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Overpriced Goodwill Item of the Week: Especially For the Woman of the House!
LADIES, we’ve all been there, haven’t we…?
You’re in Goodwill, standing there in your drawers and about to try on someone else’s discarded, unwashed fleece lounge pants with that hideous Paul Frank monkey on them.
Suddenly you realize that although it seemed like a good idea at the time, ordering Lunch Special #4 (spicy red curry pineapple/carnitas-stuffed chile relleno with extra jalapeños, steeped in Sriracha sauce) at the Mexican Thai place on Reseda (with the ‘C’ rating in the window, no less!) proved to be a serious mistake.
That ominous rumbling down there is signaling you’ve got mere moments to decide whether to crabwalk from the dressing room to the unisex bathroom with the broken lock on the door or to secrete yourself into the middle of a densely-packed circular rack of blouses, sweaters and various other stained, out-of-season tops and make do with the uncertain privacy it may or may not provide before Mother Nature hits you full force with your monthly visit from, yes, your period!
(That’s what happens, right? I’m not a woman myself, so I’ve had to cobble together bits of information I gleaned when I was a boy and brought in the mail the same day we got a bunch of takeout menus from local restaurants and my 13-year-old sister received a big box from Kotex that I fixated on but no one would talk about.)
Anyway, what to do?
I’ll tell you what to do: Head on over to Goodwill’s bric-a-brac section and pick up yourself some Sure & Natural Maxishields!
A box of five pads with superabsorbent fibers will stem any tide, from neap to tsunami. Like Josephine the Plumber used to say, they’re the quicker-picker upper!
And how much would you pay for this box of free samples from the mid-1980s in your hour of need?
Damn the cost! Those hot peppers want out! Believe me, brother, it’s $3.99 well spent!
And there go the last of the women to ever visit this blog, I reckon. Likely the rest of you, too.
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A Religious Experience!
SO I was at Big Lots the other day looking for the solution to a problem.
You see, we enrolled little Jacob in one of those free LA Unified School District summer programs to get him the hell out of my hair, but those things are full of poor children and no surprise: one of the other boys has been stealing Jake’s cookies each day.
It’s every parent’s nightmare: Learning that your child has become the target of a bully, rather than him bullying some other little wussy boy (or girl).
The best way to handle the situation, of course, is to replace the expensive, name brand cookies (Oreos!) in Jacob’s lunch with something no one would want.
Big Lots to the rescue!
Of course there’s always the possibility that fat little bastard “Crisanto” will be so angry at the switch that he’ll really go off on the Jakester, but, aaah, the summer program’s only a lousy six weeks long. He’ll get by.
Anyway!
While at Big Lots, I decided to make a pilgrimage to the most holy of holy aisles, the Western Wall of Triscuits.
It’s impossible not to be awed by the scope and grandeur of this magnificent whole wheat palisade.
Sure, a box here and there has been replaced with the odd Wheat Thins or Cheez-Its (no doubt due to damage sustained from mortar fire from settlements in the hotly contested Pop-Tart Strip); still, it stands as a monument to the many diverse flavors making up the Triscuit brand, from the old standby, Original, to new and exciting varieties (with such trendy ingredients as brown rice, sweet potato, red bean and, yes!, sea salt & black pepper) whose light have burned oh so brightly for a couple of months in grocery stores and will soon be extinguished forever, as evidenced by their presence in the nationwide closeout chain.
Overwhelmed with emotion, I too joined the countless throngs of worshippers who came before me to tuck a prayer in the wall – a quiet, spiritual way to add one more plaintive voice to the wailing heard throughout Big Lots everywhere.
True, I’m not usually a very religious man, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.
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#78 – Police Helicopters!
It began shortly after ten p.m. last night.
A Los Angeles Police Department helicopter started circling above my neighborhood. It happens from time to time, and usually it doesn’t go on for too long.
By 3:15 a.m., however, the constant noise and erratic spotlight shining down from above as the chopper made its endless loops became a bit tiresome even for someone as famously calm, good-natured and even-tempered as myself.
There has to be a reason for this, I figured. They’re after someone.
But after five straight hours of window-rattling, house-shaking whup-whup-whup-whup and unnatural shafts of light shooting through trees and onto rooftops, cars and driveways, my patience had worn thin. I picked up the phone and called the LAPD’s Topanga Station to hopefully find out what the hell was going on.
The officer who answered was, to his credit, friendly and apologetic as he explained.
Someone reported seeing a man with a gun, he told me, so they set up a perimeter. [“Set up a perimeter” – that’s law enforcement talk.]
A man with a gun?! I wondered, confused.
Given the supposed gang presence just east and northeast of me, I was both surprised that ‘a man with a gun’ was such an unusual occurrence that it warrants five hours of searching by air and a little unsure whether this was a good or a bad thing.
But it turns out, the officer added, it was just two juveniles with BB guns, and the whole operation should be wrapping up now, and sorry it woke you up.
I didn’t mention to him that I nor probably anyone in the less than four-block radius below the helicopter’s continuous orbits had been “woken up;” more likely no one had been able to go to sleep in the first place. (Nor did I speak for the entire community and suggest that the LAPD have carte blanche in administering any kind of street justice on these two dumbasses and their Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifles for causing all of this. Because that would be presumptuous on my part and insulting to the professional men and women of the LAPD.)
No, I just thanked him for the information and said good night, relieved that the end was nigh.
…And then the circling and noise and lights continued for another half-hour.
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0.000726 Leagues Under the Pool!
LIKE YOURS, enormous tracts of the landscape that is my workday is made up of avoiding doing any work at all and looking at those time-sucking websites with a whole grid of fascinating and enriching slideshow-based articles to peruse; i.e., “Ten Scariest Abandoned Scrapbooking Stores,” “Sexiest Waltons Cosplay” and “Ridiculously Adorable Organic Material Stuck to the Undersides of Subway Seats” where you click on a link that brings you to another page of articles in little boxes and then you click on one of them (usually not the one you were originally interested in because it curiously doesn’t exist on this new page). And that brings you to another page which leads you to yet a different website of links and then again to another page and a different site, on and on and on and on, and his father’s father before him.
One of the things I’ve seen time and time again, and you have, too, probably, is the “World’s Biggest Pool.” And as it will soon enrage you, it enrages me every time I see it. Every time I see it!
It’s a magnificent example of how the internet has dumbed down so many who now will believe anything they read and are too lazy to use any critical thinking skills or do any research on their own.
Those who provide content for these sort of sites ought to be ashamed, is what, for taking the so-called facts concerning this pool at face value without verifying them nor even using reasonable common sense; instead reposting this nonsense everywhere.
You see, San Alfonso del Mar is a large resort on the coast of Chile. It has a pool in front of it that’s very big.
The “facts” usually cited are that the pool is 1 kilometer long, covers about 19 acres, holds 66 million gallons of water, and has a maximum depth of 115 feet.
I don’t have any problem with the first three pieces of data. It’s the last one – the 115 foot depth – that I call utter hovadina on.
Let’s take another look at the pool, shall we?
As you can see, it’s right up against the shore. A child, even a stupid child, who has dug holes in the sand at the beach knows that the deeper you go, the more likely water starts rushing in through the sand. Suddenly, your hole collapses. (Much like after you had that particularly virulent strain of monkey dysenta— Okay, never mind about that.)
Now imagine digging a hole 115 feet deep this close to the shore. The water table so close to the Pacific Ocean would make this an engineering nightmare! Probably!
And for what? What exactly would be the purpose in having one end of the pool 115 feet deep? You tell me! For scuba diving perhaps! To explore what? The featureless cement bottom of a pool?
Here’s a photo of a few mighty vessels asea, or in this case, apool:
And another:
Notice that in each instance, you’re seeing a shadow of roughly the same size just below each of these magnificent crafts. That’s because the shadows are on the pool bottom, I posit, a relatively short distance below.
Next! Satellite photo:
If one end of this pool was 115 feet deep – that’s roughly as deep as a ten story building is tall by the way – then that area – wherever it is, would be significantly darker than the shallower areas of the pool. You can see very shallow areas of the pool – presumably wading areas. But nothing very dark.
Clearly, this pool is not 115 feet deep.
Therefore, I submit, Your Honor, that this pool is at most 11.5 feet deep, and that somewhere along the way, someone left off the decimal point.
For the want of a dot on a page, the world’s largest pool has become the world’s deepest pool as well, and if you should go for a dip and your room key slips out of your trunks and sinks to the bottom, well, better call the front desk and see if they can get Ignacio in Maintenance to fire up the bathysphere and retrieve it.
Yet, I’m a reasonable a man, and I can understand how this misinformation has been repeated ad infinitum across the internet because doing the research on this one is not as easy as one might think.
I wanted to be able to definitively say “I looked into this, dammit, and the pool is actually eleven and a half feet deep – Ignacio himself told me so!” so I got in touch with both the resort and the company responsible for building the pool.
In fact, I contacted them multiple times…but each attempt ended without any answers.
Crystal Lagoons Corporation LLC is the company responsible for designing and building the pool. They’re headquartered in Chile, but they have phone numbers in New York and Miami. Each time I called, I talked with what I presume is an answering service that couldn’t provide any information, and even though I left my contact information, no one called back.
I emailed them as well, both at their American and Chilean email addresses. No response! I fared no better contacting the resort itself: No reply to my emails and surprisingly, whoever answered the phone at this enormous world class resort couldn’t put me in touch with anyone who spoke better English than I speak Spanish. (And despite living where I do, I don’t hablo español muy good-o. Ha!)
Terrified of high international rates on my next phone bill, and suddenly remembering I write a blog about bad deals in thrift shops and good deals in dollar stores and not some sort of exhaustively researched online reference work, I didn’t call back.
Lest anyone suggest my assertion that the World’s Biggest Swimming Pool at San Alfonso del Mar is not 115 feet deep without concrete evidence to back it up makes me no better than those awful sites I’m complaining about, it’s not merely Buzzfeed and its countless viral content-peddling clones that are regurgitating the inaccurate depth factoid.
It’s also good, wholesome, decent sites like Popular Mechanics, Wikipedia, National Geographic (!) and, dear God above, the one website we all thought we could always count on, Snopes.com. Oh, Barbara and David Mikkelson, what happened?
So I say we settle this once and for all. Let’s get some kind of Kickstarter/IndieWhosis thing going to send me on a fact-finding mission down there for a couple of weeks so I can finally get us a definitive answer and put this controversy to rest once and for all. I’ve already got the tape measure and snorkel so don’t worry about that; I just need you folks to come up with airfare (first class, please – I drink a lot) and maybe twenty-five thousand dollars for an ocean-facing suite plus miscellaneous expenses. (Prostitution is legal there!)
Anyone pledging five grand gets a free postcard from the lobby (contingent on if they have free postcards in the lobby).
Pledge ten thousand and you get everything from the $5,000 package plus a little bottle of shampoo or a hotel bar of soap or something. I’m rewriting – née correcting – history here, folks, and you can be part of it! Let’s do this!
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¿What’s Bueno? ¡Queso Monterey Jack Rebanado!
I’ve heard of bricks of cheese, but this is ridiculous!
Cheese Shingles. Not “Singles.” Shingles.
Missprint?
I don’t know!
Maybe it was supposed to be “singles” but the package design copy editor has a lisp and uses voice-to-text software when creating new product labels…?
Or is this one of those ridiculously esoteric food items that you usually only see on those obnoxious cooking shows?
“Chefs, please open your baskets.
“For the dessert round, you must use veal brittle, aquarium granola, horse balls and Monterey Jack cheese shingles. Good luck.”
Outside of those two scenarios, “shingles” doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I’ve worked construction. I know what shingles look like. I’ve also had shingles. I know what shingles feel like. These are neither rectangular and rigid, like the shingles on your roof; nor itchy and painful, like the shingles on your crotch.
So I asked a pal for his opinion.
“Look at this package of cheese I got at 99¢ Only. Is this a mistake?”
“Oh yes, buying cheese at the dollar store is definitely a mistake.”
“No, you jackass! The word ‘shingles’ on the package!”He wasn’t sure either, but suggested that ‘singles’ are often individually wrapped slices of cheese (these were not individually wrapped), and since each slice was slightly staggered from the next thus resembling the overlapping nature of roofing shingles, perhaps the unlikely descriptor was intentional.
Mm. An interesting hypothesis, but I think he was giving too much credit to a company whose label looks like it was designed on a free online logo maker, so I immediately dismissed it. Plus there was that crack about where I do most of my shopping.
But it’s all irrelevant now anyway and we may never know the real story behind Monterey Jack Cheese Shingles because on a subsequent trip to 99¢ Only, I picked up this (for 99¢ Only):
Ah! Slices! Now there’s a word we all understand!
You know what? They were pretty good. And that name change can only help. Now I can enjoy Monterey Jack Slices without being subconsciously reminded of the bitter woody taste of cedar shingles or the gamy herpes taste the other kind is infused with. Oh, please, like you don’t eat your scabs!
Now then! Who’s up for one of my famous grilled cheese sandwiches?
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Ah, The Innocence of Youth!
LAST WEEK I had to take Bryce to buy some new clothes.
He’s at the age where what he wears is becoming important to him, so the days of dragging him into Goodwill, having him try on something that more or less fits, snapping off the tags, and then quickly walking back out to the car are over. (Plus some of their locations have security cameras now – imagine!)
You’re thinking, “Ted, you poor bastard – Bryce obviously inherited those gorgeous Parsnips genes so you must be going broke buying his wardrobe at Hollister and A&F!”
I wish!
No, we live in the filthy West Valley, so he’s trying to “fit in” by dressing like everyone else around here: He insists we shop at that place next to 99¢ Only where all the local gang-bangers buy (or I guess steal – ha!) their clothes.
I bought him his Chucks and his knee-high white socks and his oversized khaki Dickie shorts and his wife-beater and black and white flannel jacket…but when we were walking out he saw something – and his reaction just about melted my heart.
“Daddy, can I have 75¢ for the Guns N Grenades machine? Pleeease?”
Aww!
How could I say no? Of course I gave it to him. He may be growing up, but it’s moments like this that make me realize he’ll always be my little boy.
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Walmart’s 2013 Memorial Day T-Shirt!
EACH Memorial Day, I head into Walmart, find their patriotic t-shirt offering for that year, and look at the label to see where it’s made!
It’s a blog post that has become a time-honored Ted Parsnips tradition!
And it’s not particularly surprising, or at this point, even slightly amusing, but if we know one thing here in America, it’s that even if something is no longer really working for us, like Daylight Savings Time, or Attorney General Eric Holder (Hey! This is not a political blog!), we don’t bother to make changes. We just keep things the way they are! Inefficient consistency at the cost of all else! That’s the American way!
So here’s the t-shirt!
And here’s where it’s made! China! Awesome!
Now you’re asking “Since it also has the Spanish translation for ‘Made In CHINA’ inside the collar, isn’t it racist for them not to also have the Spanish language equivalent for ‘I [heart] USA’ – which would be ‘Me [heart] EE.UU’ – alongside the design on the front?”
Look, I don’t want to get involved in any of this. I’m probably already on some kind of government watch list for that Daylight Savings Time crack.
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Set Your HandiHalers to Wheeze!
I SAW perhaps the strangest of all summer movie tie-ins the other day during “The Price Is Right.”
It’s a commercial for some sort of medicine, and while they never come out and say it, it’s obviously a subtle promotion for the new summer blockbuster “Star Trek: Into Whosis” or whatever the hell it’s called, because it’s a sixty-second homage to one of the original series’ most famous episodes.
Anyway, in the spot [industry term], a man from far in the future is banished along with a vicious elephant from a war-like alien race, for reasons never made clear, to the desolate desert planet Spiriva.
There he is pitted against the space elephant in a fight to the death. Sound familiar yet? Mm-hmm.
The elephant tries to crush him by sitting on his chest. (Luckily he escapes.)
Then the enormous creature chases him around a lot. Kind of slowly.
Oh my God! He’s right behind you!
Apparently the gravity on Spiriva is much stronger than that of earth, or the atmosphere is thinner or something, because they’re really just walking around. Strolling, almost.
Look out! He’s gaining on you! (I…think.)
Here they’ve forged a momentary truce so everyone can just catch their breath. Phew!
But the chase – and the fight – continues.
Just when things seem their worse, and the elephant has cornered his victim and is ready to pounce…
…the man – using the planet’s natural resources of diamonds, a hollow, bamboo-like plant, and tiotropium bromide powder – manages to construct a weapon known as a bronchodilator…
…and defeats his pachyderm alien adversary.
Thank goodness there’s very few blogs that feature both “Star Trek” and prescription medication hilarity, or I’d get no traffic at all.
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A New Snack Cracker, By Jingo!
WHAT’S new and taken for granted today is the lovingly remembered crap of tomorrow!
Here’s an exclusive sneak preview of what jackasses will be posting on Flickr in the year 2053!
Oh settle down, all of you. Everyone likes old packages.
And believe me, I went easy on you people.
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Manscaping: Not Just For Girls!
I know! I’m as stunned as you are!
…Well, at least it doesn’t say “Got Manscaping?”
Ted Parsnips
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