Dear Colgate Corporation,

You’ve been in business since 1806, you’ve been making tooth brushes for over 100 years, and basically invented toothpaste. I understand it must get boring making toothbrushes for a whole century. The desire to spice things up is undoubtedly great. But seriously, get this wacky ass crap off my toothbrush.

Tongue Freshener (AKA pointy rubber things on back of head for scraping junk off your tongue): Seriously guys? Did no one during the entire design process actually bother to use this toothbrush? The addition of a spiky surface to the back of the head means that while brushing the outside of your molars you’re simultaneously treated to the removal of the inside of your cheeks… I don’t enjoy feeling like someone is rubbing a miniature hedgehog around my mouth while brushing. If I actually wanted to “freshen” my tongue, I’ll just brush the thing, you know, with the bristles.

Mint scented brush handle: I assume toothpaste makes up a big portion of your business so it’s surprising to me that you think adding more fresh scent to the brushing process is necessary. I’ve got a mouth full of toothpaste (cinnamon in my case, which is a class act of a toothpaste, thanks for making it) so my ability to pick up the delicate minty scent rising from my toothbrush handle is considerably dampened. I suppose I could get a waft of it but really, do I need this? Do I want this? No.

The color: This particular brush seems to have a killer whale thing going on. I wanted a brush that was all black… But apparently the trend in brush design these days is inspired more by 80′s BMX attire than subtle elegance. If there’s one thing I want to live to see, it’s the return of an all black toothbrush (and flying cars).

I’m not writing you for a refund or to return the brush. I already fixed the “tongue freshner” issue by scraping the spikes off with an open pair of scissors, It’s mangled looking but functions… I just want you to know that you’re pushing it, trying a little to hard and you’re product is suffering.

Sincerely,
Collin R Tiegs

Thank you for contacting the Colgate-Palmolive Company with your feedback or question. We have received your e-mail and it is being forwarded to the appropriate parties. You can expect a reply from us within one business day.

Sincerely,
Colgate-Palmolive

The next day:

Dear Mr. Tiegs:

Thank you for contacting us over the Internet about Colgate Max Fresh Toothbrush.  Your interest in our products and company is greatly appreciated.

Our goal is to manufacture and market products that meet consumer needs for convenience, value and outstanding performance. Our Product Development Team is constantly striving to formulate a wide variety of products in the hopes that, with a varied marketplace, there will be an adequate selection of products from which to choose.

Your response involved material we wanted to send you, therefore the response has been sent via regular (postal) mail and should reach you within three weeks.

If you do not receive this response through regular mail, or have any questions about this, please contact us again by email, or by calling us at 1-800-468-6502, and provide the number appearing after my name below.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to contact us. We hope this information is helpful.

Sincerely,
Gena Jordan
Consumer Affairs Representative
Consumer Affairs

I’m thinking I’ll probably be receiving a prototype all black toothbrush from them for reviewing purposes. Perhaps Ms. Jordan will take the time to write me a little hand written note as well. Only time will tell!

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When I was a young boy, home alone during the Summer months I would often consume Hormel’s canned chili for lunch. It slides out of the can like dog food, it’s ready to consume after 4 minutes in the microwave and it can be dumped onto anything (I once ate strawberries and chili). I remember it fondly, but like so many foods I loved as a child (any fast food ever) it has lost virtually all of its appeal to me. It is bland, boring and of questionable quality and origin. So with fond memories of what was, and a better understanding of true quality I  began the ritualistic search for something better.

My first chili making foray was undertaken on a cold day in San Francisco. I was essentially jobless, very bored and mildly depressed. I would often fill my days with little projects, like walking from the apartment in the sunset to the mission district to visit a thrift store I read about,  planning a UFO hoax, or dawning a backpacking backpack and cutting through golden gate park to Smart And Final to do grocery shopping, then hoofing it back through the botanical gardens as a workout… Essentially I was like a twenty two year old retiree, just filling up time. One of these lonely, lazy days was spent making chili. I went to a upper scale grocery store and bought something like 5lbs of high quality tri-tip, and all the other necessary ingredients, I think I probably spent fifty bucks. I slaved over it for hours, it was a complicated recipe for a chili dish, and the end result was horrid. The meat fell apart, in a bad way, it was too spicy and a complete failure. The left overs lived untouched in the freezer for months…

Time passed and I improved my cooking skills a considerable bit. I learned a lot about balance in food (and in life, hurrr), and when I was good and ready, I tried making chili again. It was this recipe that I used, and since then I’ve made it probably four times. Each time I figure out a little bit more and worry about the process a little bit less, and each time it gets better and better.

The keys to making good chili are to keep it simple, take it slow and don’t over do it. I’m always tempted to get freaky with a dish, throw in some cinnamon, double the spiciness, toss in a handful of bacon (actually that generally works…) and I’m usually disappointed with the results. What I never understood was that before you go and make abstract art you’ve got to understand the basics. This chili is a great 101 level dish.

I found this recipe on bigoven.com but it apparently takes its basics from a 1994 Championship Chili from the Tirlingua Chili Cookoff produced by non-other than this man.

Jim Hedrick AKA "Doc J" of Roanoke, Virginia

One look at that picture and you know two things. The early ’90s were just generally fucked up, and that Doc J is a man that knows himself some chili.

The chili itself is a really simple creation. Basically you’re browning some meat, getting the juices going, adding stock and tomato sauce and bringing it to a simmer. From there you’re just adding in chili powder and spices in three stages throughout the cooking time. The magic seems to happen in the way that the spicing of the chili is staggered, kinda like how hops are added to beer multiple times throughout the boiling process. You build a base, then as the initial spices cook down, add more and vary them to make it pop again. The spiciness of the chili really comes more from the cayenne and the chili powder, than from the chilies that the recipe calls for (three serranos are floated in the pot and removed when soft). However, the actual chilies do impart a certain fresh zing that would otherwise be missed. I couldn’t avoid getting crazy with it and I threw a habanero in there for good measure, I couldn’t tell much of a difference but it certainly increased the badass factor.

When the chili is done it comes out flavorful on the front and mildly spicy on the back end. The broth is absolutely wonderfully greasy and satisfying, I could drink it in the mornings instead of coffee. I add beans to the mix because I like it a little heartier and don’t give a shit what Texas thinks of me (or about anything).

Really chili is remarkably hard to fuck up, follow the recipe, insure you don’t go overboard with the salt and spiciness and you’ll be sitting pretty. The big bonus of chili making comes in the days afterward in which you have a legitimate excuse to chili-ize any other dish. When you’re making chili-cheese omelets at 8am or Frito chili pie at 3am (stoned) you’ll thank me.

“Doc J’s” 1994 Tirlingua Chili Recipe on Big Oven

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There was a terrible time in my life, in which I didn’t particularly like big kick ass beers, I drank malt liquor, I drank rolling rock and horrible, horrible shit. I call this time anywhere between the ages of 17-18. When a friend finally got a fake ID, and we had carte blanche reign over the beer isle, I bought a bottle of Stone’s Arrogant Bastard, and a six-pack of Sierra Nevada. I could hardly manage to drink the Arrogant Bastard, the hoppiness was overpowering, even the Sierra Nevada was far from enjoyable to me…

However time heals all wounds, or in this case evolves all palates, and I began to explore the more intense beers not simply because I thought it would make me look like a bad ass (though it is a nice side effect), but out of a sincere lust for something of substance, something with a voice. The India Pale Ale was the first beer style that yelled loud enough for me to pick it out of a crowed.  So like a newly born, blind kangaroo baby, I clung to it as though it were my mother’s fur and crawled instinctively into its nurturing marsupial pouch.

The side effect of my early and often IPA abuse is that I’ve become extremely accustom to the flavor profiles they present. Big hops, tons of bitter lovely flavor and a deliciously tangy lingering aftertaste. While I’m no where near being tired of it, I do feel that it takes a good deal more uniqueness to truly rouse me than it did when I made the switch from Mickey’s Grenades to real beer.

Which brings me at last to the beer this review is supposedly reviewing… Karl Strauss’ Tower 10 IPA. This is a lovely, lovely beer. Appropriately bitter, but not so much that it flattens out the flavor profile. Slightly citrus-y, but not so much that it becomes gimmicky. The aftertaste comes on strong and coats the mouth with a lingering bitterness. It’s balanced, above all else, and engenders love and respect because of this.

Often I think the IPA genre becomes a brewery’s intimidation beer. The brew they produced with maximum hops, full flavored, high percentage, full on attitude, in an attempt to garner some street-cred. While this does produce some truly impressive over-the-top beers, I fear that it sells the IPA style short, and is increasingly pushing it towards homogenization. Tower 10 avoids this, both in marketing that is delightfully lacking “edginess” and in a taste that satisfies the lust for hops, without sacrificing multidimensional flavor in the process.

Interestingly Tower 10 didn’t shake me from my IPA desensitization by blowing me away with it’s intensity, nor did it get my attention by going to extremes in the addition of adjunct flavorings like orange peel or something. Instead it simply followed the old creed “Everything in Moderation” and in doing so it delivers a wonderfully balanced IPA experience.

Karl Strauss, Tower 10 IPA

(Did Ben Franklin really coin “Everything in Moderation”? I feel like every witty quote from American History is either attributed to him or Mark Twain, often erroneously, so why bother siting the source anymore. Right?)

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Fiscally my life is constantly oscillating between having some money and having no money. I’m on my way back down to the having no money side of things so it seemed fitting to cash in a bowl full of coinage I’ve been saving for my return back to poverty-vile.

My sister and I went to the local Vons to do this. They have a machine there created by elves that’s called a “Coin Master” which automatically counts your coinage. However, just like the elves that run the world’s richest investment banks, they take a cut. In this case 8.9%. That’s a lot but I’m a lazy, lazy man, and even when money gets tight I’m usually willing to pay for something that makes life easier in the near term (like booze for example) even if it ends up costing me down the road (like booze for example).

So we start dumping in the coins, my total comes out to roughly $12.00. Blah, whatever – print – the machine spits out my receipt. Then tells me on it’s crappy little calculator like LCD screen (Coinstar machines are leaps and bounds nicer to look at than Coin Masters. That’s because pixies are responsible for their creation.) to check the coin return. I reach in to find a god damned PILE OF MONEY IN THERE. The sister and I begin to dump this money back into the machine, it spits out about 50% of what I put back in but seems to be reading 100% of it… So we spend the next 10 minutes feeding the machine it’s own excrement until my total reaches $23-ish and change. HOT DAMN! We repeat the process and my sister get’s $25 from it…

Now I know you’re thinking “this is dishonest and evil, and fucking with elves is a bad idea!”, you’re right it is. But I’m not a bad person. A bad person would have gone to his bank and pulled out $1000 in quarters and fed this thing for hours. Wait no, I mean I’m not a smart person because I just thought of that now and I’m too lazy to actually go do it… I guess I’m more afraid of those elves than I thought.

To conclude. If you can find a coinmaster machine that’s fucking up horribly you should probably go and use it. In fact, from here on out I think I’ll probably only use the coinmaster machines, they’re really poorly built (the tray that the coins go into was broken loose when we got there, plus it’s ugly) which means maybe this flaw is systemic. Go forth and pillage, just watch out for elves.

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What is it about a library that seems to attract people of all ages, races and states of consciousness? I suppose the abundance of chairs featuring arms, the warmth/cool (depending on the season) and the general free-ness of the place draws folks into it’s comforting bookish bosom.

I am convinced that this man is ghost. A long dead master of some eastern metaphysical cult. In life he so loved knowledge that he returns to our earthly plane at night and strolls the halls of our libraries, pausing from time to time to pull a book from the shelf, read a few lines and smile knowingly to himself before moving on. Eventually he becomes exhausted from the strain of materializing his soul and he begins the process of returning to the realm of ghosts and wind. Which is what he’s doing right now.

Even if he isn’t a ghost, I approve completely of his presence in the library. He’s quiet, well kept and has a certain dignified air that hangs about him even while sleeping. Contrasted to the beast man I last reviewed, he is a drowsy zen garden, while tub-tard is a couch on your trashy neighbors lawn.

(A man can go his whole life without getting the chance to photograph something so magical as this. I had to sneak up on them like a wildlife photographer, the fat kid had just settled in and was not yet fully asleep. Very dangerous territory.)

Asian man:

• Dignified nearly upright posture
• Perfectly silent (Ninja?)
• Even though sleeping, still a model of self discipline

Fat kid:

• So slouched he requires the use of an auxiliary chair
• Makes grunting noises while setting up his sickening sleep concoction, makes grunting noises while sleeping, makes grunting noises when awaking, makes grunting noises while leaving
• All those who see him weep uncontrollably for the future of America

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System: 0, Collin: 1 million.

I can’t read half of what the notes on this pile of trash are trying to convey to me. Something about my thesis not having anything to do with the rest of the paper (small potatoes, really). What I can read is that big ol’ fuckin’ “A-”!

Looks like  I correctly surmised that being smart means you don’t have to try. This paper was certainly no skin off my back, and look at the result. A very respectable A-, I can live with that. It’s like the professor read it and knew that I just crapped it out, but she can see my inner genius shinning through the cracks. And what the hell, compared to the pile of regurgitated lunchables she’s just read through this thing is pretty damn good. So an A feels right, but she can’t just give me an A. If she does that she knows I’ll quit right there, lock in this level of crap-quality and churn it out for the rest of the semester. So she gives me the minus there as a means of encouraging improvement. Clever girl.

So there you have it folks, the systems broke but I ain’t in no mood to fix it.

Read Part 1 Here via this internet link.

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I hate you sleeping fat kid. I don’t care if your rascal scooter broke and you had to waddle all the way from your car to campus. I don’t care if you ate a bag of candy corn and pitched yourself into a diabetic coma. These are not my concerns.

Why are you here? It’s 8am. The earliest classes are at 8am. If it’s 8am and you’re not in a class that means you’re here early.  In other words, you came with the soul intention of lumbering into the library to catch a manatee like nap. This angers me. I don’t know why exactly, but every time you fidget in your sleep or make some grunting sound, I cringe and despair for humanity.

I’m trying to pound out an essay about something I can already barely manage to care about and having your 300lbs of living, breathing, useless mass 10 feet away is not helping.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go against ever fiber of my being and break the golden rule of the library. I’m going to be loud. I’ll start with a cough, if that doesn’t rouse you I’m going to position my squeaky ass laptop screen repeatedly (it sounds like a spooky Halloween style door creak). If that should fail, I’m going to begin cycling through available ring tones on my cell phone.  I will continue to do this each Tuesday and Thursday until you vacate the library, or find some other place to plop down in. Capiche?

Here’s my review section: If you’re thinking about buying a fat kid to hang around you and sleep all day, don’t. It’s depressing and horrible and will almost certainly turn you into a hate filled jerk.

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Here’s what we’re going to do. I just wrote a paper, not a big one, just a 3 page jobber we write every week for a upper level history course I’m taking. I wrote it about a 6th century Persian work that essentially amounts to a “Scientific” discourse on, uh, everything. I read a few pages, skimmed through most of it and also read two paragraphs of scholarly writing about it. Then I wrote a brief essay detailing what the work tells us about the values of Persian elites during the period.

Who knows? Not me. I guessed. Said it had a lot to do with their emphasis on logical reasoning and it’s application to the natural world. I put two quotes from the book into the paper (thank you online source of the book for allowing me ctrl+F myself to relevant supporting passages with ease) and called it a day.

How is this a review you ask? It’s not… yet. Consider this the pre-review. Here’s the deal, I’m going to turn this thing in today and then when I get it back in a week or so time I’ll see if I’ve properly beaten the system, or if they call my bluff.

Not that this is plagiarized, it’s not, I wrote every word (except supporting sources, obviously), my ideas are my own and everything is properly cited. I should make that clear in case anyone working for the man is reading this.

Anyway, point being, there’s no reason I should be able to get away with this. If I do, it more or less proves that if you have even lick of intelligence you can sail through pretty much everything academic with relative ease. Sadly, I suppose it also means that standards have been lowered greatly to accommodate a humongous wave of stupid people… Which is bad for everyone.

Should I get this paper back and it’s so drenched in red that it looks like it just fought the battle of Iwo Jima, then I’ll know that all hope is not lost. The world still has a sharp bullshit detector and higher education isn’t a total sham.

So, now we wait. Frankly it’s a bit of a double edge sword, I’d rather get a good grade, but maintain my faith in humanity. Sadly, that’s not an option. We’ll see!

UPDATE: Part Two Completed, results are in! Read it HERE!

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There are times in life when words fall away, the mind clears, and one’s sense, pure, unadulterated by the burden of language are free to simply experience. This masterpiece of Modern-American-Sports-Arena-Multimedia-Material allowed me just such a virginal purity of experience.

It’s because of this that I feel incapable of utilizing language in order to review or even describe the work in question. One could write ten thousand words on the subject only to have them washed of meaning and made useless upon a single viewing.

Realizing my limitations I concluded that the only way to properly garner opinion on the piece would be seek the impression of another. What follows is the dialogue from my request.

Me [yelling upstairs]: Hayley [my sister] I need you to watch something and give me your impression on it.

Hayley: What do I think of The Depression?

Me: Yeah what do you think of The Depression and it’s causes. An imbalance of debt to savings or what?

Hayley: What?

Me: I NEED YOU TO WATCH SOMETHING JUST GET DOWN HERE!

[She gets down here]

Me: OK, I want you to watch this and just tell me what you feel, what you think…

[I play the masterpiece]

Hayley: Is this against global warming?

Me: …

Hayley: Isn’t he like angry about it?

Me: It’s the introduction played in the arena for a Fairbanks Alaska Hockey team.

Hayley: Oh.

[She leaves]

Conclusion: the world is not fit nor deserving of such perfect art as this.

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Bejewled Blitz is a game created by the Chinese Government in order to reduce American Worker productivity to absolute zero. The game is so unmercifully effective that upon completion it was placed in a sealed metal briefcase and carried by hand to the United States in order to be distributed via Facebook (which is a CIA creation designed to harvest information about the nations youth, namely drunken party pictures). The entire effort was codenamed Project Sapphire and its very existence is still not formally recognized by the Chinese.

I was infected by Bejeweled Blitz two days ago and have spent roughly 8 hours “playing” the game. I quote playing, because unlike traditional things that are played for enjoyment and leisure, Bejeweled is played strictly out of sick necessity. The creators have tailored the game in such a way as to sync perfectly with the portion of the human brain dedicated to repetitive tasks of matching and coordinating. The result is a type of stimulation that can be misconstrued by the brain as something akin to problem solving, or work. The stimulation of this specific area has a curious effect, eventually the individual begins to play without consciously acting. The nagging problem of upper level thought vanishes and the player transcends into a machine like state, that is surprisingly, oddly comforting.This is reinforced by the addition of a reward hierarchy that fills the player with a false sense of accomplishment as each new level is reached.

Initially the developers feared that players who so completely indentured, so fully engrossed themselves in the mechanical state, would eventually be coaxed away from the game by their peers, either by force or shaming. The easy solution is to continually reassure the player that they’re not alone, everyone is playing. This is accomplished by creating a “community” around the game in which players can see how their friends are doing, and attempt to best their scores. The competitive element is a remarkably effective way to falsely legitimize hours spent clicking a mouse on colored jewels.

The Chinese have created a near perfect tool for destroying the American workforce from within. Ultimately we will see entire corporations rot from the inside as workers spend copious hours clicking madly in search of fulfillment that is always just another star badge away. The effect on the capitalist system will certainly be profound. My advice to our government is to strike back at the Chinese immediatley. We must send a wave of internet pornography so great that the Chinese people, starved of it by years of censorship, will spend months at a time masturbating.

Let the games begin!

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