Yesterday was the 5th shave with the Wilkinson Sword DE, part of the “exhaustion” period to see how far the blade can go before it is no longer comfortably useable. I say “comfortably” because these blades can probably go 10 shaves before they start really cutting you up, but who wants that?
The blade still produced a reasonably good shave although the drag was now more pronounced, as was the irritation revealed by the alum block at the end of the shave. Time to move on.
We now enter Phase 2. Readers interested in these shaving entries will recall that this is all part of the experiment to assess the usefulness and claims of the Razorpit blade sharpener. In Phase 2, I will now shave with the same brand of blade, this time gliding it across the Razorpit “sharpening” surface (a rubberized membrane that purportedly cleans off the dead skin cells and soap scum that reduce blade sharpness) at the end of each shave.
I’m very interested to see the results over the course of the next couple of weeks (or longer if this thing really works!).
An oldie but perpetual goodie. Funny because it rings so true for anyone who has had a gym membership and “trainer” (I’ve had dozens over the years and look where it’s got me). Thanks to Mr. Dario for the reminder of this old gem:
“Dear Diary, For my birthday this year, my husband gave me a week of personal training at the local health club. Although I am still in great shape since being a high school football cheerleader 43 years ago, I decided it would be a good idea to go ahead and give it a try. I called the club and made my reservations with a personal trainer named Christo, who identified himself as a 26-year-old aerobics instructor and model for athletic clothing and swim wear. Friends seemed pleased with my enthusiasm to get started! The club encouraged me to keep a diary to chart my progress. ________________________________ MONDAY: Started my day at 6:00 am. Tough to get out of bed, but found it was well worth it when I arrived at the health club to find Christo waiting for me. He is something of a Greek god– with blond hair, dancing eyes, and a dazzling white smile. Woo Hoo!! Christo gave me a tour and showed me the machines.. I enjoyed watching the skillful way in which he conducted his aerobics class after my workout today. Very inspiring! Christo was encouraging as I did my sit-ups, although my gut was already aching from holding it in the whole time he was around. This is going to be a FANTASTIC week!! ________________________________ TUESDAY: I drank a whole pot of coffee, but I finally made it out the door. Christo made me lie on my back and push a heavy iron bar into the air then he put weights on it! My legs were a little wobbly on the treadmill, but I made the full mile. His rewarding smile made it all worthwhile. I feel GREAT! It’s a whole new life for me. _______________________________ WEDNESDAY: The only way I can brush my teeth is by laying the toothbrush on the counter and moving my mouth back and forth over it. I believe I have a hernia in both pectorals. Driving was OK as long as I didn’t try to steer or stop. I parked on top of a GEO in the club parking lot. Christo was impatient with me, insisting that my screams bothered other club members. His voice is a little too perky for that early in the morning and when he scolds, he gets this nasally whine that is VERY annoying. My chest hurt when I got on the treadmill, so Christo put me on the stair monster. Why the hell would anyone invent a machine to simulate an activity rendered obsolete by elevators? Christo told me it would help me get in shape and enjoy life. He said some other shit too. _______________________________ THURSDAY: Asshole was waiting for me with his vampire-like teeth exposed as his thin, cruel lips were pulled back in a full snarl. I couldn’t help being a half an hour late– it took me that long to tie my shoes. He took me to work out with dumbbells. When he was not looking, I ran and hid in the restroom. He sent some skinny bitch to find me. Then, as punishment, he put me on the rowing machine– which I sank. _________________________________ FRIDAY: I hate that bastard Christo more than any human being has ever hated any other human being in the history of the world. Stupid, skinny, anemic, anorexic, little aerobic instructor. If there was a part of my body I could move without unbearable pain, I would beat him with it. Christo wanted me to work on my triceps. I don’t have any triceps! And if you don’t want dents in the floor, don’t hand me the damn barbells or anything that weighs more than a sandwich. The treadmill flung me off and I landed on a health and nutrition teacher. Why couldn’t it have been someone softer, like the drama coach or the choir director? ________________________________ SATURDAY: Satan left a message on my answering machine in his grating, shrilly voice wondering why I did not show up today. Just hearing his voice made me want to smash the machine with my planner; however, I lacked the strength to even use the TV remote and ended up catching eleven straight hours of the Weather Channel.. ________________________________ SUNDAY: I’m having the Church van pick me up for services today so I can go and thank GOD that this week is over. I will also pray that next year my husband will choose a gift for me that is fun– like a root canal or a hysterectomy. I still say if God had wanted me to bend over, he would have sprinkled the floor with diamonds!!!”.
Everyone is entitled to their food likes and dislikes. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of Brussels’s sprouts, although I’ll still eat them, if in smaller quantities than things I like better on the plate. But when food preferences become very expansive or quirky, you can be sure that it’s about a lot more than the food.
One acquaintance would only eat boiled chicken and white rice if she were anywhere outside her own home. Whether in a restaurant or invited to dinner at friends’ homes, she would either eat nothing at all, or you knew there had to be boiled chicken and white rice on the menu.
Another acquaintance would never eat anything she or her mother hadn’t cooked. At a restaurant with a group of friends, she would only drink water.
And still another, proudly regaled us with stories of her trip to India with her now ex-husband, where she managed to eat only at the American hotel where she was staying or McDonald’s. Strangely enough, her daughter, a corporate executive, recounted the same story about herself after a recent buying trip to India. So, food nuttiness does tend to run in families as kids absorb the behavioral strategies of their parents.
I always ask people with food restrictions, “why?”. One lady of our acquaintance avoided shrimp at a group dinner. I asked if she didn’t like shrimp, to which she replied she had never tried one. “How come?” I asked. She replied, “I might be allergic”. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, have you had any allergic reactions or been tested for a shrimp allergy?”. “No”, she replied, “But I still might be, so I avoid them”.
You might be surprised that even many hardcore vegetarians or vegans have difficulty explaining (even to themselves) why they pursue their restrictive lifestyles. For many, it’s a nebulous cloud of morality, environmentalism, health, etc., without any intellectual integrity to back it up.
Food is so primordial to the human experience that it is deeply interwoven with our psyche. Freud described the first stage of human psychic development as the “Oral stage”. We learn very early on that we have the potential for great power if we use food to manipulate others. And for many, this pattern doesn’t change through adulthood; food becomes about power (the ability to make others dance to our food quirks) or about love (prove to me that you love me by submitting to my food rules).
Marketers of course know all about this – there are likely more psychologists working for corporations and ad agencies than there are in hospitals. Pulling mom and dad’s strings to make them accommodate a junior food terrorist can be very profitable. Here’s a particularly egregious example from Kraft in the video below.
Our kids were brought up with two simple food rules:
1. You have the right to not like something, but you have to at least taste it once before making that decision.
2. If you don’t like what’s being served, you can wait till the next meal and see if there’s something you like then (strangely, a little hunger seemed to make most previously disliked foods quite palatable).
Unfortunately, the situation shown in the ad is neither unique nor uncommon. It may largely underlie the obesity epidemic among children, so rampant in North America, i.e., the preference for junk food, heavily laden with salt, sugar, fat, and obesogenic additives.
And while Kraft promotes this Frankenfood as a healthful option with no artificial flavors, colors, or preservatives, see the ingredients below for the 3-cheese variety:
We’ve become so inured to full nudity and explicit sexuality in movies that we forget there was a time when less was more because it engaged the imagination, a far more powerful emotivator (did I just make that word up?) than the intellect. Thanks to Mr. Dario for pointing out this terrific tribute to Sophia Loren; a case in point for seething sexuality.
Thanks for this wonderful find to Leisureguy, posted on his blog today. I go through a lot of garlic. To steal a line from Mr. Italo’s daughter, “Garlic is my natural odor”. But I do hate peeling it, especially when I’m using a whole head (which is most of the time). And my poor supertaster wife has been living with this for 37 years!
This is day 4 on the same Wilkinson Sword DE blade, trying to take it to exhaustion in order to establish its real and “normal” useable life-span, prior to doing the test of the Razorpit.
The blade, surprisingly, continues to perform well, although it is getting a little draggy, and the alum block tells a tale of somewhat heightened irritation. I’m sure I’ll get 5 shaves out of it at this point, but can’t count on six. The risk of getting nicked rises as the blade gets rougher and unpredictable.
A couple of days ago I threw down the pizza gauntlet to our resident expert on all things Italian, Mr. Italo (Even his name is authentic). He had made the rather outlandish claim that there was no “real” Neapolitan style pizza in Montreal, although he gave New York rave reviews for the authenticity of its pizza.
We decided to start a pizza quest in Montreal. I am flying “blind” as it were, never having been to Naples, and in fact, never having eaten pizza on my one and only trip to Italy in 1994 (I was in the North).
We began our quest at a little place called Pizza St. Viateur for which Mr. Italo had received recommendations. It was just O.K. The lack of a wood-fired oven is likely quite a handicap, and the pizza suffered from the traditional Montreal affliction of too much cheese, despite asking the pizza guy to go easy on it. I chose the anchovy and black olive pizza. We all agreed that the sauce was excellent and tasted homemade. I would rate it a 7/10 in comparison to other similar thin-crust pizzas I’ve had in Montreal.
Mr. Italo, I’m sure wouldn’t be so generous. He was pissed that they had mislabeled what was clearly a Pizza Margherita as Pizza Napolitana, and wasted no time in telling the pizzaiolo as much, despite my urging for restraint; I frankly wanted to keep the number of goobers on my pizza to a minimum.
Nevertheless, it was all quite enjoyable with good ambiance, and the good company of Mr. Italo’s photographer friend Andy.
Man, I love Summer and the BBQ. Today’s lunch (well, yesterday’s and today’s actually). I sliced the grilled eggplant in half, took out the “meat”, chopped it up with feta, pesto, and walnuts, then put it back in each half “slipper”. I removed the skins and seeds from the grilled peppers and served them with a few anchovies tossed on top. The zucchini I served “au nature” with some olive oil. All topped with some tzatziki and served with a piece of Poilane.
For today’s lunch, I made tartines. I took the eggplant “pesto” and spread it on the Poilane, topped with zucchini and red pepper slices, anchovies, and black olives. It was truly delicious.
Poilane is ideally suited to tartines. It’s almost purpose-made for them. It’s not a great sandwich bread as its texture is very firm and I suspect it might crumble if you had a lot of stuff in the middle. At the very least it would be a big mouthful.
But in a tartine, it truly shines. Its firm texture allows it to absorb juices without getting soggy. And thinly sliced as it should be, it allows the ingredients to shine without dominating the flavor.