I always thought the blow up sex doll required an extremely advanced sense of imagination to be enjoyable. I mean, how is it humanly possible to ignore the intense stench of plastic, the permanent expression of surprise, and the obvious bonelessness of the thing?
Well, these days in Japan makers of blow up dolls (how'd you like to be a marketer at one of those places?) have gotten wise to this problem and have created a series of dolls that look rather, well, realistic. Disturbingly so, actually. To further mortify you mortifiable web denizens, they have made these lovelies essentially prostitutes that you can rent for a period of time.
I can imagine a Netflix business model emerging at some point.
If you're just sitting around, like dozens of people today are, and you feel an urge to write a list of things that you plan on sharing with the world, a top ten list, say... or perhaps it's the Top 10 Most Annoying Characters on TV, or Top 10 remarkable engineers of all time or perhaps even Lindsay Lohan's top 10 favorite sexual positions while she's hopped up on crack and hanging out at some photographer's house, whatever, just STOP yourself, please, and consider a few other, let's say 10, activities that those of us out in the world would rather you partook in.
1) Start a boy band: It seems there's a niche currently. You'll need to assemble a group of good looking young boys who can dance and cover the incredibly large spectrum of personality types between rebel and brooding rebel. Then figure out what your hair styles are going to be. There...you're done.
2) Learn to etch glass with a rotary tool. Etched decorations never go out of style. Mainly because they're never in style to begin with. They exist above the whole style paradigm. Give one to your loved one. They'll be so touched.
3) Take Full Advantage of Your Former Employer's Outplacement Service. There are strong professionals in this field who will guide and instruct you on how to get another job in your field. If that doesn't work, consider a new career as an outplacement professional!
4) Resolve yourself to take better care of your tattoo. Cleaning it with antibacterial soap, applying Aquaphor ointment in thin
layers and using non-scented lotion can help your stupid fucking tattoo of Woody Woodpecker look its best.
5) Remove the blood stain from the drapes. Yes, it might add to the intrigue of your pad, but also clashes with the carpet. First thing to remember is that blood is protein and proteins require cold water. If the blood's been around awhile, you might want to use cold water with Oxyclean. That's what, er, I've heard anyway.
6) Learn how to read sheet music. Don't just play the music, feeeeeeelll the music. That's it...you'll be Stairwaying To Heaven in no time.
7) Chip in your time on a missing person's search and rescue. Clearly you have oodles of time, so don't be selfish. Check the local hospitals. Over 2,000 people go missing every single day. You could be one of them. Hey, seriously, are you one of them?
8) Go fuck with that army of ants that lives in the corner behind the wall. You've seen the scouts. You know what the're looking for. The time has come to draw out the herd and squash them. Bring home one of those free candy suckers from the laundry mat and put it out for them. Wait till the ant highway is like 5 lanes each way - then douse them with maple syrup and watch them drown in their own version of a happy meal. Oh, you're so sick.
9) Try to decide between bankruptsy or forclosure. You don't really need both. You could potentially file for bankruptsy and exempt your home from the asset list that debtors can access. In any case, you'll need some time to ponder this and that's time you won't be spending cluttering the world with your top 10 lists that really anyone could write.
10) Pray. Start praying a simple prayer... for example "God what is my purpose on
this earth". Get in a habit of waiting for his response before doing anything else.
You could write a book about this topic. You could write 100 books on it. In fact, if you Google this term, you get 5,780,000 results for why capitalism doesn't work.
One of the problems is that companies in any given industry are more likely to copy each other than they are to differentiate - particularly when copying ways to screw regular people out of their money. Now, I don't know about you, but for me something is lost from the concept of "competition" when everyone is doing the same thing.
At that point, it's just about who has a better brand campaign or customer-facing gimmick. If there is any competition, it's centered around doing a better job screwing the common man without losing him as a customer. Even then, as I said, whatever works gets copied by all.
Just take Banks for example. The Banks were ALL writing shitty loans and pooling them into big funds, decoupling them from the loan originator, and selling them on the open market over and over again. They ALL did it and now we own them and their ill-considered debt.
Then there's credit card companies who ALL charge fees willynilly, all raise rates quietly and whenever they feel like it, all hide their right to do all of this in the legal mousetype that nobody understands. The late-fee is its own industry worth $9 billion. If there's money to be made, they will find a way to suck it out of you. All of them. You don't hear about the HONEST BROKER credit card company.
The oil industry, the insurance industry, the drug industry, the food industry...I mean pick one and there's probably an obvious symptom showing that it's hostile to the common man. But if said common man wants or needs that kind of thing, they really have no choice but to submit to some form of micro-torture. You get the phone tree and hold musak, you get the made-up surcharges, you get lies about the safety of their products, you get denied coverage that you paid for, and you get misled EVERY time. Yet here's capitalism dancing off the tongues of our leaders with it's promise of choice, of competition, of market forces making everything better and better. It's bullshit. We're going backwards.
With the erosion of common decency, honor, and humanity out there in corporate-land, life for us "consumers" is getting more and more diabolically inconvenient, inexplicably expensive, and systematically confusing. It's a bit like being mugged, actually. Every single day.
Now, some might say that capitalism is the best thing out there...and I wouldn't disagree. But it also doesn't really work. So as Americans, I would think that it's in our nature to want to tweak it or re-invent it. Make it work better. Or at least develop some controls around it that compensate for the excesses. Something to protect us from the parasitic minority of aristocratic families marginalizing all of us to sharecropper status and sticking us in beige cubicles for the rest of our lives.
Or we can wait for things to get so bad that pretty much anything would be better than capitalism. Also an option. Thoughts?
Rejoice! Muslim women can now bathe. Well, publicly anyway. The solution, a burqua that's a burquini, was born out of Australia in 2007 (so not that new, but relative to the age of their culture, like yesterday).
Since Muslim women are apparently unclean even when they're bathing, the new swimwear will cover them from the tip of their head to just below their dirty, naughty, and probably overly-sexy ankles.
Being that they use so much fabric, they are rather pricey though. $160 USD or so. But think of the UV protection. A few more years of global warming and we'll all be wearing these. Get yours today. Then again, it's rather hard to turn away from this:
A former colleague of mine, an Art Director, was recently laid off from Google. But she's a survivor. A smarty girl. She went to work creating her own line of round pins and custom t-shirts for people who are unemployed and have a sense of humor about their sitchiation. You can have your resume printed on the front of a t-shirt for $50 bucks. The pins (shown here) are 2 bucks a pop. You can afford $2, right? Right?!
She's available for freelance, by the way. She's been at Landor, Yahoo, Google. And she just finished filming on a new Mark Burnett reality series with creative folks. I forgot the name of it.
For years, when people have watched me eat they say the same thing, "My God, you just inhaled that (insert food item here, usually a burrito)." Sometimes I'll be "eating" with someone and they'll suddenly notice that my food is gone even though they never saw me take a bite - nothing but a couple of small sauce splotches left on my plate.
My motto is: When you're gathered around the kill with the other hunters, eat fast and take big bites. I'm sure that's how my people survived. After all, you don't "dine" when you only get maybe 4 big-game kills a summer. No, you inhale...cuz someone's going to bed hungry that night and it ain't going to be me.
Then again, it's 2009 and we gather around all-you-can-eat buffets, not dead buffaloes that are still a little twitchy. But instincts, they die hard.
So eating fast is one kind of inhaling. Then there's what scientist and Harvard University professor David Edwards has recently invented which is call Le Whif - a revolutionary gadget that lets you breathe in different chocolates and eventually other foodstuffs.
Edwards said: "Over the centuries we've been eating smaller and smaller quantities at shorter and shorter intervals. It
seemed to us that eating was tending toward breathing, so, with a mix
of culinary art and aerosol science, we've helped move eating habits to
their logical conclusion."
Actually, I think America consumes bigger portions at the regular intervals. Hence all the tub-o-lards. But whatever, he's a Harvard scientist so I'll go with him on that.
He calls it whiffing. The chocolate, you see, is a very fine powder in a small plastic cylinder (OMG, this guy is like a total coke-head with a bad chocolate craving). You inhale it - I'm unclear whether it's through the nose or mouth). According to Edwards, the particles don't go into your lungs because they're too big. Unfortunately he doesn't tell us where they do go. No doubt you'll wind up with 4lbs of high-grade Ghirardelli shoved up your nose or in the back of your throat when it's all said and done. Hmm, can't wait until they invent the chicken waffle inhaler system so that I can have that wedged all up in my nasal passages.
But then again, zero calories.
"Chocolate is only the beginning - we're going to be unveiling more different types of food in the future," crows Edwards.
I can't wait to inhale a 7 square foot slice of tiramasu. But then again, I ain't goanna hold my breath for that.
I work in the video game field and I know its power over the human psyche. It's engagement factor, especially with today's graphics and game engines is as high as it gets outside of reality. But for kids it's completely, 100% immersive.
So watching the faces on these children ages 9 to 16 while they play video games doesn't surprise me. But it still manages to disturb me. For added effect the makers of this video threw in some 9 year old boy telling us in his monotone matter of fact way exactly what you're supposed to do in the video game to win, "Well, you have to kill the guy and then you get his mansion."
Chocolate Bark, and it's evil holiday incarnation Peppermint Chocolate Bark, is the invention of enterprising candymakers who simply need a way to
use up their scrap chocolate and still charge $26.50/lb for
it. Chocolate bark is, after all, just flat rectangles of chocolate that've been melted, spread out on sheets to harden, and cut
into jagged pieces. Often the bark also includes sea salt smoked almonds or broken shards of candy canes that they had lying around (in which case they can jack the fee to $31.50/lb).
Then the slices are shoved into brightly colored tins and tossed onto the shelves by the check-out counters at Williams-Sonoma, Sees Candy, or Restoration Hardware (that name is such a misnomer, by the way) and hordes of thoughtless aunts and uncles buy them and give them to people like you. Then you eat a quarter of one, put it in the cupboard and throw it all out six months later.
Now, wouldn't you rather have a Jelly Bean Portrait of Elvis Presley? Who wouldn't, am I right? Huh!?
As Americans we are bathing in bullshit every single day. It's unavoidable. So, if we can't avoid it, we might as well come to understand it. This is a group exercise, so if you'd like to point something out to us, by all means, do.
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