Terrible Analogies

Taking the Eye In The Sky from the bookshelf, I study the box and wonder, “just who is their proofreader?”

I was messing around with my new 4×4 Rubik’s Cube a few days ago when it locked up on me, then suddenly (and quite unexpectedly) exploded / disintegrated in my hands.  Colorful cubes of plastic poured from my hands and on to the faux wood of the kitchen floor.  It was a tragedy to be sure, but nothing I couldn’t recover from.

With wallet in hand I raced upstairs to purchase a replacement.  My first stop was Cube4You, but their funky site just didn’t want to play nice with Safari or Firefox.  Here’s what Cube4You sent me when I signed up:

Note: our system don’t accept Firefox now , when you pay , you shall use Internet Explorer , we’ll fix this soon.

“You shall use Internet Explorer.”  Frak that.  I hate any company that tells me what to do.

Willing to give them the benefit of a doubt that they just haven’t quite grasped the intricacies of the english language, I sent a quick e-mail to them asking an innocuous question about their cubes.  A whole day passed and I never received a response (heck, four days later as of this writing and still no response), which didn’t fill me with happy fuzzies.  Okay, I guess Cube4You doesn’t get my business (and it shouldn’t get yours either with their lousy customer support).

My next stop was Cubefans. Taking a chance I placed my order.  Minutes later I received a confirmation number.  Ten minutes later I received another e-mail stating that my order had been shipped.  This e-mail also included a UPS tracking number, and there was my order, ready to be processed.

Three days later and I’m now the proud owner of a new Eastsheen cube.  If you need a new 4×4 cube, I’d definitely recommend Cubefans.  They’ve got my business from now on!

Inside the shipping envelope was a sturdy box protecting my valuable cargo

My replacement stickers and new cube. This Eastsheen A4 has great action for a 4x4. Single digit control, no lockups...great cube!

The brother-in-law called me up at work yesterday, asking if it would be okay if he swung by tonight, “say, around 8pm?” 

“Sure,” I told him.  I was more than a bit curious why he wanted to stop by, but I figured his wife was driving him crazy and he needed a break

Eight o’clock eventually lumbers around and there’s Shannon hulking frame knocking at the door, freaking out the cat who went from cute-n-cuddly to “wanna rip someone’s throat out” in the blink of an eye.  In walks the BiL, who begins to tell me how sorry he was that he missed my birthday, and that he wanted to make up for it.  From his pockets he slowly begins to produce a multitude of colorful objects that I instantly recognized as various flavors of Rubik’s Cubes.

4x4, 5x5, Hollow Cube, 2x2

Nerdgasm!  

I’ve been threatening Karin that I was going to buy a new 4×4 cube, but she kept telling me to hold off, that she had something planned.  I guess she knew that Shannon had these cubes en route.  

Being the hardcore closet geek that I am, I was shocked that someone would go out of their way to hook a brother up like this.  Many thanks, Shannon!

…What kind of toys are kids playing with nowadays?

In the span of a single afternoon I happened to stumble upon:

Disgusting Anatomy Heart:  Have you ever found yourself standing in your darkened kitchen late at night, with the only light coming from the single dim frosted bulb inside your open refrigerator?  There you are, slouching into the open box, your arm draped heavily over the door as you slowly scan its chilled contents.  Unsure what you want to eat you’re suddenly overcome with an overwhelming, insatiable desire to hold a slick, pulsing, quivering human heart in your bare hands.  

No?  Strange…I can’t believe I’m the only one ever to have that feeling.  

+1 for the bonus eyeball kit.

Gabby Girl: High creep factor with this toy.  I’m not sure where the manufacturer was going with this doll, but the posable mouth, flickering tongue, beady, vacant eyes, and 80′s inspired clothes propels this toy into the high stratosphere of the uncomfortably abnormal.  

Recently I’ve been having this reoccurring nightmare of waking up in a cold sweat and seeing that sometime, in the dead of night, this life-sized doll had silently pulled up a chair next to my bed and has been patiently sitting there, in the dark, inches from my face, watching me sleep.  The only sound I hear is a sticky, rubbery *smack* *smack* as it gums it’s lips together, her dead eyes staring straight into my shivering, cowering soul.

This doll eerily resembles a cousin of mine who lives in San Francisco, but with fewer facial piercings, no chronic cough, and absence of strict vegan diet for “religious reasons”.

Gummy Tapeworm: Knowing that by eating this it’ll soon be working its way through my colon is enough to make me want to wash my hands after handling the package.  I wonder, if I ever had an opportunity to eat a real honest-to-gosh tapeworm, would it taste like apple?  Who knows what a tapeworm tastes like?

Okay…that’s enough disturbing thoughts for one night…

I’m not sure when this practice started, but it has got to stop.  Right.  Now.

What I’m all up in arms about is the fact that cereal companies are getting into the habit of placing their prizes inside of the cereal boxes, but packaged and placed along side the interior cereal bag.  This, IMHO, completely strips away the thrill of digging into the cereal itself and hunting for the elusive toy.

We all had our own special ways of extracting the prize from inside a freshly opened box of cereal.  As a child I preferred the “hold the box at a 45° angle, push in against the box to create a hand space, then dig in from the bottom” method.  Others opted for the less refined “bum rush the box by slamming your arm up to the elbow and muscle the toy out” approach.  If you weren’t hip to either technique you could find a large bowl and dump the entire contents and simply pick out the prize.  This last approach was deemed the cowards way of obtaining the prize, and was considered bad form around our household

But I guess this is all becoming moot, with Kellogg’s now pre-separating the prize from the cereal itself, these and other self-taught prize extracting techniques might go the way of Pound Puppies, Speak & Spells, and “flesh” colored crayons.  We’re denying future generations of children by not allowing them the pleasure of digging deep into a box Froot Loops, bits and pieces of cereal oozing out of the box as they stare at the ceiling in total concentration, hoping to feel their way to the prize that looked so cool printed on the outside of the box.

*Sigh*  It’s an example of another small of piece of my childhood dying by carefully measured increments.