RadioFreePirate

Not long ago, on a road trip with my partner, I broached the subject of my nascent plans for our future.  To ensure our stability, I would turn our bank holdings into gold, protecting us from such events as a stock market crash or wave of avian flu. 

Partner was concerned on several counts, among them concern for my sanity, distress at my lack of trust in the economy, and the overwhelming concern that I would forget where I’d hidden the money.  I wasn’t convinced - would my blissful dreams of a gold stockpile in the attic (I picture it as kruggerands, despite not being entirely sure what those are) be so easily forgotten?

 then last night, in an attempt to learn the Irish accent for a production, we watched “Michael Collins,” a rather slow and one-sided movie about the revolutionary leader and nominal “Minister of Finance” in the early Irish Parliament.  This morning I looked up his entry on Wikipedia to see what Neil Jordan had left out (plenty) and came across this sidenote:

“Such was Collins’ reputation that even Lenin heard about his spectacular national loan, and sent a representative to Dublin to borrow some money from the Irish Republic to help fund the Russian Republic, offering some of the Russian Crown Jewels as collateral. (The jewels remained in a Dublin safe, forgotten by all sides, until the 1930s, when they were found by chance.)”

let us state for the record, my friend, that: YOU WERE RIGHT, I WAS WRONG.  If a struggling new republic can just forget about the crown jewels, I don’t have much hope for our nest egg.

 Perhaps some bills in a sock?

And you just don’t know who to ask.

DO AWAY with the workaday woes of shiatsu answerlessness. STRAIGHTEN UP and FLY RIGHT.

Visit the Zen Shiatsu Chicago Weblog.

Or the Zen Shiatsu Chicago Website.

The fact that I purchased the Venus Vibrance, despite the fact that I only shave when I play a character with a different aesthetic bent than my own, may owe something to the power of (cough, cough) design. The fact that it is quickly becoming a huge-selling item for Gillette may have something to do, instead, with the power of shame.”With the push of a button, turn on Soothing Vibrations ™ for a whole new shaving experience.  You’ll feel so pampered.”  I’ll say! A soak in the tub with the Vibrance, and you’ll feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor - but the experience has little to do with shaving.  The first powered razor for women is as pink as Barbie’s townhouse in Times Square, and nearly as function-free and condescendingly marketed.  Both its packaging and the website emphasize the simplicity of its battery operation (guess what? you unscrew the handle and pop out the battery), which gives an eloquent clue to the assumptions the designers have made about women.  And in the final analysis, does one really need a razor that is both battery powered AND designed to use when wet? 

When I came across this item at the store, I laughed out loud - imagining a crowd of men in suits around a conference table, trying not to chuckle as they promise the Vibrance will sell like hotcakes due to “discerning female buyers.”  In my neighborhood, I have two adult store options - neither of which are particularly welcoming to female clients, or for that matter particularly clean. While I wouldn’t say I’ve felt myself to be in personal danger, I wouldn’t go alone at night.  Add in the fact that many women would be as embarrassed to have their vibrator found by a visitor or child as they would be to be spotted at an adult store, and you begin to see the brilliance of this product and the “ball shape at the end of the razor (which) allows a stable, extended reach, even into the most difficult areas.”

I don’t mind so much that the product looks like a razor - much like a lipstick pipe, it gets you across state lines and avoids embarrassment at the airport.  But it seems a shame that a product like this can only be sold at K-Mart as a cosmetic tool.  I find myself longing for a time when feel-good products can be sold in the open, companies like Hitachi (producer of that grand-daddy of vibes, the Magic Wand) and Gillette can come clean, and I don’t have to worry about razor burn.