If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. That way, you can have new posts delivered right to you. Or click here to subscribe to The Men's Gift Guide by Email Thanks for visiting!
I am so ready for summer. I’m so ready to thaw out and get my drink on. A nice 12 oz. adult beverage is what’s I’m sayin’. Just the sound of the paper shredder at work makes my mouth water– it reminds me of my Frozen Margarita Maker, full of margarita mix and ice and booze. Sorry to be so frank but DANG I can’t stand it!
Come on– a man can still be a man and have a fruity drink. It’s refreshing. Look, I make them for my wife. What?! I am so looking forward to those warm nights on our patio, the kids are fast asleep, stars ablaze, and my margarita machine working away, chopping frozen tundra into fine granules of ice for my drink. Oh my Lord. So, it makes smoothies too, okay? Ya happy? And yes, I’ll make those cute little fruit cubes with the toothpicks sticking out and all, for the kiddies and their little friends, okay? What I’m talking about right now is the kids are down for the night, and I’m putting the ahhh in Margarita– the right blend of ice and fruit and LIQUOR.
With a machine like this, you’re not going to get the watery seconds– it literally channels the water away from the ice flow, to ensure the perfect margarita, every time. This is a professional machine, yall. I think some MIT geek designed this thing– it’s the real deal.
Okay, I know what you’re thinking. This guy wants to get down disco style in the toilet? GROSS. Whatever, man. I spend more time in my bathroom than Margot does in the Royal Tannenbaums. I have two kids– one who is potty training, and the other who likes to try to flush IMPOSSIBLE things in my toilet. So, basically, I gotta hang out in there to make sure it’s just poop that’s going to the great beyond. I even knocked out a closet (okay, I hired a contractor) to add more space to our main outhouse, so I could put a lounge chair in there. It’s not as icky as you think. . .
Anyway, my throne is not my own, so I might as well make it a party– so I got the iPod Dock Toilet Paper Holder. Now, bath time is fun time! We learn our ABCs, play rhyming games, and when I have a moment to myself, I listen to The Ramones. You can take the guy out of the can, but you can’t take the can out of the man. What am I saying?
It’s nearly officially spring. It gets warm, and the sky doesn’t know what to do, so it rains, and you never know when that’s going to happen. Fine. Go ahead, rain then. I just got used to unrelenting snow storms, and now it’s going to rain on me. I know, it’s not personal. It’s just that, I’m like an Alaskan sled-pulling dog when it comes to snow. I know how much we’ll get, when it’s going to start falling and from which direction– I’ve made up MY OWN words for snow. I know which snow you can eat and which snow to steer clear of. But rain? I’m like, rain deaf or something. Rain blind. I’m always shocked when I get caught in a storm– showers just comes out of know where. NO ONE REALLY KNOWS when it’s going to rain! Doppler my butt.
What’s worse are the days when I bring a friggin’ umbrella and it doesn’t rain– I’m stuck carrying a stick in a vinyl dress all day. What about the days when it’s raining enough to launch Noah’s Arc? Once, I had to borrow the receptionist’s umbrella to get to a meeting. It was pink, and covered with dancing unicorns. Talk about embarrassing.
And another thing– I can’t stand my office mates who, at the slightest threat of rain, come to work with an umbrella built for TEN. You know the ones. Those umbrellas that have the circumference of Switzerland. A wing span of a teenage pterodactyl. Walking to and from my car on rainy days when THE GIANTS have their umbrellas taking up air space I’m always afraid that I’m going to lose an eye or something. And once people get to work, they pop their umbrellas open to dry. You put eight gi-normous umbrellas in the break room– it’s like an obstacle course! A poor man’s bumper cars.
So, like any good boy scout, I have decided to be prepared, in an understated way– I bought a flat briefcase umbrella. The thing folds up like the evening paper– FLAT, and can just live in your brief case, or coat pocket– it only weighs 8 ounces. No, it’s not the size of a toy– it has a 43″ arc– it will keep the water from spilling down the back of your shirt. Pops open with a touch of a button. There, there– turn that frown upside down.
You know how I am in the morning. I’ve told you. Mad, confused, zombie wandering around looking for my lost youth. Maybe I left it in my other pants.
Anyway, I found just the thing to get me going before I make it down stairs for that first cup of mocha– the Shower Shock Caffeinated Soap
. You heard me. CAFFEINATED SOAP. Again, Nobel Committee, please add this invention to your list of nominees. This bar of soapis like pouring a pot of coffee over your head. It’s a vegetable-based, glycerine bar of soap chocked-full of gentle ingredients, including, you guess it– real COFFEE! Please don’t eat it. Just add water and scrub.
Loaf of bread, a potato and milk, and a stick of butter. You remember that from the old Sesame Street cartoon. Well, every time I go the grocery store, that’s the tape playing my head– this usually happens when I’ve lost the list, or I’ve forgotten the few emergency items my wife sent me to the store to grab. So, guess what I come home from the grocery store with? Loaf of bread, a potato and milk, and a stick of butter . . .
My wife swears that men can only remember two things at a time. That true? Maybe it is. Anyway, now I have the SmartShopper Grocery List Assistant
. All you have to do is say what you need from the store, and the SmartShopper records your words, creates a list you can print out and take to the store! No more scribbling indecipherable lists in the middle of the night. No more going the store, hungry and delirious with two kids, grabbing anything off the shelves, shopping like it’s the end of the world. No more forgetting what to get– all I have to do is open the fridge and SAY what’s not in there. I love this thing. It has 2500 household items already programmed in the SmartShopper, and you can add your own favorite things, too! Now, if I can just remember to remember flippin’ the list!
OMG– an oven with a handle on it. Dang! This is like the discovery of FIRE. Like the first person to run a mile in four minutes. Or. . . Or . . . NAPOLEON crowning himself EMPEROR! He would have had one of these. Can you imagine the leader of France having to heat up his hot chocolate in a microwave used by all of his troops? Coup de GROSS. Do you know how tired I am of cleaning the inside of the office microwave before I can warm my coffee in there? Once, I found shards of ancient lean cuisine floating in my cup-o-soup. Ick– I nearly passed out.
So guess what I found? A mini microwave . . . for me! The iwave Personal Microwave
is less than a cubic foot of relief– keep it in your office and burn your afternoon bag of popcorn in private, or get some Easter Peeps and stick them in there– they’ll puff up like softballs! MMmmm warm Peeps. . . As far as I’m concerned, the iwave Personal Microwave
is the new boombox, the new 15 minutes of fame, and everyone should have a piece of that.
Oh, so you think it’s wasteful to have your own microwave, huh? I’ll tell you what’s wasteful– flying 5 people on a commercial airplane from Chicago to London. That’s 3,000 liters of jet fuel per passenger. That’s over 35 tons of carbon dioxide PER PERSON. That not just a carbon footprint– it’s more like a sinkhole. Com’on– what’s a little personal microwavin’ amongst friends?
Streptococcus is not a meeting of political bigwigs. Listeria is not a flower that blooms in spring. Germs. GERMS, people! Think you’re afraid of super delegates? Try. . . superbugs. They are everywhere. Recently while on a business trip, I shared a room with a colleague. No biggie. We were upgraded to a huge room– a suite, actually. Aside from the sound of guy snoring, and the faint aroma of dirty socks, I hardly noticed the guy was there. But one morning, before a big meeting, I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth when I noticed that . . . my toothbrush was already wet. Like, SOMEONE used my friggin’ toothbrush, and it wasn’t me, unless I sleep walk AND brush my teeth. I’d prefer to sleep walk and do my taxes. Anyway, as I was standing there, looking at my damp toothbrush, I remembered I totally embarrassed the guy at foosball once– I mean, I slaughtered the guy in front of the boss. All I could think of was my electric toothbrush being used to scrub the toilet, shine his shoes, or WORSE. Yeah, I don’t know what’s worse. So when I went down for the continental breakfast, I made sure to smile like a maniac so he’d think he got his revenge, I mean we still had like three days to go on this trip (I heard this guy slashed the tires of a bike messenger who cut him off in traffic– man, he should work for Vladimir Putin). Luckily, I had a back-up toothbrush.
When I got home, I promptly bought The Million-Germ-Eliminating Travel Toothbrush Sanitizer.
. This sanitizer eliminates 99% of bacteria, and shocks the bugs off your toothbrush faster than you can say “job security.” Okay, not that fast– but in 7 minutes you can clean your mouth with a clean toothbrush and rest easy. It kinda looks like the mini version of Michael Jackson’s hyperbaric sleeping chamber. Hey Brett from accounting? Watch your back, man– watch your back.
Remember back in the day when men were men? They wore suits and ties to exercise. Back then, working out meant pulling an all-nighter with your manly friends, in the handmade, basement bar of your house where no woman dare tread. Cigars, scotch and a coupla pin-ups on the wall. . . AHHHhhh, a man’s domain.
It’s still kinda like that, except my basement bar is the laundry room. And a store room for the over flow of toys. But, I do have a little corner I can call my own. I call it the Seaweeds Bar! My collection of vintage beer cans dating back to the 1940s is growing– can you imagine the strange brew festering in there? Anyway, I found a great new way to decorate my bar– Personalized Tin Pub Signs. You know, the kind you might see at an old soda fountain. The images are vintage, the text is hilarious and get this– you can have the name of your bar on the sign! Isn’t that cool?
There are a couple styles available, including a Budweiser Sign, a Jack Daniel’s Sign, and a Captain Morgan Sign.
YEAH! I always wanted to be a hobo, a vagabond, a man ON THE ROAD, like Jack Kerouac
finding adventure and loose women in every town, using my mouth harp and beatnik poetry to seduce them. Are you crazy? I got kids and a wife who would send out her assassin chick posse to hunt me down if I tried to re-sow my wild oats. I’m done, a goner, I’m through– now the only roaming I do is on my blackberry. But hey, that’s cool . . . that’s cool. . .
It’s just that we are planning a week in some national forest somewhere and well, there’s going to be a lot of time spent in the dark, fending off mosquitoes– and what better way to do that than to build a fire, toast some marshmallows, and play the harmonica. Look, I’m never going to be Stevie Wonder or John Popper or anything like that, but I would like to be able to play This Land is Your Land without hunting for notes, so I got the Campfire Companion Harmonica Set so I can brush up on my summer camp skills. This DVD comes with a harmonica, a history of the instrument, and enough lessons to get your through a least one concert in the wild. The DVD comes with rugged wilderness scenes to get you stoked about being in the middle of nowhere with wild bears and mountain lions. I’m talking about my kids, of course.
When I was in high school, our next door neighbour, Miss Kirby, was divorced, childless liberated woman of thirty-nine. That was completely unheard of at the time. She was totally like Bea Authur in Maude, and she was the talk of the neighbourhood. She liked going to check the mail in her crochet sweater dress, sparkly bracelets that jingled when she walked, and high-heel espadrilles, all of which made my mother’s canasta group go crazy. Miss Kirby had been to the Middle East in the late 60s and taught belly dance on Saturday mornings at her house. The only belly dance I knew was drawing a face on my stomach and wiggling my lingering baby fat in the mirror. Once I tried to find out what was really going on in Miss Kirby’s dance, so I tried to peek in. I stacked up a bunch of books so I could see into her sunken den, from our living room window. I got grounded for a month, not to mention that I fell on my butt. From that day on Miss Kirby kept her curtains closed, but on days when the wind was right, I could smell the incense she burned. It was sandalwood.
I didn’t remember ANY of that until I got Mistral Sandalwood Bamboo Men’s Soap. The rich sandalwood smell is great. Mixed with extract of green coffee and white ginseng– totally wakes me out of my morning zombie state. The bamboo powder scrubs dead skin cells away– I’ve noticed that my wife has offered me more back rubs lately. Yeah, I know . . . 14 dollars for a bar of soap. Crazy. But it totally pays for itself, if you know what I mean. . .
I bet Miss Kirby is still teaching belly dance somewhere. I bet she’s voting for Hilary, too.
