Tag: Misc

Dear James Cameron,

I’ve never seen your billion dollar blockbuster Titanic. You can blame Celine Dion for that. But I recently paid over fifteen dollars to watch your latest billion dollar blockbuster Avatar in 3D, so it seems you finally got your money from me that you should’ve gotten with Titanic. Even though I gave up the possibility of eating three Subway footlong sandwiches to watch your movie, I would like to thank you for creating Avatar.

I’m not thanking you because I think Avatar is the greatest movie ever, nor am I thanking you for giving me a strong geek hard-on that I haven’t had since my lightsaber rose with excitement before seeing The Phantom Menace. I’m thanking you because I can now use your movie to help me describe the new Dove Men+Care Clean Comfort Body and Face Wash.

If Avatar didn’t exist, I would’ve used the Smurfs or the Blue Man Group.

Now you might be thinking about how I can connect your movie with the Dove Men+Care Clean Comfort Body and Face Wash. Let me teach you, white-haired one, like how you taught me that I should pee before seeing any three-hour long movie.

The Dove Men+Care Clean Comfort Body and Face Wash comes in blue color that looks like it could be a Na’vi body fluid. I’m not sure which one, but I guess we may find out in the extra scenes of the Avatar DVD or if the porn industry ever makes an erotic parody of your movie, which will probably either be called Assatar or Analtar. Whichever comes out first, I just hope it’s in high-definition 3D.

The body wash didn’t have a strong scent and it dissipated quickly after I finished my shower, but it’s a pleasant scent that I thought was kind of woodsy. Actually, if you created a way for the audience to smell a movie during your crazy attempt the recreate how films are made, I might be able to say it smells like the Na’vi Hometree. But you didn’t, you underachiever.

Much like how I was stunned by how hot Sigorney Weaver’s avatar looked, I was surprised the product is a combination of body and face wash. Usually, I’ve seen products that combine a body wash with a shampoo, which is probably something more useful to you since you’ve got that mop on your head. I’m not sure what makes it so special that it can also be labeled a face wash. It could be the “micromoisture” technology, but technically any soap can be a face wash.

If you decide that you want to wash yourself with a body wash that looks like a Na’vi body fluid, the Dove Men+Care Clean Comfort Body and Face Wash is probably your best choice. It smells good, rinses off easily and you might be able to use it as a prop in the Avatar sequel.

Thanks again for making Avatar!

Sincerely,

Marvo

Item: Dove Men+Care Clean Comfort Body and Face Wash
Price: $4.49
Size: 13.5 ounces
Purchased at: Target
Rating: 6 out of 10
Pros: Pleasant woodsy scent. Not a strong scent, so you don’t reek of Na’vi body fluid. Rinses off easily. It’s a combination body and face wash. Sigorney Weaver’s avatar.
Cons: Looks like a Na’vi body fluid. Slightly pricey. Scent doesn’t last very long. Having to hold in your pee until the end of the movie. The eventual porn parody of Avatar. Celine Dion.

It seems like the holiday season came and went faster than an unsuspecting family who hoped to pick up a pet rabbit at the infamous Nevada establishment known as the Moonlite BunnyRanch. After trying to find a proper place to dispose of your Christmas tree or Hanukkah bush, it’s time to go through your loot and decide what you’re going to keep, what you’re going to regift and what is heading back to store.

When I received the Mr. Coffee Cafe Frappe, I was happy. However, I wasn’t as excited as I was Christmas 1993 when I received an amazing 16-bit gaming console known as the Sega Genesis. But needless to say, over the years I’ve become jaded, bitter and a crotchety woman. That is, of course, if I don’t have my coffee. Once I have at least one cup in my system I’m ready for the day.

The Mr. Coffee Cafe Frappe seemed like it was the perfect countertop machine for me because I love the icy treats from Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, but I’m cheaper than an elderly man who insists on getting senior citizen discounts at the Moonlite BunnyRanch. In fact, I’m so cheap that when I found out Dunkin’ Donuts gives senior discounts, I was tempted to buy a Wilfred Brimley mask and go to the nearest location so that I could get my coffee fix for 50 cents cheaper. But I didn’t because I’m too cheap to buy the mask.

The Cafe Frappe is pretty easy to operate; after the coffee brews, you add two cups of ice, milk and whatever else your caffeine-powered heart desires. The pitcher makes one large serving or two smaller servings, but that is if the unit works. After making my first frappe (a coffee and mint concoction with chocolate soy milk) and cleaning the pitcher, the machine would not turn on again.

Nothing that a trip to Bed Bath & Beyond couldn’t fix, right?

Wrong.

Apparently this smoothie coffee maker hybrid was the hot item this year for people who buy random kitchen appliances and use them once. So a gift turned into a hunt to find a Mr. Coffee Cafe Frappe within a 50-mile radius. After finally finding one, I was able to make unique and sinful frappes like The Lady Godiva, which is tiramisu flavored coffee and a few shots of Godiva chocolate liqueur. The Cafe Frappe is a great machine to impress party guests, but it would take a lot of time to make enough for a group of people, like all of the women one can choose from at the Moonlite BunnyRanch.

Just like that Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine I had when I was just a wee little girl, I’m sure the novelty of the Mr. Coffee Cafe Frappe will wear off and become the coffee lover’s version of the Margaritaville Margarita Maker, Power Juicer and every As Seen on TV appliance.

Item: Mr. Coffee Cafe Frappe
Price: Received as gift but retails for $79.95
Purchased at: Bed Bath & Beyond
Rating: 6 out of 10
Pros: Easy to set up. Easy to make. Coming up with your own recipes that Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts can’t make due to legal reasons. Wilfred Brimley Masks. Sega Genesis.
Cons: Quality of the machine isn’t the best. Doesn’t make a large quantity of frozen delicious beverages. No College Student Discount at Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts. Driving around to return gifts.

The company TerraCycle is much like a music producer who has to deal with Britney Spears’ recording sessions, they both take trash and turn it into something that can be marketed and sold. TerraCycle calls what they’re doing “upcycling,” while Britney’s music producers probably like to describe what they do as “panning in a river of diarrhea for gold.”

Some examples of what TerraCycle has done include: Taking discarded Capri Sun drink pouches and turning them into backpacks, using old circuit boards to make picture frames, making pencils out of newspapers and creating pencil cases out of Chips Ahoy packages. One of the company’s latest products is their M&M’s Candy Wrapper Speakers, which they created with a company called Fashionation and can also be found made with potato chip bags.

According to the packaging, these speakers are made with up to 80 percent of recycled materials, which is a lot, but significantly less than what can be found on an album by the cover band Me First and the Gimme Gimmes. The speaker’s box is made out of a big M&M’s Fun Size package and cardboard that looks like it’s been made out of recycled paper. However, I’m not sure how much of the cables and speaker components are made out of reused metals and plastics.

The speakers fold into 3.25-inch cubes and can be unfolded flat again for easy storage and transportation, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it often because I found it difficult to reinsert the tabs into the slots needed to turn them into cubes. The uncooperative tabs and slots caused me to do a little digging, which caused me to accidental peel some of the M&M’s wrapper. When in cube form, they’re front-heavy, like Morganna The Kissing Bandit, so if you put them on an uneven surface, they might topple forward.

The speakers are attached to a standard 3.5 mm headphone plug, so you can connect it into your iPod, laptop, desktop computer or auto-reverse Walkman cassette player. Because the speakers don’t run on batteries, the plug also powers them.

If you’re an audiophile, or an audiophile poser, these candy wrapper speakers won’t come close to satisfying your hoity-toity tastes. They don’t come with a subwoofer made out of recycled candy wrappers and they aren’t very hi-fi, so they sound as good and treble-y as a cheap AM/FM radio alarm clock.

I connected them to my iPod and they have the ability to fill a small room, but in order to do so I had to turn up the volume on my iPod to at least 75 percent to get a decent amount of decibels, which can be a problem if you don’t remember to turn it down before you plug in your earbuds for some personal listening.

I thought the TerraCycle M&M’s Candy Wrapper Speakers would be a useless novelty, like glow-in-the-dark condoms. But they weren’t bad, considering they’re mostly made out of recycled candy wrappers and cost less than $20. At that price, I don’t feel bad if I have to destroy the speakers when a Britney Spears song comes out of them.

(NOTE: Below is a video demonstrating the speaker’s audio quality.)

(NOTE: Grub Grade has a couple of posts about turning potato chip bags and Capri Sun containers into purses and handbags.)

Item: TerraCycle/Fashionation M&M’s Candy Wrapper Speakers
Price: $16.99
Size: N/A
Purchased at: Radio Shack (or The Shack, if you want to be lame)
Rating: 6 out of 10
Pros: Decent sound for something made partly out of candy wrappers. Sound from them can fill a small room. Made from mostly recycled materials. Foldable and portable. No batteries required. Has a standard 3.5 mm headphone plug.
Cons: Not for audiophiles or audiophile posers. Can be difficult to repeatedly put together. May topple forward on uneven surfaces. Have to turn up the volume on your device in order to get a loud enough sound from the speakers. Using references that are older than some of your readers. Britney Spears.

These new One A Day VitaCraves Gummies come in fruit shapes, but I prefer my gummy multivitamins to come in bear form, so that I can tear them apart limb by limb and say, “That’s what you get for stealing my pic-a-nic basket” or “That’s what you get for scaring me and making me cry with your audio-animatronic versions when I watched the Country Bear Jamboree at Disneyland in 1984.”

On a daily basis I eat gummy bear multivitamins to get the vitamins and minerals I can’t get from a bag of Lays Sour Cream and Onion potato chips, a glazed doughnut and a Diet Pepsi Super Big Gulp because, I’ll admit, I have a hard time swallowing pills, even with a Diet Pepsi Super Big Gulp to help wash it down. But the gummy multivitamins I consume are meant for children and come in six great flavors. The One A Day VitaCraves are meant for adults and it only has three flavors: orange, cherry and some kind of blueberry/raspberry hybrid.

You might wondering if there are any other differences between the children’s gummy multivitamins and the VitaCraves. The VitaCraves are definitely more potent than their gummy bear counterparts, providing almost always twice the amount of vitamins and minerals, but the gummy bear multivitamins taste like normal gummy bears, while the VitaCraves have a slight bitterness to them, like regular vitamins.

Also, while the gummy bear multivitamins are really soft like a Trolli Gummi Bear, the VitaCraves are quite tough like Haribo Gummi Bears or the skin of someone who stays out in the sun for too long on a regular basis. But if you’re someone who has a hard time swallowing pills it’s still a decent choice.

While two One A Day VitaCraves Gummies provide me with 100% or more of my daily recommended intake of many vitamins and minerals, I think I’ll stick with my children’s gummy bear multivitamins because they taste better, are soft to chew and I can decapitate them with my teeth to get even with Teddy Ruxpin for ruining my cassette tape copy of “Sports” by Huey Lewis and the News.

(Supplement Facts – 2 gummies – 10 calories, 3 grams of carbohydrates, 3 grams of sugar, 80% vitamin A, 100% vitamin C, 100% vitamin D, 133% vitamin E, 100% vitamin B6, 100% folic acid, 167% vitamin B12, 50% biotin, 100% pantothenic acid, 53% iodine, 33% zinc, 60 micrograms of choline and 40 micrograms of inositol.)

Item: One A Day VitaCraves Gummies
Price: $7.83
Size: 50 gummies
Purchased at: Walmart
Rating: 6 out of 10
Pros: Two gummies provide 100% or more of my daily recommended intake of many vitamins and minerals. Made for adults. Great for those who have trouble swallowing multivitamin pills. Decapitating gummy bears. “Sports” by Huey Lewis and the News.
Cons: Expensive for just 50 gummies, even though I bought it from Walmart. Not in bear form. Tough to chew. Slight bitterness. Only three flavors. Audio-animatronic bears.

Sometimes I dream of being able to take off my shirt in public and jog shirtless, just like male athletes, overweight men without shame and douchebags. But, unfortunately, my torso has the unsightly body issue trifecta, which consists of pale skin that reflects sunlight, a gut that jiggles like Jello and makes you wonder if Jim stuck Dwight’s stapler in it and enough hair to make people break out their cameras and take pictures of my physique so that they can sell them to the National Enquirer as Sasquatch photos.

Sure, I can pet myself and imagine a dog or cat is resting on my chest, but in this tropical environment, all that hair makes these summer months seem a little bit warmer. Thankfully, I have the Braun bodycruZer to help me with my body hair because I want a chest that’s as smooth as a douchebag’s.

The Braun bodycruZer is a electric manscaper, able to knock down any forest on a man’s body, whether they be in the northern hemisphere, like your chest, or in the southern hemisphere, like your…um…dangling South America. It’s similar to another manscaping utility — the Norelco Bodygroom.

While both tools can be used in and out of the shower, have rechargeable batteries that lasts for 50 minutes and have a trimmer/razor combo, the bodycruZer is significantly less noisy, which really does make a difference because the loud buzzing sound the Bodygroom emits makes me somewhat scared to bring it near my dangling South America. Also, while the Bodygroom uses a foil electric razor, the bodycruZer incorporates the five bladed Gillette Fusion, which can be used alone or in combination with the trimmer, which also can be used by itself.

I think the replaceable Fusion blades gave me a closer shave on my chest, compared with the Bodygroom, but I was hesitant to bring them near my South America because I was afraid to cut off Buenos Aires. The blades worked fine when I chopped down my Panamanian rainforest, but I was scared to bring them lower south.

However, my South America didn’t mind the bodycruZer’s trimmer, which was very powerful and easily knocked down longer hairs. I felt more comfortable with the trimmer because its teeth are small and the gaps between them are short, which make them unlikely to snag skin. However, when it gets dull, you can’t just replace the trimmer part. Instead you have to replace the entire unit, unlike the Bodygroom, which uses trimmer cartridges.

Overall, I think the Braun bodycruZer does a good job of manscaping. I have the smooth chest of a douchebag and my South America is much like the real South America in that there has been lots of deforestation. However, if you’re diligent with your manscaping and all you deal with is stubble, you probably don’t need a bodycruZer. A regular men’s shaving razor will do just fine, unless you’re Manny Ramirez, and if that’s the case, you’ll need a women’s shaving razor. But if you like to let things grow, then the bodycruZer will get the job done fast.

Item: Braun bodycruZer
Price: FREE (retails for $60 – $70)
Size: N/A
Purchased at: Received unit from Braun
Rating: 7 out of 10
Pros: Does a good job of manscaping. Uses Gillette Fusion shaving technology. Rechargeable battery. Less noisy than the Norelco Bodygroom. You can use the razor or trimmer by themselves, or you can use both of them at the same time. Small teeth in trimmer make them unlikely to snag my scrotum. Can be used in or out of the shower. My smooth chest. Deforestation of MY South America.
Cons: The messed up capitalization in its name. Gillette Fusion blades might not seem very safe on the scrotum. Trimmer is not replaceable. Pricey compared to the Bodygroom, which is almost half the price of bodycruZer. Manny Ramirez’s use of female hormones. Really hairy balls. Deforestation of South America.