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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.
Mother Nature has been one scary momma lately. You can barely swing a dead meteorologist without hitting some sort of earthquake, twister, tsunami, flood or typhoon on the map. What’s next, hailstones the size of Kardashian implants? Krakatoa ripping us all a new volcanic lava-hole? Plagues of locusts and killer bees and whatever the hell species the Philly Phanatic belongs to?
It’s enough to scare the waterspout right out of you. Frankly, most days I’m afraid to even look outside.
Just like the weatherman said: partly sunny, with a chance of “AAAAAHHHHHH!! AAAAAAAHH!! YAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!”
But if a natural disaster is coming — and believe me, it’s coming — then the least you can do is be prepared. Once the megastorm/meteor/iceberg/Ent invasion hits, the four basic necessities will be hard to come by: Food. Shelter. Clothing. Twitter.
But you can be prepared for the next weather emergency. Our old friend Amazon has all the survival supplies you need; read my actual Amazon product reviews below to make sure you’re not left out in the cold.
Or the lava, or the swarms of insects. You might want to invest in some galoshes, just in case.
My Amazon Review:
If there’s a food that can withstand any weather emergency, it’s the almighty Twinkie. They’re the perfect survival staple: Twinkies are waterproof, fire retardant, unfreezable and approximately as lava-resistant as you are. They float, have a half-life longer than carbon-14, the filling repels insects when rubbed on the skin, and these are individually wrapped, so if a tornado carries them miles away, you can still track them down and enjoy a delicious post-apocalyptic snack.
In fact, their tastiness is the only downside. I bought a week’s supply, four boxes to stash away in case of emergency. They lasted about six hours. I think I may have inhaled one of the wrappers.
Maybe I should switch to Hostess Ho-Ho’s. Just to be safe.
My Amazon Review:
One of the most important things in a weather emergency is finding shelter from the elements. This lean-to looked sturdy enough to handle moderate wind and rain, and the description said it’s “quality wood construction” and is “compatible with larger equipment and animals”. You could store giraffes or rhinos or Eiffel Towers in it, by the sound of things. That’s plenty good to suit my survival needs.
Or so I thought. It turns out this so-called “big” lean-to is actually a model, or a toy or something. Toying with my emotions is what it is! Here I wanted a place to keep myself and whatever survives the hurricane or blizzard or portal to Hades safe and protected. But this thing’s only a foot tall — I guess that “larger equipment and animals” means hamsters and exercise wheels, because that’s all that’s fitting inside this dinky little “BIG” structure.
Come to think of it, Mr. Nibbles would get awfully scared all alone in his cage. And he’ll need that wheel to bulk up, so he can survive the Mad Max-ian dystopic future we’ll no doubt find ourselves in.
Fine. The lean-to can stay. At least ONE of us will have three walls and a plywood roof over our head.
My Amazon Review:
When all the sheep have been swept away or encased in rogue glaciers, what will be left to make our clothes from? Dogs, that’s what. Man’s best friend will stick close by our side through the emergency — begging for Snausages, most likely — and will happily provide raw material for our shirts, hats and scarves in the aftermath. Because they won’t know any better.
I bought this book to learn all about fashioning attractive outerwear from the mutt fuzz I’ve long taken for granted, or picked off my popcorn that falls in the floor. I immediately set out to craft a new knit cap from the hair of my own dog. It’s about time she earned her keep around here.
Mmmmm, it feels like cashmere. Sure, it SMELLS like Alpo and rolled-in poodle plop. But mmmmmmm… caaaaaaashmere.
Unfortunately, it didn’t go so well. I was a little over-eager and skipped a few chapters, so I missed a fairly important point: the hair you use for your project CANNOT STILL BE CONNECTED TO THE DOG when you start knitting. The fur is hard enough to keep on the needles, without all the squirming and howling going on. And if someone comes by to walk the dog or play fetch, then you might as well forget it. You’ll never keep your stitching straight while the mutt’s dragging you through the park after a tennis ball.
Trust me. My new “cap” looks like a drawn and quartered doily. It’s back to stitch one for me.
My Amazon Review:
Electricity is a fickle beast, and should a storm or fire or horde of rabid squirrels knock out the power, I want to be sure to have a backup — so I can tell everyone on the internets about it. After all, if a disaster strikes and nobody tweets it, did it really happen? Google Search says, “NO.”
So I ordered this backup generator, which says it can produce 200 kilo-Volts. That seemed like plenty to me, but I think I’m doing something wrong here somehow. First of all, I had to plug it into the wall. I thought the whole point of the generator was to not NEED the socket. But I figured maybe it had to charge up. Fair enough.
I left it plugged in for a couple of hours, and tried to charge my laptop with it. But there was nowhere to plug in the cable; just this big metal globe. And when I got close to that, sparks shot across at me and gave me a nasty jolt.
On the other hand, the laptop flickered on when it happened. I guess that’s just how it works. So now I’ve been sitting here next to the generator for the last three hours, typing out this review and touching a finger to the globe when the computer runs out of juice. It’s working, I guess, but I’m getting a little bit shellshocked. Or shockshelled. Something. And I think my hair is stuck permanently in the “up” position.
Photographic re-enactment of actual events. I tried taking a picture of myself, but when I touched the camera, it asploded.
If this is what it takes to be prepared for an emergency, then I give up. Bring on the comets and plagues of frogs already. I’ll be hiding under the covers.
What’s that, a cataclysm? Sorry, it’s my naptime. Could you come back in maybe a few dozen years? Thanxyerapeach.
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.
It’s been a tough year so far. But finally, the freezing and the blizzards and dual pressures of Valentine’s and Tax Day are behind us. I for one am ready to relax.
Problem is, I’ve forgotten how.
I’ve been puckered up so tight for so long, I’m afraid my puckerer may have frozen that way. So I logged into my old friend Amazon to find some products that could bring me back to a nice peaceful — and unpuckered — calm. And since spending too much money angries up the blood like shoveling out a Nor’easter or a visit from the tax auditor, I made sure to find my inner peace at a bargain price.
Pull up a Zen garden and take a leisurely stroll through my actual Amazon reviews of the products I found, and you can have a little taste of Nirvana, too. (It’s like cough syrup. Only peacier.) Namaste, my puckery peeps.
My Amazon Review:
When my wife goes to a spa to relax, she always gets some kind of oatmeal facial scrub treatment. I don’t know much about pampering, but I’m intimately familiar with a wide variety of hot breakfast cereals. If oatmeal on the face is relaxing, then I’d sure give it a try.
I heated several packets of the oatmeal in the microwave, per the cooking instructions, added a little milk and layered it onto my face. I’m not sure what’s supposed to happen next in a “professional” treatment, but in my bathroom, a lot of it just glooped off into the sink. The rest felt … well, like oatmeal on my face. Sticky. Warm. Lumpy, in a way that was less “relaxing” and more “get it off my face-y.”
This is about as relaxing as doing a bukkake flick with the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man. And — hey, is that a cranberry?
The oatmeal did smell nice, and made me sort of hungry, but I don’t think I relieved any stress by putting it on my face instead of IN my face. Maybe next time I’ll try wearing it with eggs over easy, or a rasher of bacon. Bacon makes *everything* peaceful.
My Amazon Review:
Those vibrating chairs and pillows and personal massage doohickeys look pretty inviting — but they’re always so expensive. I figured it’s the wiggling that does all of the work, so why not use a vibrating toothbrush to gently caress out my cares? Oral-B, take me away!
The only downside is that the head on this brush is rather small, so it takes quite a bit of rubbing on my neck, temples or back to have any real impact. And by the time I’ve worked out a big knot between my shoulder blades, say, I’ve created an even bigger one from holding the toothbrush in one place for so long.
Like Icarus before me, I eventually flew too close to the sun.
If this came with some sort of clamp, or maybe a person to hold the brush for you, then it would be a nice massage tool for people. In the meantime, it’s the perfect size to provide tension relief to my pet hamster. Mr. Nippers really seems to like our massage sessions. And his wheel running has been much looser and easy-going since we started. Nice product!
My Amazon Review:
Aromatherapy is a huge deal these days; they say the right fragrance can put you into a deeply relaxed state of mind. I chose this one because it sounded very soothing — and Sandalwood and Ginger are two of my all-time favorite stripper names. And those gals always smell good. It’s a win-win!
Evidently, these are supposed to be used with some sort of diffuser reeds or burned with a candle or something. That seemed pretty complicated and expensive, so I didn’t bother with any of that. I just carried a couple of bottles with me, and when I needed a quick calming jolt, I’d pop the caps off and double-barrel a big *sniiiiiiff* of the fragrance, up close and personal.
Well hello, girls. It’s so good to smell you again.
Would I recommend this method? Probably not — I haven’t been able to smell or taste anything but ginger-tinged wood for the last three weeks. The experience is probably a touch less “in your face” with the candle delivery system, or the diffuser reeds. Unless you’re using the reeds as chopsticks, or shoving them up your nose like you have a sword-swallowing honker. Which I also wouldn’t recommend.
So my experience is maybe less “relaxing,” and more “intensely overwhelming.” But hey — it sure is cheap. I’ve got two bottles of cinnamon fragrance on the way now. That ought to spice things up a few hundred notches.
My Amazon Review:
I’ve heard that the sound of gently-falling water can be very soothing and this seemed like an attractive product, so I gave it a shot.
Unfortunately, the proverbial “some assembly” is required for this contraption. Which would be fine if I were already calm and collected — but with all the nervous tics and twitches, it was nearly impossible. I dumped those little rocks on the floor a dozen times before I finally got everything stacked up and assembled. It was like playing “fifty-two pickup” — only with stones, and I was the one tricking myself. Very frustrating.
And when I finally did get the fountain set up, I found the biggest shocker of all: you have to provide your own water! It’s a waterfall, sold WITHOUT WATER! Well, that was too much for me. “Water not included” was the last straw, and I tore the thing to pieces right there. It’s all over the living room now, like some deconstructed Zen garden. A SERIOUSLY deconstructed Zen garden.
On the bright side, I do feel a little better now. I just needed to let off some steam, I guess. So I can’t really recommend this as a fountain — but as a therapeutic punching bag, it’s A-plus-plus! Would destroy in a tantrum again!
The author, “relaxing” in more traditional fashion while taking a break from product testing.
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.
You would think my dog would be grateful. I rescued her from the local pound, after all, and gave her a good home. She gets a warm blanket to sleep on, three square kibbles a day, and treats that would make the ritziest French poodle drop a jewel-encrusted turd in envy. I barely even beat her, if there’s anyone around who might be videotaping it. You’d think that would count for something with the stupid flea bag.
You would be wrong.
Instead, little miss “Princess Paws” is constantly out to get me. Last week’s “tasty food” is this week’s “inedible garbage,” while this week’s actual garbage is evidently a gourmet treat. She pees when I’m sleeping, sleeps when I’m ready to walk, and can even pee while sleepwalking, which covers all the bases without requiring my involvement at all.
The “Princess,” in repose. And probably a puddle of her own urine.
I can’t even beat her with bribery. She’ll wag for twelve seconds — or less — over a new toy, then banish it to the forgotten pile of chewable dreck, never to be gnawed on again. I have more drool-spattered rawhide and rubber strewn around my place than a spaghetti Western oral fetish club.
Still, I try. I cling to the vain hope that somewhere out there, the perfect pooch paraphernalia exists. And if it does, I figure it’s probably sold on Amazon. Have a look below for my latest (failed) attempts to mollify the mutt, and for my real live Amazon reviews of the products I bought to tempt her. If they only sold dogs on Amazon, I wouldn’t have this problem in the first place. But they don’t.
They do sell Vietnamese cookbooks, though. Someday, you mangy little cur. Some. Day.
My Amazon Review:
I had high hopes for this toy. With all the interesting shapes and colors and bouncy fun, I thought the dog would be all over it. Instead, she was “over it” before I even got it out of the package. There’s no accounting for dog snobs.
I tried to sweeten the deal by putting treats and food inside the ball, hoping she’d bat it around for a while trying to get them out. No such luck — she found it on the floor, took one swift lick around the middle to slurp all the morsels, and promptly kicked it under a couch. I keep bringing it back out to play with, but she has zero interest in the thing.
Or so I thought. This morning, I found it by the front door. The dog somehow got hold of my keys and jammed them inside — and now I can’t get them out. I tried pulling it, stretching it, bending it — even licking all around the inside — but I’ve got nothing. Except a “sick day” taken at work because I can’t leave the house, and breath that smells like metal and Alpo. I feel like I just French-kissed K-9. Not so nice.
Seriously, how do you do that without opposable thumbs? Does the dog have David Blaine on fricking speed-dial?
My Amazon Review:
I bought a bag of these biscuits, thinking I could coax the mutt into good behavior through “positive reinforcement.” Though the idea sort of fizzles when the dog is too finicky to eat the stupid things. She gave the tiniest of disinterested exploratory sniffs, then scrunched her furry little schnozz like I was offering her a handful of barf-encrusted crap.
(Which, based on her previous dietary choices, she would actually eat. Tasty baked tidbit? No, thanks; I’m trying to keep my greyhoundish figure. But the poop du jour in half-digested BLEEEH-rnaise sauce? Mmmm-mmmm! Bon appeturd!)
I tried to entice her, but she wasn’t having it. I even tried a little nibble myself, to prove I wasn’t trying to poison her. (Yet.)
And actually, the biscuit was pretty good. It’s got a nice crunch, with a taste somewhere between a heavy water cracker and reconstituted horse meal. But pretty light on the “horse meal” part. All in all, not bad. I’d give it about a four on the people-food scale — somewhere between a stale bag of Funyuns and a plain rice cake eaten off a sweaty Clydesdale’s back. I finished the first one and had another. Pretty soon I’d gone through half the bag.
Oh, don’t judge me. What do you think your precious “Chicken” McNuggets are made from?
So this was a complete waste for the dog. But I found a new snack for TV nights. Now if I’m out of popcorn, I set out a bowl of biscuits and munch away. They’re not gourmet. But they’re filling, and I’m getting my recommended daily allowance of hoof meat all in one sitting. That’s a winner.
My Amazon Review:
This seemed like a good way to save what’s left of my poor carpet. Instead of the dog dive-whizzing the rugs, she could have a nice comfy patch of “grass” to water. I laid the mat out and waited for magic to happen.
Magic happened, all right. All over the carpet. I cleaned it up and tried again. This time, I set the dog ONTO the mat. As if on cue, she immediately lifted her leg.
And peed a tight stream three feet away, onto the coffee table. I wiped that down, and gave it another go. “Come on, girl, get it right!”
She got it right, all right. Diddled right of the pad, and right onto my shoe. By now, I was losing my cool. I tried to reason with her: “Look, you, I know this thing works — it’s ‘SEEN ON TV’!!”
She peed again. ON THE TV.
I don’t know how this thing is supposed to work, but I finally figured out how to keep the dog from soiling the carpets — I just bought eighty-two more of these things, and I’ll cover every surface in the house with them. If she won’t pee on them, she won’t pee at all. Score one for me!
My Amazon Review:
All dogs like balls. Whether chasing, chewing or licking — and whether their own or someone else’s — what dog can say no to a nice game of fetch with a happy fun rubber ball?
*MY* dog. That’s what.
Try as I might, I couldn’t get her interested in this product. And I tried everything. I rolled it to her. I rolled it away from her. I dangled it over her head, buried it in her food and tied it to the back end of that Schnauzer across the street she likes to trade sniffs with.
Nothing. It’s like her ball-chomping gene has been removed or something.
Not her “temperamental” gene, though. Last night, I was trying again to get her interested, waving the ball in front her like a manic rubber hummingbird. She finally had enough, batted the ball hard out of my hand, and it hit me right in the mouth. And stuck there. It took me half an hour to dislodge it from my jaw, and another before I could close it properly.
Hey, is there something stuck between my teeth?
So I’m giving up on this toy. Next time I try to get her to show interest in something, it’ll be a tuna fish sandwich on rye. I look forward to that.
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.
April Fool’s Day is just around the corner. So this is prime time to ready all the gags, goofs, stunts, pranks, fools, psyches and gotchas that you’ve been saving up all year. But as we prepare to unleash our deluge of mayhem on coworkers, friends and unfortunate bystanders, there’s one important detail too often overlooked:
Quality control.
The April Fools prank that doesn’t go off isn’t really a prank, now, is it? A joy buzzer with no buzz is no joy at all. If you penny in an empty room, who have you trapped? If a whoopie cushion goes off in a forest, does anyone cringe?
To avoid these embarrassing false starts and faux pas, I decided to have a dry run this year — a practice round of pranking, to make sure my gags were up to snuff. I just needed an unsuspecting rube to try them out on — some gullible sap who’d fall for every trick in the book, and was in no position to divorce me, fire me, disown me, arrest me or pound me into a thin bloody paste. The answer was obvious:
Me.
Thanks to a terrible short-term memory, questionable IQ and regular blackouts, I was the perfect patsy to test my battery of pranks on. So I headed over to Amazon, loaded up on supplies and set about fooling the bejeesus out of myself. Check out my practice-run prankstravaganza — including my real Amazon reviews of all the products — below.
And remember this April Fool’s Day — if you’re not pranking properly, then the only one you’re really pranking is yourself.
My Amazon Review:
I’ve heard of putting bubble wrap under a toilet seat to make a noise when someone sits down, but that seemed pretty mild. I wanted more bang for my pranking buck.
Like everything else in the world, pranks are improved by the addition of gunpowder. So I carefully arranged a full set of these caps under the seat in my john, and waited for nature’s call to override my aversion to loud explosions near my tuckus.
Sure enough, I woke up with an urge in the middle of the night and shuffled in for a ‘midnight sit’. The moment cheek touched porcelain, the caps fired off like a posse of sewer bandits shooting their way out of a bidet. And I found myself hanging upside down and pantsless from a towel rack across the room, with powder burns all over my toilet seat. And my _other_ seat.
I’d call that ‘Super Bang’ for my buck, all right. Two cheeks up!
My Amazon Review:
I’ve always had a soft spot for the ‘shoe polish on the binoculars eyepiece’ gag. Let someone look through, and they get the raccoon mask look for a day — hilarious!
But who uses binoculars any more? Bird watchers and perverts, that’s who. And I gave up ornithology after my last snipe hunt, so I needed a different target for applying polish.
The answer came to me in a flash — the cell phone. So I applied a liberal coat of the black stuff to the face of my cell phone, and waited for the next call to come in. When it did, I absent-mindedly lifted the phone to my cheek as usual, and thought nothing more about it. Until people started asking me why I was growing one really dark mutton chop, or how I managed to live with a huge rectangular hole in my face.
I’ve got something where, now? Over here? Did I get it? It’s gone, right?
Unfortunately, this polish is *really* hard to get off. I worried that I was rubbing layers of skin off trying to scrub it away — so much so that I called 9-1-1 for help. Or tried to — but some jerkwad had glommed shoe polish all over the face of my phone, so I couldn’t see what I was dialing. I never did reach emergency services — but I apparently set a new personal best in Angry Birds while I was trying. So I’ve got that going.
My Amazon Review:
I unwrapped this dribble glass and mingled it in among the other glassware in my cabinet, figuring I’d grab it accidentally one day and give it a good road test. A few days passed and I completely forgot about it.
Until last Saturday, when my wife went to bring her mother over for dinner. I was supposed to pull out the roast and set the table, but first I decided on a quick brewski to calm my mother-in-law-jittered nerves. Naturally, that’s when the dribble glass made its way into play.
Of all the beer glasses, in all the towns, in all the world — you had to dribble out of mine.
My wife and her mom returned to find me covered chin-to-belt in spilled beer, with the dog lapping up a puddle of the stuff on the kitchen floor. It dripped on the plates I set out, on the table, on the roast, on dessert, and on my mother-in-law’s coat when I offered to take it. My *teetotaling* mother-in-law’s coat. She couldn’t have been more mortified.
So basically, I’d call the glass a rousing success. I’m buying a six-pack and having her over again for April Fool’s. Bottom’s up!
My Amazon Review:
A lot of these products _say_ they smell bad. But I had big reeking havoc to wreak on the big April day. I needed to know if this was the real deal. To test it, I used the direct approach: I took it to work one day, carried it to the bathroom at lunchtime, squirted it out onto my hands, and applied it cheek-to-cheek like aftershave.
Meh. It still smells better than Drakkar Noir.
I don’t know exactly what happened for the next ten minutes or so — the hallucinations about giant dancing septic tanks pretty much took care of that. When I regained my senses, I returned to my desk in a haze of concentrated unholy stench the likes of which hasn’t been witnessed since… I don’t know. Waterworld? Rebecca Black? The latest New Jersey Nets game?
The smell eventually subsided over the course of a few hours. That was three days ago. On the bad side, every meal I’ve had since then has tasted like a pack of burning cats simultaneously using the same litter box. And there’s no wine on the planet you can pair with that to make it palatable.
On the good side, no one in the office has dared come near my desk to bother me since then, for fear of entering the smelly fog. Downsides or not, that’s worth its weight in gold. So I’m not using this to prank anyone on April 1st — but I am ordering another dozen bottles to replace my Old Spice. Peace and smelly quiet — here I come.
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.
Saint Patrick’s Day is just around the rainbow, and this year I vowed to be prepared. Patrick is one of the world’s favorite Saints, after all — right behind Nicholas, Pauli Girl, and The New Orleans.
And what’s not to love about St. Patrick’s Day? The wearing of the green, the dancing of the jigs, the doing of the whatever the hell we’re supposed to be doing with the shamrocks, and the drinking — always with the drinking. My kind of people, the Irish. Two pints for breakfast, and it’s down the hatch from there.
I prefer “the wearing of the Guinness”. Although the lack of stripes makes me feel strange. And a little gassy.
But too many years, I’ve sat on the sidelines. I’d get busy or forget the calendar or all my lime-colored togs would be at the cleaners, and bam! Another St. Patrick’s Day missed.
BEER GONE?! ZOLTON ANGRY! ZOLTON SMASH!!
Well, greenless, overpinched and sober is no way to go through life. So this year, I decided to go shamrocks-to-the-wall and stocked up on all my St. Paddy’s Day supplies well in advance, thanks to the good folks at Amazon. Read on to see how my preparations went — and the actual Amazon reviews of all my St. Pat’s purchases. Zolton go Braugh!
My Amazon Review:
I bought this leper mask for a pre-St. Patty’s Day party, and wore it ready to yuk it up with dozens of others in similar costume. But this one is so realistic and detailed, I knew I’d be the talk of the party.
Which I was, but not for the reason I thought. Turns out I had confused ‘lepers’ with ‘leprechauns’ when picking out my getup. Lepers have nothing to do with the holiday — except mabe the hangover the next morning. And everyone at the party was staring at my hideous mask, gaping.
No matter. Like I always say: when life gives you lepers, you make leper ade.
I just explained that I was dressed as the shambling corpse of old zombie Saint Patrick himself, risen from the dead to make merry with the living. I lurched around the party mumbling, ‘Snaaaaaakes… snaaAAAAaaakes…’ for a while, then parked myself by the green punch bowl and had a wonderful time. Or so they tell me.
In short — great party, great costume. Would highly recommend!
My Amazon Review:
St. Paddy’s Day just isn’t the same without a wee tipple or three of the old witches’ brew. Sadly, I couldn’t find real Irish whiskey available for sale on Amazon. So I did the next best thing and bought these fine Irish mustards, made with the very hair of the dog I was looking for.
I’m Irish enough to know that fine whiskey from the old country should be messed with as little as possible. So when the condiments arrived, I filled a nice fresh highball glass with a few ice cubes, scooped in three fingers of wholegrain Irish whiskey mustard, and sipped it by a roaring fire.
Because no single image can capture the full majesty that is the Irish mustard sipping experience.
I can’t say this product was quite as ‘smooth’ as the other Irish whiskeys I’ve had. The color was rich and dark, and I definitely detected a hint of the familiar smoky peat. But most of the other characteristics I was looking for seemed masked — muted somehow by a very front-forward… how should I say it? “Mustardiness,” I think would be the technical term.
I probably wouldn’t recommend sipping this neat. Sadly, this vintage is probably best mixed — perhaps in a whiskey sour, or a mustard julep, or some sort of hot dog-flavored Irish coffee.
My Amazon Review:
Saint Patrick’s Day is all about the ‘green’, so I bought this book to tell me everything I needed to know about the Irish experience. Right off the bat, the subtitle seemed a little strange: ‘Gleaners, Scavengers and Dumpster Divers’? That sounded pretty harsh to me. I mean, sure, they did what they had to do to survive during the Potato Famine — but that was a long, long time ago. Cut the nation some slack already. And did they even _have_ dumpsters in the mid-1800s? Odd choice.
On top of that, the book didn’t tell me much that helped prepare for St. Patrick’s Day. It was just a bunch of essays about people foraging through trash and recycling bins and living off what other people throw away. There were no shamrocks or green beer or snake chasers at all. And certainly no pots o’ gold to be found.
On the good side, I used what I learned to dig through the dumpster behind my local party supply store, and found a veritable treasure trove of barely-damaged, somewhat-torn, possibly-spat-on and marginally-misspelled holiday goodies. This is going to be the best Santi Partickl’s party EVER!!!
My Amazon Review:
When I go all out, I go *ALL*. *OUT*. So I decided to dye my hair green for the holiday this year. Anyone can wear their colors on their sleeve — I can wear mine under a _tiara_. Only I don’t wear a tiara. But I should, because this hair dye move was HARDCORE ROCK STAR.
Unfortunately, I picked the first ‘green dye’ I found in the search, which was this one. Which happens to be for fabrics. And which my hair is not.
That wasn’t a big problem, because it says right in the description that it works on ‘all natural fibers’, which my hair *is*. So I squeezed it out onto my head and massaged it in deep — while I read the rest of the description, which includes the word ‘PERMANENT’. Ouch.
Wait, I’m sorry. That said PERMA-what, now?
The good news is that the dye works like a dream. I got even coating all over, great penetration down to the roots, and the color is as vibrant and rich as a Nicaraguan jungle. Also, those pesky gray hairs I’ve been noticing lately? No longer an issue.
Of course, the bad news is that I’m going to look like an Emerald City troll doll for the next six-to-eight weeks, until my hair grows out. That is, IF my hair grows out.
But no matter. Until then, *every* day is Saint Patrick’s Day, and I get to celebrate it all the way into May. Which is what I was really hoping for in the FIRST place.
My hair is setting, the beer is green, and the drinking goes on through the spring. Stay VERY thirsty, my friends.
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