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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
I originally wrote this piece for MediaShower.com, for use on the late, great comedy site ZuG.com. Text and images published here with permission.
There are many kinds of holiday traditions. Some people warble old songs off-key to annoy the neighbors. Others slaughter and display innocent evergreen trees in their living rooms. Some sit on a fat old bearded man’s lap and make wishes.
My personal tradition is to sneak a flask into Christmas parties and drink until I can write “Fa la la la la, la la la la” in the snow out back. Or possibly the side of the garage.
(Hey, I said it was a “tradition”; not a good tradition. I never promised you people a sugarplum garden.)
Of course, if you’re getting sloshed for the holidays, you need a booze of choice. A go-to Christmas spirit. Your Hakkukah hooch. A Kwaanza quaff. A winter solstice whistle-wetter.
Mine is tequila. And so, in honor of the season, I hit up some of the world’s most popular agave squeezers for advice on making life more festive this year. Where “festive” has less to do with hanging tinsel and wrapping gifts, and more to do with eating the worm and doing body shots off an elf’s back. Just the way baby Jeebus intended.
Read on for my questions — and my actual posts on the companies’ Facebook walls. With any luck — and some help from my friendly local liquor store — this will be one Navidad that’s muy feliz. Bottoms up, muchachos!
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Last week, Zolton placed an order for lulz with Harry and David, SkyMall, Lillian Vernon and Hammacher Schlemmer. Want to join in the prank? Click the links to see each real-life Facebook post, and comment or ‘Like’ them to generate more buzz. Or visit Zolton’s own Facebook page!
Permalink | No CommentsI originally wrote this piece for MediaShower.com, for use on the late, great comedy site ZuG.com. Text and images published here with permission.
I’m not what you’d call a “morning person.” Hell, I’m barely a “noon person.” I tolerate the A.M. hours in much the same way Superman would endure a kryptonite G-string — with lots of fidgeting and sweating and complaining about the enormous pain in the ass it’s causing.
Still, there are days when I have to wake up before the crack of twelve. My boss claims there are five such days in every week, which sounds like an awful lot. Of course, he also claims there’s no such thing as “Pantsless Fridays,” so I take everything he says with a grain of salt. And an Ambien.
The author, in his usual pre-noon stupor.
But I do occasionally have to “rise and whine” in the early morning, so I need something of a pick-me-up. A start-of-the-day boost to get me up and at ’em. Or up and near ’em. Frankly, I’d settle for semi-conscious and not drooling on ’em. I’m taking baby steps here.
Clearly, I needed some help in getting myself out of the sack and raring to go. So I turned to the raringest folks I know over at Amazon to stock up on a variety of stimulating products and wakeful aids. Read on to see my actual Amazon reviews of all the products tested — and to find out what happens when you deny your body the sleep it so desperately needs at ten thirty in the morning.
Don’t try this at home, kids. I’m a professional.
My Amazon Review:
I bought this alarm because the reviews said it was LOUD. I’m perfectly capable of sleeping through three hours of beeping or NPR — or Bavarian honking yak polkas, for that matter — so I need an alarm that turns the wakey decibels up to eleven.
This one certainly didn’t disappoint, blasting out enough noise yesterday morning to blow me halfway across the room. When I came to my senses and realized I hadn’t been moved in my sleep to a 747 jet turbine convention, I set about turning the monstrous thing off.
“I’m awake! My sphincter is somewhere in the closet, but dammit, I’m awake!”
Sadly, I had neglected to read the instructions the night before. So I didn’t know how. And with all the racket, I couldn’t figure it out, either.
For three hours, the alarm went off like an over-amped sonic lighthouse. The neighbors upstairs complained. The neighbors downstairs complained. Ditto the neighbors down the street. Some guy from the next town over got into his car, drove over and told me to keep it quiet already. Finally, mercifully, I fiddled the alarm into silence.
Until this morning, when it went off again. At least, I assume it did, because I’m getting all sorts of nasty emails and notes shoved under my door. But since yesterday, I can’t hear a thing. So I slept til noon, can’t use the alarm any more, and I’m packing it up and shipping it back. I just hope the battery runs out before I get it to the post office. Those postal workers are skittish enough, as it is.
My Amazon Review:
Often I’ll wake up groggy, and simply fade back into blissful sleep. So I bought these smelling salts to keep on the nightstand. One whiff of one of these babies, I figured, and I’ll be wide-eyed and sinus-cleared, ready for whatever the day throws at me.
In that sense, the packets work great. Waft one under your nose and you’ll forget all about sleeping. Or smelling. Or what your name and address are, most likely. They should call these things “amnesia inhalants”; one tiny snootful, and your whole world is awake in a funky fog.
Oh, one sniff was probably enough. But where’s the fun in that?
The only downside is, the smell tends to linger. With the pack on the nightstand, my entire bedroom smells like ammonia. For the last three nights, I’ve dreamt of nothing but industrial solvents and cleaning old urinals. Which is precisely the sort of thing I’m going to sleep to _forget_. Calgon, take this ammonia away!
My Amazon Review:
I’ve always heard good things about these 5-hour energy pills, and extra-strength is always better, so I bought some to help shake the cobwebs after waking up early.
I popped the cap on one, slugged it down, and… OHMYGOD I CAN TOTALLY FEEL THE BLOOD IN MY FINGERS, ONLY IS IT ME FEELING THE BLOOD OR THE BLOOD FEELING ME? OH WOW THAT’S DEEP, IF ALL THE PENS WOULD STOP VIBRATING OFF THE DESK I WOULD TOTALLY WRITE THAT DOWN.
WAS THAT ROD SERLING I JUST SAW? WAIT, NO. JUST A PAPER CLIP. BUT THAT PAPER CLIP TOTALLY LOOKED LIKE ROD SERLING FOR A SECOND. FROM MY ANGLE. AND WITH THE SEIZING, IT WAS THE SPITTING IMAGE, I SWEAR. ROD SERLING OR ROSIE O’DONNELL, ONE OR THE OTHER. YOU COULD LOOK IT UP.
DOES ANYBODY TASTE PURPLE? IT TASTES LIKE PURPLE IN HERE ALL OF A SUDDEN. ROD, PURPLE? NO? MAYBE JUST ME, THEN.
MAN, I SURE CAN’T WAIT UNTIL THIS ENERGY DRINK KICKS IN. YOWZA.
My Amazon Review:
My wife gets up before I do, so I made her a deal. Every morning I need to get up early, she tosses one of these packs into bed with me before she leaves the house. The idea being that the cold would instantly freeze me into my senses.
Instead, it’s turned into a battle of wills. These packs are good for maybe fifteen minutes of frigid cold. I know that if I just suck it up and wait, it’ll warm up and I can go back to uninterrupted sleep. So far, the wildcard has been placement — if she slaps it on my back or legs, I’ve got a fighting chance. If she goes for the feet or stuffs it down my boxers, then I hop out of bed immediately. And walk funny down the hallway to the bathroom to assess the damage. Mission accomplished.
(I offered to repay the “favor” somehow in our deal. Oddly, she said that ice-bombing my snoring carcass at the crack of dawn was its own reward. Now I’m just worried that I can’t get her to *stop*.)
Me, after my wake-up helpers, at 8am this morning. I’m a whole new man!
Me, at 8:02am. Somebody kick me when it’s time for lunch.
Join in on the prank! Click the links to see each real-life Amazon review, then mark them as “helpful” so they rise to the top of the list on Amazon. Or click here to read and rate the entire library of Zolton reviews!
Permalink | No CommentsI originally wrote this piece for MediaShower.com, for use on the late, great comedy site ZuG.com. Text and images published here with permission.
Here in the U.S., we’ve just had an election. A national election. Pretty big one, evidently. Maybe you heard something about it.
Here’s what I know about the election results. Apparently, fifty million people and change cast their votes for one guy, and they’re giddy today. It’s all blowjobs and bubble gum in that camp.
Meanwhile, another fifty million people and change voted for a different guy, and those people are sad today. Down in the dumps. On a fast train to Frown Town.
So what does all this mean? I’ll tell you. It means a lot of people are going to be drinking a LOT of alcohol soon. And in this country, what do we drink to celebrate, or cry into in anguish?
That’s right. Beer.
In honor of the coming surge in brewski sales, I took to Facebook to hit up a few of the nation’s brewers of adult barley-based beverages. Read on for my questions — and my actual posts on the companies’ Facebook walls.
It doesn’t matter if you voted with your head this election cycle, or with your heart, or with some other body part. A nation divided is rejoined at the liver. Bottoms up!
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Last week, Zolton put a ‘skurr’ into Trolli, Wonka, Brach’s and Skittles. Want to join in the prank? Click the links to see each real-life Facebook post, and comment or ‘Like’ them to generate more buzz. Or visit Zolton’s own Facebook page!
Permalink | No CommentsI originally wrote this piece for MediaShower.com, for use on the late, great comedy site ZuG.com. Text and images published here with permission.
Mrs. Zolton and I were slogging through yet another holiday season — trudging through sidewalk slush, battling the hordes of berserker shoppers, resisting the urge to hang ourselves with boughs of holly at our office Christmas parties.
Then my wife threw me an ice-crusted curveball: “Why don’t we have a fondue party? They’re all the retro kitsch rage these days.”
Well, I didn’t understand most of those words, but I did latch on to “we” and “party,” and that’s all I needed to hear. A few of our closest chums, some runny Velveeta, several cases of booze and writing our favorite Christmas carols in the snow — that’d stuff the partridge up the old pear tree, all right.
Seriously, who WOULDN’T want to be at this groovy party? Or to sport a haircut that hasn’t been in style since the Ford administration?
Just one problem: we don’t own a fondue set. And when the missus wanted to go out and buy some ritzy expensive contraption, I nipped it in the chestnuts. We’re melting cheese here, not building a nuclear reactor. This isn’t brain surgery. It’s not even hair transplant surgery, for the love of Blitzen.
If we’re going to make fondue, I told her, we’re doing it my way: on the cheap, outside the box, and without reading any pesky instruction manuals or safety guides. Also, with a little help from Amazon. So ho-ho-who’s hungry for cheese?
My Amazon Review:
I’ve used one of these hair dryers and it felt like it was melting the scalp off my skull, so I figured it would make quick work of cheese. I dropped a block of aged cheddar onto a plate and blasted it, point-blank.
Ten minutes in, and nothing happened. Twenty minutes, still no melting. An aroma I imagine to be something like the Jock Strap from the Black Lagoon made its way around the kitchen, but the cheddar wasn’t budging. After half an hour, I gave up. Or passed out from the fumes; the details are still sort of fuzzy.
Oh, admit it. If I gave YOU those big googly eyes, you’d melt in a heartbeat.
But at the end of the day, all I had was warm cheese, a tired arm and a lingering funk that could drop a reindeer at forty paces. And now every time I dry my hair, I have flashbacks of swampy underpants. Not cool.
My Amazon Review:
The reviews say this stuff melts ice better than anything out there, and it’s non-toxic and pet-friendly to boot. Cheese is a heck of a lot softer than ice, so it should work even better for fondue, right? I had a whole wheel of Swiss to get through, so I bought two bottles, just to be safe.
I started with a light sprinkle on top of the cheese, and waited for the melt. And waited. And waited. Nothing — the cheese just sat there. So I poured on some more, until the whole wheel was covered in a pile of little blue pellets. Still nada; the cheese didn’t even break a sweat. Eventually, I dumped both bottles over the cheese, and pressed the pellets into the wheel as deep as I could. I waited for hours, but it just never melted, even a drop.
On the bright side, all those little blue bits stuck in the yellow wheel were sort of pretty. So I jabbed a hook through the top and we got a new Christmas tree ornament out of it. And if the dog ever manages to jump up and tear it down, at least we know it’ll be gentle on her paws. That’s something, I guess.
My Amazon Review:
It’s billed as a “beauty” product, but this little gem does have the capability to melt cheese — albeit veeeeeery slowly. I actually fell asleep on top of it while cooking up a batch of Gruyere, and ended up with cheese in my ear. Which is clearly not the face hole where I’d intended to put it.
Wait, is that… is that… hair gel?
That said, this product can certainly be used as an emergency fondue pot in a pinch. But if you also use an actual wax warmer, I’d suggest buying a second and keeping them separate. Ours disappeared with my wife into the bathroom last week, and now everything we melt tastes like it’s made by Crayola.
My Amazon Review:
If a machine can blast enough hot air to pop kernels of corn, then surely it can liquefy some soft cheese, right?
Right. With two rather important caveats. One, if you use the popper to make fondue, you’ll probably want to consider never using it again. For anything, ever. After one block of cheese, the inside of the popper looks like a La Brea tar pit. If you got your finger stuck in that goo trying to clean it, it might be archaeologists five million years from now who find your remains.
And two: being a popper, this device doesn’t just heat your cheese. It also periodically shoots little bits of it out the top and toward whatever happens to be in front. Which, if you’re curious like me and want to know if it’s working, could be your face. And a blast of searing hot Jarlsberg up the nose is not as refreshing or delicious as you might imagine. Trust me on this one.
The author, after another exhilarating session of “Pop Goes the Cheesel.”
You can help with this prank! Click the links above to see each real-life Amazon review, then mark them as “helpful” so they rise to the top of the list on Amazon!
Permalink | No CommentsI originally wrote this piece for MediaShower.com, for use on the late, great comedy site ZuG.com. Text and images published here with permission.
‘Tis the holiday season, which means spending quality time with family. Where “quality time”, apparently, means trading presents with a bunch of red-sweatered weirdos you only see once a year, because your great-great-aunt once got busy with their grandfather’s cousin twice removed, and now you’re related.
Of course, you don’t want to go out shopping for these gifts; who has the time for that? You save your quality mall-walking energy on the people who are really important to you — significant others, siblings, parents, kids, dogwalkers, bartenders and the cute coed across the street who never closes the curtains.
Extended family? Schmextended schmamily.
Those people get the unwanted ugly orphans of Christmas presents: useless crap from mail order catalogs. Hey, if you wanted thought put into your gift, you should’ve been my sister. Tough genetics, Ginny Sue.
During my annual schlock-shopping spree this week, I found I had some questions about the gaudy sweatshop-produced doodads I was buying for my loved ones. Luckily, the big mail order companies are all on Facebook now. Ho-ho-how convenient.
Read on for my mail order queries — and my actual posts on the companies’ Facebook walls. Maybe you’ll find a present for Cousin Clete or your Great Aunt Petunia’s kid with the lazy eye whose name you can never remember.
Or maybe it’ll inspire you to fake a bout of the bubonic plague and stay at home for the holidays. Then you can rummage through the catalogs, and buy a bunch of kitschy junk for yourself. Isn’t that what the holidays are all about, really?
Last week, Zolton worked up a sweat with UnderArmour, Champion, Russell and Speedo. Want to join in the prank? Click the links to see each real-life Facebook post, and comment or ‘Like’ them to generate more buzz. Or visit Zolton’s own Facebook page!
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