won’t offer me their product protection plan.

The body wash’s bottle is the same 10-ounce one the women’s body wash come in, except instead of a pretty chrome cap, it comes with a manly black cap screwed on top. Thanks to the sodium lauryl sulfate, the body washes lather up really nice. Each body wash also contains aloe vera and nourishing oils, so if you hate feeling like your body isn’t completely rinsed off, I’d suggest not wasting your money on these men’s Bath & Body Works body washes just so that you can ogle and flirt with a Bath & Body Works employee.

Their fragrances aren’t nearly as strong as those from Axe, but they also don’t make me smell like a 15-year-old boy. Their scent lingered on my body for around 45 minutes after stepping out of the shower. On the Bath & Body Works website they list the key fragrance notes I should be smelling with each variation. Citron has crisp bergamot, sage, lemon zest, brisk woods, tonka bean and sandalwood; Ocean has bergamot, cypress, nutmeg, patchouli, cedarwood and vetiver; and Noir has sage, coriander, cardamom, white vanilla, vetiver and amber musk.

Oh, who am I kidding? I don’t know what half of that stuff is, so let me break it down using words I don’t have to look up on Wikipedia.

Citron has a light, citrus fragrance with a little bit of spice. It’s a crisp, pleasant scent and probably my favorite of the three. Ocean has a sweet, slightly fruity odor and I think it’s more of a unisex scent than a manly one. Noir is the most manly smelling of the bunch. It’s a bold, musky scent I imagine James Bond would wear. It’s also bold enough to be the best scent to help female Bath & Body Works shoppers sense when a perv is trying to get close to them.

Item: Bath & Body Works Signature Collection for Men Body Wash (Noir, Citron and Ocean)
Price: $10.50 each
Size: 10 ounces
Purchased at: Bath & Body Works (Mall of America)
Rating: 6 out of 10 (Noir)
Rating: 7 out of 10 (Citron)
Rating: 7 out of 10 (Ocean)
Pros: Pleasant, non-overpowering scents. Lathers nicely. Not tested on animals. Doesn’t make me smell like a 15-year-old boy like Axe does. Scent lingers on body for about 45 minutes after stepping out of the shower. Not getting asked by the cashier to sign up for mailing lists or if I’m interested in buying additional products.
Cons: Almost twice the price as regular men’s body washes. Noir’s scent can help Bath & Body Works shoppers know when a perv is getting close. Oils in the body wash makes it feel like you haven’t completely rinsed everything off. Getting kicked out of Victoria’s Secret and Forever 21. Not knowing what bergamot, brisk woods, tonka bean, cypress, patchouli, vetiver and amber musk is.

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Show Notes:

The Impulsive Buy podcast has gone in a different direction. No more news and week in review segments. It’s now just one review. I decided to do this because it makes the podcast easier to produce, since I am just one hairy man. Speaking of hairiness, this week, I review a product that makes my body as smooth as a pre-pubescent boy’s.

Also, I know. I forgot to deinterlace.

Length: 2:44

Photo Credits:

Other photos purchased via www.istockphoto.com.

I hate change.

Yes, I know change can be a good thing, but I hate when the things I grew up with morph into something so unrecognizable that I have to question whether or not I’m in an alternate universe where Taylor Swift is regarded as talented.

Gwen Stefani is on that list. She was a source of inspiration for myself and many girls of my generation who were too young to remember Joan Jett, but still wanted to rock out with their non-cock out. Now, she’s the source of me questioning, “What the fuck?” Sure, she has popped out a couple of kids and no longer does pushups on stage, but she has gotten stranger and stranger over the years. Compared to Lady Gaga, Gwen is a mild mannered soccer mom, but her odd obsession with Japan and Harajuku Girls is just too hard to not question whether this chick is playing with a full deck.

Her obsession started five years ago when she accessorized with four Japanese girls, claiming they were her “backup singers,” but I’m sure they aren’t even allowed to say a peep when Gwen is in earshot. Her second fashion line (Remember when celebrities had one fashion line and that was cutting edge), Harajuku Lovers makes anything by Sanrio seem like it’s appropriate for Hells Angels to wear when they go road tripping.

Harajuku Lovers Fragrance G is no different. Basically, the bottle isn’t a bottle at all, but rather a massive cap that looks like a cartoon version of Ms. Stefani. G is her signature scent, but there’s also Love, Lil’ Angel, Music and Baby to represent her “backup singers.”

Despite the child-like packaging, the perfume has a wonderful scent of coconut, jasmine and some sandalwood. I will admit to looking at the notes for this fragrance on Sephora’s website, but I could identify a coconutty smell right off the bat. Coconut perfumes can be a gamble, because if there’s too much fruit going on, you might smell like a stripper, but G doesn’t do that. Some fragrances fade away after a few hours of wear, but G has some stamina and I can still smell it after a long day.

When I purchased it, it came with a compact of solid perfume, so for the price it’s pretty good, but the bottle is pretty pathetic. I know you’re not supposed to bathe in perfume like your great aunt does, but having only one ounce won’t last you very long if you use it as your daily scent.

To sum it up, Ms. Stefani is making you pay for packaging. Extremely cute weird packaging that would only appeal to little girls, or twenty-something professionals who still decorate their work binders with Lisa Frank stickers. But if you look beyond the bottle and how strange Gwen has gotten over the years, then you have a wonderful perfume that would smell good on anyone — including strippers.

Item: Harajuku Lovers Fragrance G
Price: $50.00 (with solid perfume)
Size: 1 ounce
Purchased at: Macy’s
Rating: 8 out of 10
Pros: Long lasting scent. Coconut isn’t too overpowering. Rocking out with your non-cock out. Gwen Stefani circa 1996. Lisa Frank being cool when you were six. Hells Angels wearing Hello Kitty leather jackets. Strippers that smell like sweet coconut.
Cons: Packaging is way too gimmicky. Small quantity for the price. Gwen Stefani post-No Doubt. Thinking Lisa Frank is still cool past the age of six. Price isn’t budget friendly. Strippers that smell like Marlboros and cheap whiskey.