Chicks With Bics

Product developers and advertisers are always looking for an "in" when it comes to gaining a foothold in various consumer demographics. Gender is an important component in that search. Or should we say gender separation, because the push for product identity can often equate with sexual identity. Sometimes it comes across favorably, such as Secret deodorant being "strong enough for a man, but made for a woman." Sometimes it receives mixed acceptance, as proven with Dr. Pepper 10, the diet soda for men.

Some products can leave a person scratching their head wondering if the actual value of the item outweighs the obvious pandering that it's better for one sex over the other. For example, tools. Not just hand tools, but power tools, as well. Creating something, say a screwdriver or a cordless drill, and selling it as a product "for women" because it's made to fit a smaller hand can be insulting not only to men with small hands but to women who have man hands. One should have a large collection of tools that are size-relevant to the project being worked on. Small project = small tools. Sex should only become relevant if you're fixing something as a favor to your spouse.

Razors are another product that come in his/hers styles. Granted, men and women may have different shaving needs (frequency, hair thickness, location), but aside from minor tweaks in design for shaving angle, a razor is a razor. In fact, research done by Schick showed a majority of women used razors "designed" for men. Nonetheless, companies like Schick, Gillette and Bic market the product for both sexes because men don't need* a razor on their upper lip if it vibrates, and women don't want to drag something called a Mach 3 along their crotch if it doesn't. (*Not that we men don't want one. We just don't need one.)

Occasionally, a product hits the market that makes you wonder if someone took a joke too far in the Product Development Department, or if some senior V.P. in charge of said P.D. challenged his people (stand down ladies, you know it's a guy) to push the envelope. The edge of this envelope is where I believe the ebb and flow of unemployment rates exists between product designers and public relations staff.

*Batteries not included

Not too long ago, Bic introduced the "Cristal for Her" ball point pen. Here is the product description as listed on Amazon:

"BIC Cristal For Her has an elegant design - just for Her! It features a thin barrel designed to fit a woman's hand. It has a diamond engraved barrel for an elegant and unique feminine style."

In reading through the 1,495 (and counting) customer reviews on Amazon - (Ed. note: Yes, we did.) - there was a noticeable change in the tenor of the comments. Initial reviews were on-point product evaluations regarding design and functionality. But as one would expect, once you add a clown, you create a circus. That big top went up on August 15, 2012, with a review that ended with the line, "AT LAST! Bic, the great liberator, has released a womanly pen that my gentle baby hands can use without fear of unlady-like callouses and bruises. Thank you, Bic!" And with that, an onslaught of prose ensued containing sarcastic wit at levels this blog always aspires to achieve. Grainiums had to share some of the more entertaining ones with you and crown a winner. (Another Ed. note: reviewers' identities have been withheld.)

"I can't find a switch to turn it on, and it didn't come with batteries. This is not the "for her" product I was expecting. At all."

"I needed that little something extra to complete that elusive feminine aura when I'm wearing my wife's clothing in public."

"I bought these for my wife, hoping to add some spice in our marriage for valentines day. Then she had the audacity to use it for our divorce papers."

"...I'm only giving two stars...For one thing, they dot every "i" with a little heart. They also won't make periods at the ends of sentences; it's a question mark or an exclamation point every time... Secondly, they insert "like" and "um" randomly through whatever it is you're writing..."

"First of all I'm a male. I picked a pink one up by mistake to write a quick note... Next thing I know I'm sitting down to take a pee."

"I thought that certainly a pen made especially for women would also include instructions on what words to write when one is holding it...This is very frustrating. I suppose I shall just make up names for my future husband and draw castles. It's really all the thing is useful for."

"I noticed that these are in the office and school supply section. You might want to set them in the cooking/cleaning section so that women can find them."

"Clearly I picked up the wrong pen. I have begun asking for directions and even gave back my neighbor's belt sander. I need a hug."

"These are great pens, but I'm still holding out for a pen made for us left-handed women. Some day, Bic, please!"

"My husband used this to do our taxes and now he has sore breasts."

"Will these pens make my ass look larger? If they do, I will come back and change my review to 4 stars."

"It's nice to get a Bic that fits in your hand so nicely and doesn't leak or blow all over your clothes or hand before you're finished."

To help us avoid placing a "for her" label on this blog post, we stayed away from the expected red-pen-leakage, heavy-writing-day, and monthly-hand-cramping comments. There were also a woman's a small handful of comments directed toward specific extracurricular activities, girth-related comparisons and the like that, while funny, didn't really represent the level of crass originality Grainiums sought. We did find one, however, that we felt summed up the overall tone of the consuming public...

Grainiums presents the Award for the Most Sexist Comment - Writing Instrument Category: "A pen designed for a woman should not have a ball point. Only a man's pens should have balls in them. A pen designed for a woman should be a fountain."

grab bag

Things I've seen, or heard, or would like to see, or don't understand, or understand but don't know why.

• Hand-carved wood...yes. Hand-woven tapestries...yes. Hand-cut flowers...yes. Hand-blown glass? No such thing. It's mouth-blown or lung-blown. It can be called hand-made to differentiate it from machine-made. But hands can't blow, therefore there is no such thing as hand-blown glass.

• Personalized plate...

• Everyone will know when I start suffering from short-term memory loss when I

• A Kentucky teenager was arrested for entering a bingo hall and disrupting the game by yelling the word "bingo." According to official reports, he was instantly grabbed by an officer and placed in handcuffs. My guess was so he couldn't Clap, Clap, Clap-Clap-Clap.

• Those are spinners on those rims. Can you identify the vehicle they're on? (Answer below)

• I saw a promo for the T.V. series Survivor. Not that I care about the show. I really wasn't paying attention until I heard the contestant doing the promo say something to the effect of "I may be old, but I want to show the others I still have game." No, you don't. In the context of trash talking, the word "have" is grammatically unacceptable when referring to what you "got." You can't have game. You can have a game. You can bring your "A" game. You can make a game out of something. You can win, lose or throw a game. You can be game. There are a lot of things you can do with a game, except have one. (Okay, you can have the next game, just not the one you're in.) It's got game, as in "I may be old, but I still got game." And if you find it absolutely necessary to flash your education, "I've still got game" will be allowed.

• I find it oddly amusing that questions about homosexuality qualify as "queries."

• Considering the number of idiots already on the roads, seeing this doesn't bother me. At least the bitch can park in the space.
  

• Ever sit in a booth in a restaurant and have the bench you're sitting on raise up when someone sits in the booth directly behind you, and then you spend the rest of your meal eating like you're riding on a see-saw?

• There may not be an "i" in "team", but there is a "you" in "why we didn't succeed." 

• What you see below is wrong on so many levels, and yet it really only needs just one level.

• You want to know what's trending for me? My dislike of the terms "trending," "trend" and "trendy." I dislike reading trending articles that include trended words with annoyingly trendy hashtags in front of them. I don't like the distraction of watching television and having newscasters or sportscasters inviting me to "tweet" them at one of their long lists of #'s. To me, a "#" indicates only one thing: there's a message following with poor grammar and bad spelling in it. When I see "#" I don't think "hashtag," I think "pound." Then I think #this.

 
• I'm curious to know why when I see a gasoline truck unloading at a gas station, the price for all of the grades of gas change at the same time. There are never more tanks with the truck than there are tanks in the ground, yet all of the prices change.

• Answer: Nissan Quest Minivan

Cookie Monsters

I recently encountered young girls in short skirts standing on street corners soliciting me to give them money in exchange for a treat.

No, not hookers! Girls Scouts!

It's springtime. You all know what that means here in the United States...allergies, daylight savings (except Arizona) and Girl Scout cookie sales.

Unlike this man, many people succumb to the guerrilla-style 
sales tactics of Girl Scout cookie sellers by failing to 
employ the very simple “No Eye Contact” rule.

On every corner and in front of every supermarket, tables are set up and decorated with boxes of cookies, fronted by pigtailed little angels holding hand-made signs and subjecting the public to their famous "Would you like to buy some Girl Scout cookies?" taunts. And you're not going to say no, because you've been strung out for almost a whole year waiting to buying a box of Thin "crackMints" to feed your addiction. That's right. Addicition. Girl Scouts are the drug lords of the cookie world. The difference between a drug cartel and Girl Scouts is FDA approval. During the first quarter of every year, their Thin Mint cookies are #1, outselling even Oreos. Estimated at $785 million, Girl Scout cookies are the #3 cookie product sold in the U.S., with five of the ten best-selling cookies during those three months.

It's not enough that these girls go after the easy targets - parents, grandparents and old ladies in the neighborhood - these little darlings pimp their dads for sales, too. (Sadly, I was a victim of one such evil child.) Who's going to fuck up their career by not contributing part of their salary to the boss so his little girl can level-up on the sales chart to get her cookie bling? A large office complex can turn into a Greek marketplace overnight. And since everyone's obligated to buy from everyone else, it seems as if the same $4 are being passed the office around like a bad cold.

Did you? No.: When you buy a box of Girls Scout cookies and write the purchase off as a charitable deduction on your tax return, you may be committing tax fraud. That's because, according to the Girl Scouts' web site, if you keep the cookies for personal consumption you've purchased a product at fair market value. To receive a tax write-off, you must give them the money and leave the cookies.

Speaking of $4...it seems like only yesterday when they were $2 a box. Then it was $3.50. Now a box of cookies is as expensive as a gallon of gas, and I can make a gallon of gas last longer than a tray of coconut-laced Samoas. If the boxes feel a little lighter, too, it's because in 2009 a weighty concern arose prompting the organization to reduce the number of cookies per box. The weight issue was related to the cost of shipping, not your gut. Additional production costs have impacted quality, as well. And judging by the Photoshopped box art (above), you know they must have paid top dollar for marketing.

But it's not all about the cookies. The official Girl Scout web site proclaims, "When a Girl Scout sells you cookies, she's building a lifetime of skills and confidence." Like marketing and sales planning. Like public interaction and self-expression. Like learning that even if you suck at doing your job, baked goods are an excellent way to distract people from that.

Smelling a Profit

(For fun, let's see if you can count the number of time the word "shit" or a reference to "shit" is used in this post. The answer is at the, uh, bottom.)

I'm going to be a rich man. One of my crack research assistants brought to my attention that doctors are treating bowel infections with fecal transplants. And as full of shit as I am, I can't help but smell an opportunity to squeeze out a little profit.

A drug resistant strain of bacteria known as Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) is causing more frequent and severe intestinal infections in patients being treated with antibiotics for various other maladies. The antibiotics treating the illnesses are also killing good bacteria that reside in the intestines. This collateral damage allows the C. difficile bacteria to attack the patient's digestive system, often causing severe diarrhea and bowel inflamation. This is according to the Mayo Clinic, and how can you doubt any report on intestinal problems when Mayo is involved?

Doctors have found no effective standard therapy to combat this bacteria, so some have opted to try a therapy that is "decidedly non-standard," which is an understatement. They are attempting to restore the patient's intestinal deficiency of good bacteria with microbes excreted by healthy patients. It's called "intestinal microbiome transplantation" - fecal transplants - and the success rate of this bacteriotherapy during studies is encouraging. Basically, doctors take a healthy shit from one person and put it into another. The microbes don't attack the enemy bacteria directly. What they do do is re-establish normal levels of healthy bacteria and allow the body to excrete natural healing defenses. And so far, there are no major side effects with this treatment other than diarrhea, constipation and burping. Burping? I don't know about you, but I can't recall anything that tasted better the second time coming up.

Everyone who donates gets
this neat pin!

So where's the profit in all of this for me? Donor feces. Why not? People who sell their blood can make $200-400 a month. Qualified sperm donors can make $200 a week during a six-month contract. I'm not talking about turning myself into a human soft-serve machine, but a few bucks to fill a Dixie cup every now and then is nothing to turn up your nose at. Of course, there is an element of timing involved with a donation such as this. It's not like a needle in the vein or leafing through a Playboy magazine.

Fecal Run 2013
Run like you gotta go, and
"Give a shit to save a life"

And it's not only about donating. Education is important, too. Events could be held to raise awareness and promote the fight against C. difficile. At fairs and festivals, set up informational kiosks shaped like outhouses. Better yet, use actual porta-potties! Sell brown, rubber "Giveashit" wristbands. Start a Givestrong foundation. Have a marathon to raise funds. The opportunities are endless, so to speak. Let's grease up that good ol' American marketing machine and polish up that golden turd to fund a cure.




So say "No!" to Jamie Lee Curtis and put down that yogurt. Because there's only one true source of natural probiotics!




(Answers: I got 31 - crack, bowel, fecal, shit, squeeze out, diarrhea, bowel, excretes, fecal, shit, do do, excrete, diarrhea, constipation, shit, feces, soft-serve, this*, outhouse, porta-potties, Giveashit, Givestrong, turd, & natural probiotics. In photos: shit, fecal, shit, ass, crappy, fecal, & shit. If you find others, you must justify them to me with the understanding that I will ultimately tell you you're full of shit.)

* "this" used in the context "such as this" is not only a direct reference to shit, it uses the same four letters.

Going Over the Fiscal Waterfall in a Pork Barrel

Well, it's nice to be back. For those who didn't know, Grainiums was on hiatus. And while this moment in a blog post seems a little early for a parenthetical aside, we're going to have one.

(Hiatus is a Latin word translated as being a gap or interruption in continuity. It is derived from the past participle "hiare," meaning "to gape." To gape is defined as "to stare wonderingly or stupidly, often with the mouth open.")

That pretty much sums up what I've been doing for the past several weeks. But I wiped away the drool oozing from the corners of my mouth and set myself back to the ol' grindstone. Looking back at all of the events that occurred during the hiatus, nothing screamed "stare stupidly" more than the government's handling of the country's financial woes.

The United States was facing a two-headed monster on January 1 - tax increases and budget cuts. Fortunately with a deadline in effect, it meant our legislative bodies would burn the midnight oil to come up with a solution. At least I assumed the government was burning a petroleum product because the price of gas went up during this period. Facing public backlash and battling through partisan devisiveness, our elected representatives, in the tried and true, American get-to-it attitude, got half the job done. They eliminated the tax increases. But what about the budget cuts? This is going to be a tough one for them as there are lots of marquee funding choices on the chopping block. Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, education. Hard to find things to cut from the budget, although it shouldn't be that difficult to at least find a starting point...

College humor - Punking a rattlesnake
with a fake squirrel.

The U.S. government gave two California academic institutions - San Diego State University, and the University of California, Davis - $325,000 to develop a robotic squirrel to help researchers at the schools study "the nuances between predator and prey" of the California ground squirrel and rattlesnakes. The robosquirrel, when placed in the proper environment and confronted by a real rattlesnake, is designed to wag its tail back and forth to simulate what a real squirrel would do in a similar situation.

(Spoiler Alert: That's all it was built to do.)

And that's all it did, because apparently that's what squirrels will do when threatened by a viper. Okay, that and it seems that real squirrels also have the speed and agility to dodge a rattlesnake strike, animated behavior that I guess doesn't quite fit in a $325K budget. So if the rattlesnake struck at the robotic squirrel, the chances are relatively high a bite would occur. However, the robosquirrel shares one other characteristic with a real squirrel besides a wagging tail: both have immunity to the effects of rattlesnake venom. This would be like me getting a government grant to buy you a bag of marshmallows to throw at me, but instead of me it's a cardboard cutout that looks like me. There's also no mouth, but there's a speaker where my mouth was so you can hear me warn you not to throw the marshmallows at me. And either a) you're so stupid you don't throw one, or b) you throw one and it hits the fake me because the fake me can't move, and it doesn't hurt.

The ground squirrel is not the only member of nature's crash-test dummy army. There is a robot lizard that does territorially-defensive push-ups, a robot female sage grouse that uses a spycam to collect data on male sage grouse's courtship behavior, and the fake cockroach soaked in pheromones to study cockroach peer pressure. Public funding for cockroaches...wearing musk.

I'm alright, nobody worry 'bout me.
Why you gotta give me a fight, why
don't you let me be.

Interesting ideas to kick around the campus coffee shop, but increasing our financial debt $325,000 for a study using a taxidermy squirrel that only wags its tail? By comparison, the gopher used in the movie Caddyshack - the one used to generate behavioral "nuances" between a rodent and a golf course groundskeeper - was also relatively cheap to build and operate, but at least that little fucker could dance...and to the tune of almost $40 million at the box office! So in essence, we don't need government funding directed toward post graduate work on rodents adding to our fiscal deficit. We need government funding directed toward film comedies with dancing rodents turning a profit! Watching a flash mob of dancing hamsters won't completely cure the country's debt woes, but it'll help us laugh while we pay it down.

SDSU defended the grant in part by pointing out the components to make the squirrel only cost a few hundred dollars. The rest of the $324,000 and change went to fund the 4 graduate students and 30 undergrad students participating in the project because, you know, we can't expect college students or their parents to pay for tuition, and hobbies aren't covered through student loans. Not that all scientific studies don't deserve government subsidies. I think discovering how diseases are transmitted between species is very important because that kind of knowledge has a practical application to humans. However, I've come across a few rattlers in my travels, and the last thing I think I'd do is "drop trou" and shake my ass hoping to keep them at bay.

And what of university officials and professors claims that a study of this nature has helped in understanding human behavior? Judging by public disbelief and outrage generated by their government funded shopping spree at Radio Shack...success!

Season's Greetings!

Happy Holidays!

See you in 2013!

Get Out and Vote!

A quick reminder to all citizens U.S. citizens legal U.S. citizens legal U.S. citizens who are registered voters:

It's a MAILBOX, not a BALLOT BOX. Stop stuffing it!

GET OUT AND VOTE SO I CAN FIND MY BILLS!