The Consumer Category
We bring you the chic and unique, the best and most bizarre shopping offers both online and offline. We offer you tips on where to buy, and some of the less mainstream and crazy, individual and offbeat items on the internet. Anything that can be bought and sold can be featured here. And we love showcasing the best and worst art and design.
Condoms or no condoms, sex is great says Sex Professor
THE Daily Mail Reporter has news: “It’s official: Condoms DON’T make sex less enjoyable.”
No. It isn’t. The news is based on a survey carried out at the School of Public Health-Bloomington, Indiana University. The research was led by self-styled ‘sex professor’ Dr Debby Herbenick, who has “consulted for a range of corporations and organizations on issues related to study design, condoms…” She supports increased use of condoms.
Researchers reviewing an online questionnaire of the sex habits of men and women from 18-59, found participants consistently rated safe sex as ‘highly arousing and pleasurable’ – the same score as unprotected sex.
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Posted: 23rd, January 2013 | In: The Consumer | Comment
Comment is free? Guardian worker writes of executives lavish excess
THE Guardian is heading Down Under to Australia. What do the workers think of the idea? This letter appeared on the Guardian/Observer Weekend section:
”Afternoon Alan – I’m a member of Guardian staff, posting anonymously.
As you know, it’s a tough time for your journalists at the moment – especially for those of us way down the food chain: the production grunts, the desk-bound, the ones who actually produce the content.
We’re working harder and harder (because we love the papers), coping with dwindling resources and morale, we’re badly mismanaged, and trying to cope with the life-changing threat of compulsory redundancies – all a result of the company’s long-term financial illiteracy and lavish excess at the top.
So I just want to say thanks for the series of articles – three now, isn’t it? – about learning to play your Fazioli piano. They’re brilliantly timed, and I know they’ll lift spirits. We always wondered how you filled your days, how you spent your fortune. Now we know.”
Posted: 23rd, January 2013 | In: Money, The Consumer | Comment (1)
How to repair and mourn your ‘Dutch wife’ sex doll
“UNTIL about 30 years ago, the typical ‘Dutch Wife’ (love doll) sold at sex shops in Japan was of the inflatable type, and of shoddy quality that was easily subject to deflation at the slightest, er, prick.”
“When customers brought the dolls in for repairs, vendors would stick on hot patches, like on tire inner tubes,” [said Hideo Tsuchiya, president of Orient Kogyo K.K., a manufacturer of state-of-the-art love dolls].
Some of these buyers, however, had their own reasons for preferring rubber joy mates to real women. Some weren’t satisfied with going to brothels. Others, jilted by their mates, had become eternally suspicious of females….
Orient Kogyo also provides after-service. When and if the time comes for the dolls to part with their owner, the company will conduct a kuyo (Buddhist memorial service) for the doll, complete with floral offerings..
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Posted: 22nd, January 2013 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
Food faddists make quinoa a crop worth fighting over
THOSE in the know, eat quinoa. Foodies and health nuts call quinoa a superfood. Time reported:
He leans forward, face brightening: “In 1983, 100 lb. of quinoa sold for 25 bolivianos — the price a T-shirt. Now that sack goes for $100 [700 bolivianos]. That’s a lot of T-shirts.”
But the windfall could become a double-edged sword. In February, violence over prime quinoa-growing territory left dozens injured, and land conflict is spreading. “Sure, the price of quinoa is increasing,” says Carlos Nina, a local leader in Bolivia’s quinoa heartland, “but so are our problems.” Apart from increasing feuds over property rights, these include the collapse of the traditional relationship between llama herding and soil fertilization, with potentially disastrous consequences of quinoa’s “organic” status, and the ironic twist that the children of newly prosperous farmers no longer like eating quinoa, contributing to dietary problems.
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Posted: 22nd, January 2013 | In: The Consumer | Comment
An estate agency writes….
ESTATE agency of the week:
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Posted: 22nd, January 2013 | In: The Consumer | Comment (1)
Pigeons to be tinkered with so they defecate soap
THERE’S an experiment afoot in London which will attempt to turn pigeon poo into soap, which is obviously not weird or cruel at all.
In a video explaining the project, it is explained:
“Like other birds pigeons can be fun company but they are also messy,” adding: “The bird will be fed a specially-designed diet. The individuals behind the idea claim they are using synthetic biology to create the bacteria that will modify the metabolism of the birds.”
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Posted: 22nd, January 2013 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
Duane Michals was the Bogeyman
DUANE Michals was The Bogeyman back in 1973. As he said: “To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.”
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Posted: 21st, January 2013 | In: The Consumer | Comment
Man rants as Subway ‘footlong’ is an inch short
WE’VE all been needlessly pernickerty about things in our time, but one Subway customer really has gone the extra mile.
This chap, called Matt Corby, found himself apoplectic with rage when he visited a Subway for a bite to eat.
[insert ‘it’s his own stupid fault for going to a Subway comment’ here]
The source of his ire was that he strongly suspected that his sandwich was not a foot long, as advertised. So, instead of getting on with his life and scarfing down the slightly moist article, he got his tape measure out.
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Posted: 18th, January 2013 | In: Reviews, The Consumer | Comment
Irish grandpa steals from dead HMV when it refuses his gift voucher
TALK about kicking someone while they’re down! An old man shoplifted from HMV because the €40 gift voucher he had bought was not accepted by the shop on Dublin’s Henry Street. As HMV are in administration and all the staff are fearful of their jobs, and weighing up various sit-in protests over unpaid wages, things are remarkably bleak over there.
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Posted: 18th, January 2013 | In: Reviews, The Consumer | Comment
Say NEIGH to meat: Tesco beefburgers are just jelly-free Belgian dog treats
SAY NEIGH to meat. The Food Safety Authority of Ireland has fond horse meat in Tesco, Iceland, Aldi and Lidl beefburgers:
In Tesco Everyday Value Beef Burgers, horse meat accounted for approximately 29 per cent of the meat. The supermarket announced last night that it was removing all fresh and frozen burgers from sale immediately regardless if they had been found to contain horse meat.
Tim Smith, the group technical director of Tesco, said: “The presence of illegal meat in our products is extremely serious. Our customers have the right to expect that food they buy is produced to the highest standards.”
An investigation was carried out by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland. The Food Standards Agency, working with the Irish authorities, established that mainland Britain was part of the area affected.
More than a third (37 per cent) of the products tested in Ireland contained horse DNA, while the vast majority (85 per cent) also contained pig DNA.
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Posted: 17th, January 2013 | In: The Consumer | Comments (2)
Idiots move to ban people from nodding off in libraries
THUMBS DOWN and BOO to the burgers of Iowa City Public Libraries. Library director, Susan Craig, says she and her colleagues are moving towards a ban on sleeping in the reading rooms. Says she:
“People sleeping in the library disturb other people. It makes them uncomfortable, particularly if they are laying down on a couch. If there’s a 20-year-old college student with their head down on their textbook they need to be treated the same way as someone who is dressed in a way that someone may assume they’re homeless.”
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Posted: 17th, January 2013 | In: The Consumer | Comment (1)
Photographer snaps his own shadow (photos)
HOW did he do it? PoL Úbeda Hervàs has taken phots of his own shadow. How?
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Posted: 15th, January 2013 | In: The Consumer | Comment
Don’t laugh, but Coca Cola have made this video about obesity
THOSE scamps at Coca-Cola have decided to make a little film about obesity. Why are you laughing and snorting in derision? What’s that? Because Coke could well be responsible for a load of us being toothless and overweight? Ah, gotcha!
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Posted: 15th, January 2013 | In: The Consumer | Comment (1)
How the ‘Brazilian’ waxing J Sisters wiped out pubic lice
BAD news for pubic lice. You’re dying out. Bloomberg news says the remaining lice can blame bikini waxing.
More than 80 percent of college students in the U.S. remove all or some of their pubic hair – part of a trend that’s increasing in western countries. In Australia, Sydney’s main sexual health clinic hasn’t seen a woman with pubic lice since 2008 and male cases have fallen 80 percent from about 100 a decade ago…
“Pubic grooming has led to a severe depletion of crab louse populations,” said Ian F. Burgess, a medical entomologist with Insect Research & Development Ltd. in Cambridge, England. “Add to that other aspects of body hair depilation, and you can see an environmental disaster in the making for this species.”
Posted: 15th, January 2013 | In: Reviews, The Consumer | Comment
Sugar rationing in World War 2 – photos
SUGAR was in limited supply during WOrld War 2. Sugar was the first food the US rationed, in the spring of 1942.
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Posted: 14th, January 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, The Consumer | Comments (2)
Sugar: the latest godawful health scare
IT has to be the Mail reporting this, doesn’t it? But here it is, the shocking news that UK cereals contain more sugar than US cereals.
Breakfast cereals sold in Britain contain as much as 30 per cent more sugar than the same products in the United States.
Posted: 14th, January 2013 | In: Money, The Consumer | Comment
Pointless vegetarian foods: ham that tastes like chicken
POINTLESS vegetarian foods features the ham that tastes like chicken. Well, so they say. How can a vegetarian be certain that it does?
Posted: 14th, January 2013 | In: The Consumer | Comment (1)
Helping the Retarded to Know God
BOOK of the day: Helping the Retarded to Know God. Published 1969 by Contordia.
Add it to the list of terrible book titles.
Posted: 13th, January 2013 | In: Books, Flashback | Comments (2)
Coca-Cola defends Vitamin water: no-one said it was healthy
VITAMIN water. Yum. Sounds healthy. Vitamins. lovely vitamins:
“Coca-Cola is being sued by a non-profit public interest group, on the grounds that the company’s vitaminwater products make unwarranted health claims… lawyers for Coca-Cola are defending the lawsuit by asserting that ‘no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking vitaminwater was a healthy beverage.'”
Keep tacking the vitamins, unreasonable consumers…
Posted: 13th, January 2013 | In: The Consumer | Comment
