Not My Regular Breakfast

I get to spend a fair bit of my working life in hotels, or at least waking up in hotels, which means that I am no stranger to the experience of blearily taking the elevator down for breakfast. In some places you're faced with an extraordinary selection of breakfast delights, fresh fruit juice, friendly service, eggs made to order and all the hot tea or coffee they can force down your neck. But recently my travels have been more, shall we say, routine in nature. Lots of Hampton Inns, and very basic breakfast buffets.

When it comes to breakfast, the main thing is to eat enough that you're not starving by 10:00am. This means eating eggs. If I get eggs for breakfast I can pretty much choose when to get lunch (not whether to get lunch, mind you - missing meals is strictly for anorexics and fools) but no matter how much fruit, cereal, toast, pastry, etc. I cram down I know I'll be ready to chew off my own arm by 10 o'clock. That said, after I get done with eggs and whatever "allegedly meat based" accompaniment is in the adjacent tray, I will often go back for something "healthy". Because everyone knows that the negative impact of the crap fried food you eat can be directly offset by throwing something better down right after it.

This typically means some form of fruit, and whatever basic economy-grade yogurt is sitting in a bowl of ice at the end of the table. It's usually common strawberry, although the place I've been staying recently has taken to buying economy-grade light yogurt, which takes the whole thing to an unacceptable level. Still, at least it wasn't Activia.

You've seen the commercials, right? Where fresh-faced yummy mummies share their innermost issues of "irregularity" with Jamie Lee Curtis? Now when I get to the end of the breakfast buffet and I see a bowl of Activia pots in ice I just cannot bring myself to pick one up. For a start I get this slight repugnance because, obviously, this is a bowel yogurt. It's not fruity, or tasty, or healthy. No, it will help you with your irregularity. What does that even mean? When the woman won't go in the swimming pool because she's having issues with irregularity I have no idea what the problem is? Does it mean she's going too often? Or not at all? Or maybe just having to shit at different times every day?

"You know, I used to be a seven o'clock person, but just lately I've been getting irregular, and now I find myself wanting to curl one down at all sorts of different times. Can you help me, Jamie Lee?"

As a result, I can't risk eating it. If it helps by blocking you up, that's no good to me. I'm on an egg-based breakfast regime, remember. And if it's going to loosen me up that's no good either. I'm not playing Russian Roulette with some strange yogurt that'll have me running to the gas station toilet in some bumfuck Pennsylvania backwater, with my hands clutching my arse cheeks together. Thanks, but no thanks.

I just can't believe there's a market for the damn stuff. Whatever possessed the marketing team when they came up with the whole product positioning for Activia?

"I think all the major yogurt brand propositions have been staked out already. They've done fruit on the bottom, fruit on the side, crunchy bits on top, more fruit, more taste, less calories, exotic flavors, economy packs, giant pots and race for the cure. They even did big, fat Greek yogurts that look like congealed donkey sperm and have no flavor, but sell for five times the price. It's all been done."

"How about we go for bowel movements?"

"What?"

"You know, our yogurt will make you poo better."

"What do you mean by 'better'? Do you mean more, or less, or bigger lumps, so you have to wipe less, or what?"

"I don't know. Let's just say it will make you more 'regular'. That way all the people shitting too much will eat it to make them shit less, and all the people who are out there straining, with their eyes bugging out, will eat it so they can take a dump without risking a brain aneurysm."

"Brilliant! 'Regular' doesn't actually mean anything at all! But how can we sell that to men? I don't see them going for the bowel image thing."

"I know, we'll get Jamie Lee Curtis to promote it. Men don't buy yogurts, and when their wives and girlfriends bring this crap home they can just say that Jamie Lee is pushing it, and they'll instantly be OK, because they remember her outstanding boobs from that move where she went topless."

"What movie?"

"I don't know. I don't remember the title, I just remember the boobs. But trust me, so will they."

Nevertheless, in spite of the memory of those boobs, I bypassed the Activia offering at the hotel last week. Like I say, I just can't take the risk. And who wants to be walking back to their table with a pot of that on display? It's like buying Preparation H, or Viagra. Everyone will just know you have "that" problem. And I don't want everyone thinking I have a problem that I can't even explain. Frankly I'd be more comfortable picking up the erectile dysfunction yogurt. It's surely only a matter of time until they launch it. I suggest they call it Dicktivia.


Copyright © 2012 Edward Bison

No Room Up Front

I think it's fair to assume that if there's a heaven and a hell, there will be a special place in the latter reserved for home builders. I just bought a town home in St.Louis, for reasons too tedious to enumerate, and on the face of it it's a nice abode. OK, the walls are newspaper-thin, and bits of siding might drop off for no apparent reason, but when you're dealing with the average US home builder your expectations had better not be high at the outset.

Nevertheless there is one flaw that aggravates me more than all the others, partly because I'm reminded of it every day, and partly because it affects my most sacred time and place.

When builders design a home they obviously try and make it seem as large as possible while actually giving you as little real space as they can get away with. Normally you make an effort to check things like the size of rooms, the number of closets, and all that. I failed to spot that my garage was suitable for one full size car only if no-one ever wanted to open a door and get out of it, but that's just par for the course.

But when you start messing with a man's toilet then your just taking the ... well, you know.

The builder of my particular domestic palace apparently decided that a normal toilet might give the impression that the bathrooms were a bit, well, small. This would be accentuated by people constantly falling over the toilet on the way to the bath. So rather than, say, enlarging the rooms by a few inches they instead installed micro toilets. These have round seats perfectly designed so that when you sit on them you can have your arsehole inside the rim. Or your junk. But, importantly, not both.

I don't know about you, but when I'm enthroned I don't want to be having to make critical decisions like "am I about to drop one off or piss". I usually count on having the whole apparatus, so to speak, inside the rim, and then nature takes over. In fact I doubt whether anyone consciously considers the order of their ablutions. Or the consequences of getting the order wrong.

Where do you even find toilets like that? Is there a special catalog for home builders which sells crap fixtures that no sensible human being would ever want? "Amaze your client! Magically increase the size of your bathrooms! Just don't ever actually try to take a dump in one!" Or did they just order it from the supplier who does school lavatories?

If home builders were women I could understand the abject lack of appreciation for the physics of wedding vegetable placement, but I'm pretty sure they mostly aren't. That makes them the most vile traitors to their gender, selling another man's dangly parts short just to pimp a town home and drag a few more inches of apparent space out of nowhere. No surprises what's top of my list for home improvement. And I hope the builder catches his parts in a circular saw - serve the bastard right...


Copyright © 2011 Edward Bison

Good To Be Back?

It is said that all good things must come to an end, and having escaped St.Louis two years ago I have to report that I've now returned. I won't go into the details - suffice it to say that the positives must have outweighed the negatives - but now that I'm back I have the opportunity to reflect on everything I missed about St.Louis.

And the answer is "not much", when I think about it. Sure, I missed friends, but that has nothing to do with St.Louis - you make friends anywhere, and missing them is just a feature of moving, no matter where you're from. I thought I'd be glad of the lighter traffic, after Chicago, but with my current commute I'm not much better off than I was before, and here's the kicker - when you're done driving home in Chicago you end up in a place you want to be (i.e. Chicago). Personally I'll kill a few minutes extra each day to be able to say that.

From Chicago you can fly anywhere in the world, many places direct, on real planes. In St.Louis the airport is, frankly, shit, and hardly anyone flies a real plane there anymore - it's all regional jets, with seats so uncomfortable that if I were, say, a veal calf I'd have PETA petitioning for my better treatment. As if to emphasize the point about the airport I was welcomed back on the night I returned by a tornado which ripped half the roof off, rendering the ambience of the place even more "third world" than usual.

"Ah, but houses are so much cheaper in St.Louis" I hear you exclaim (or at least I think I hear that - after a few weeks in St.Louis hearing voices is just part of the charm). Well yes, you can have a barn-sized plywood house in one of the sprawling subdivisions for a lot less than the equivalent-sized home in a Chicago suburb, but here's the thing: the Chicago house would be made largely with brick, and have a real garden, and be situated in a real neighborhood, and generally look less like a builder knocked it up in the least time possible, with the shittest materials available, and then stuck granite counter-tops in to sell it. Great neighborhoods do exist in the suburbs of St.Louis, but guess what - they cost the same as the ones in Chicago.

That brings us to the last refuge of the St.Louis apologist: "It's a great place to raise a family". Well whoopee shit. That's what you fall back on? That's the best you have to offer as a clincher for the St.Louis area? Firstly, this is a pathetically weak pitch - I don't understand what supposedly marks out St.Louis as an especially great place to "raise a family". But more importantly it demonstrably isn't true, at least for much of the region. It certainly isn't true of the City of St.Louis, nor of East St.Louis. North St.Louis county is a shithole, so dangerous in places that you may be killed simply for getting lost and accidentally venturing into some areas, and much of South county is crap and crime-infested too, so that pretty much just leaves West county, where you find all the big plywood houses.

Sure Chicago has a miserable winter, but it's not much worse than what you get here, and in return you get a summer you can use - it's about 100 degrees outside now and there's just no point going outside unless you enjoy sweating, heat-exhaustion, palpitations and death.

In fact the only thing I was pleased to experience here again was a small barbecue restaurant which has very good pork, excellent fries and nice friendly staff. And I'm not sure it wouldn't be easier to have them move to Chicago than drag my carcass back here...

Oh, and by the way, you can stick the St.Louis arch up your arse.


Copyright © 2011 Edward Bison

Oh Yes?

While I was at the gym, fortified by half a packet of bacon and Bison Daughter's home-made pancakes, reminding myself why squats and deadlifts are best done on different days, Mrs Bison was shopping. Until recently she split her food shopping time between Target (great prices on meat and many other items, shit selection of fruit and veg) and Dominicks (good fruit and veg, more expensive meat). However she recently stumbled upon a store called Garden Fresh, or something like that, which is a "third option", and today she went there.

I haven't been there yet, but it seems to be set up to cater to the food shopping needs of a clientele that can best be characterized as "immigrant", predominantly Eastern European. The other shoppers were hard-faced scary-looking types. Certainly Mrs Bison felt somewhat isolated there today, as the sole (apparent) English speaker. At any moment she expected Liam Neeson to jump out and start looking for his kidnapped daughter.

So Mrs Bison came home with a pile of vegetables, some assorted meat, and a selection of ethnic "treats" to add a little extra to our Sunday lunch. There was a box of "choco cake" from a company called Haitai, which came from Korea, and whose principal selling point was the legend on the box which read "Presents for your delicious taste. Enjoy your happy times". I mean, what could possible go wrong there? In addition she had a bag of Russian pick'n'mix. She'd experimented with these two weeks ago, with some success, and so this time she jumped right in with a new assortment of Soviet candy.

Having partaken in a salad, designed to create just enough sense of healthy eating to justify shameless indulgence in foreign sugary treats, we moved on to the Korean choco cake, sold under the brand name Oh Yes. Well, just in case the outer box didn't put you off there was writing on each of the individually wrapped choco-effect, fake coated synthetic sponge squares, which read "You know that sweet things make smile. We love to see you smile with your people. So just taste this cake." Apart from the halting English (OK, my Korean isn't so hot either) you have to admire the logic behind this selling proposition:

Sweet things make you smile. We want you to smile. So eat the sweet thing.

The only problems was the lack of significant sweetness in the "thing". In fact the text on the wrapper should be updated to read:

We know that sweet things make you smile. This is a very bad cake. Don't give it to your people.

So, flushed with disappointment we moved on to the Russian pick'n'mix. Each of these was individually wrapped, but unlike Western candy, where a coconut candy might have a picture of, say, a coconut on the wrapper, these things had pictures which could not possibly have borne any relation to the ingredients. At least I sincerely hope not, since otherwise I have just consumed two pieces of chocolate candy containing ground penguin (or possibly ground swallow).

The other pieces had pictures of poppies, a cherub and daisies, and I would venture to suggest would have tasted significantly better had they in fact been manufactured from these ingredients, rather than the sawdust, cocoa and cigarette ash which I can only assume were the principal components. How hard is it to make candy taste good? You only need a bit of sugar, milk, chocolate, and maybe a few nuts. They teach tiny kids to make candy in elementary school (or at least they did when I was a kid, before they got concerned about all the two hundred pound fourth graders showing up). What possible reason is there in any civilized society for people to be eating candy that tastes like a cocoa flavored ashtray?

The very best candy in the bunch tasted a bit like a protein bar, which, to any one who's actually eaten one, is a pretty good indication of just how shit it was.

Maybe this goes some way to explaining the miserable, scary disposition of the other shoppers at Garden Fresh. If the most you have to look forward to, having loaded up on beets and sausage, is a bag on candy that tastes like dog-ends, and a choco-effect cake to make your people smile, you too might wonder just what the fuck happened on the way to the American dream.

I'm sure all the Albanian people-traffickers in "Taken" would have been quite happy to have stayed at home had they just had access to some decent sugary snacks in their home country. But as Liam Neeson would say: "Good Luck".


Copyright © 2011 Edward Bison

Reality Ever After

Mrs Bison is watching re-runs of Sex and the City, and I have to admit that it doesn't seem half as bad as I remember it. OK, no need to demand my "guy card" back just yet, it's not as though I'm watching it myself. How can I be? I'm writing this. No, my point is not that it got better, nor that I turned into the kind of limp-wristed, flamboyant excuse for a man that would actually enjoy it. My point is that compared to the utter crap that's cluttering up my cable TV these days, Sex and the City is brilliant.

Do you remember when TV shows had actors and stories? Or when we had interesting documentaries, or investigative shows? Now I trawl through the channels and all I find is "reality shows". You name it and someone's made it into a reality show. I cannot fucking believe that there are shows out there solely about people who make cupcakes, and all the trials and tribulations of being a cupcake maker. There are shows where people compete in stupid contests to become the next top model, or cake boss, or apprentice or whatever fucking idiot idea someone in LA or NY just came up with. This is about as "real" as little green men probing your anus while whistling the theme from Bonanza.

I could go on and list all the dumb "reality" shows that center around some lifestyle or profession, such as clamping cars, being a woman cop, getting married, hunting wild hogs, giving our parking tickets, collecting scrap metal, buying a wedding dress, operating a pawn shop, having a makeover or losing about two hundred pounds of bodyweight, all of which are chock-full of completely staged situations, created to bring drama and suspense to the tiny-minded plebs watching. What really pisses me off, though, more than anything else, is the plethora of "celebrity" reality shows, centered around the kind of vacuous bullshit non-people whose only claim to fame is being famous. Once upon a time we just had Paris Hilton, but now we have the overpaid, overexposed, real housewives of just about anywhere, all prancing about like utter twats in a massive celebration of the collective stupidity of the American populace.

Unlike the internet, which allows people to self-select according to their tastes, and where absolutely anyone can find something of interest to them (farmyard porn anybody?) cable TV is all about appealing to the masses. Only by attracting enough viewers to support advertising can TV companies make any money, so they work extremely hard to make sure that EVERYTHING we see is targeted at as broad an audience as possible. We can assume that they've got pretty good at it by now (economic Darwinism working its magic), so we can by extension assume that the swathes of reality TV shit that they put out are exactly what the majority of the American viewing public desire. I mean, TV companies aren't stupid.

Now we've reached a new low. Bethenny Ever After is coming. A woman famous simply for being on reality TV is now getting yet another reality TV show, just about how tough her life is now that she's married and has a kid. (Makes a change from a litter of six kids, or nineteen, I suppose.) What the fuck? I'd never heard of this weird looking cow before, but it turns out she's been on an apprentice show, been a real housewife, and also had some other show about planning her wedding, and now we're being offered a chance to watch the next episode of her life. Jesus wept! That's what America's doing now - tuning in to see what this "famous for nothing" celebrity bitch is doing in her manufactured life every week.

If we could decide for ourselves which cable TV channels we wanted in our bundle you can be absolutely fucking sure that this piece of trash wouldn't be on my list. I'm about ready to junk cable altogether, because it's nothing but crap and cartoons.

How did we get to this stage? The great moronic mass of the voting American public is sitting down every night to worship synthetic celebrities. Now we have Kim Fatarse Kardashian (where the FUCK did she come from?) hawing herself, her perfume, her clothing, and just about anything else that you can stick a brand name on. She's only famous for being famous, and that's what gets paid for in America today.

You know, compared to that load of old crap, even horse-faced Sarah Jessica Parker's looking good these days...


Copyright © 2011 Edward Bison

Good Vibrations

In amongst all the festeringly uninteresting commercials on TV this Christmas, I couldn't help noticing an outbreak of Trojan ads. These started with commercials for Fire & Ice condoms, which are supposedly so good that they make couples rush into the drugstore to buy some more. Let's overlook for the moment that among the things I'd willingly put on my erect penis, neither "Fire" nor "Ice" are in the top 1,000. Plus, while condoms may be a necessary evil, nothing about their use makes sex better, unless you're the kind of two-pump chump for whom lack of sensation is considered a benefit. Still, I'm happy to see something advertised that isn't cut-rate auto insurance, end-of-year auto sales or a mobile phone.

Trojan seems to be branching out, however, with the Trojan Vibrations device. The commercials are suitably vague, but it appears to be what you and I would know as a good old-fashioned vibrator, "woman for the stimulation of" as they say. Of course this is the twenty-first century, so it doesn't look like a big rubber dick. In fact it seems to resemble nothing so much as a lipstick, maybe because women like lipsticks, or maybe to overcome that inner resistance which may come from purchasing something that just screams "shove it up your vag".

The commercial shows a group of seemingly professional suburban women sitting around exchanging birthday gifts, and, guess what, three of them have given the birthday girl a Trojan Vibrations thing. Supposedly it "blows your hair back", and the girls in question turn to show that their hair is, indeed, blown back, signifying that they have brought themselves off with the Trojan product (although hopefully not the one they just wrapped up for birthday girl).

Now on the one hand I'm delighted to see the open advertisement of vibrating sex toys, since it signifies a society which accepts sex as more than religiously approved baby-making. However I can't help wondering what would happen if they advertised the male equivalent. There is a massive double standard when it comes to sexuality, and it's exactly the reverse of what you might imagine. When a group of girls go to watch a male stripper they're "just out to have a good time" whereas a group of men going to a strip club are "typical seedy, dirty guys". The well-groomed women sitting around examining their lipstick-shaped vibrating sex toys would be in stark contrast to a group of men comparing blow-up sex dolls. "Hey, she's got real hair AND a fully functional anus!" Not that any man would be seen dead comparing sex toys with another man - this heinous a violation of the Guy Code would see you banished for at least ten years. Still, I'm willing to take sex toy commercials for women, one-sided as they may be, as part of the general progress to a more enlightened America.

Of course if you live in Alabama you'll be waiting a while yet for this progress. It's one of seven states which appear at the bottom of the commercial where Trojan Vibrations are not for sale. They are, not surprisingly, mainly southern states: Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia. I'm not going to point out the contrast between the desire for gun ownership and the death penalty in these states and their apparent fear of sex toys, mainly because I like both gun ownership AND the death penalty, and would happily support more of both, even while encouraging the general population to experiment with vibrating sex aids.

It does seem strange though that any state would attempt to prohibit something as harmless as a vibrator while quite openly allowing gay sex. If you're going to get all worked up about something, you'd think a bloke shoving his dick in another bloke's "tradesman's entrance" would be a bit more disgusting than a woman using a vibrator. I mean, what would YOU rather find on the internet? (I rest my case.)

I can only assume that gay sex is tolerated down there because the Federal Government says it has to be, and maybe because it's kind of hard to stop it. I mean, you can close down the vibrator stores but you won't stop the fudge packers from finding a way. It's true that there was an attempt to overturn the vibrator law in Alabama but the state courts sided with the legislature and the US Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal, thus condemning the good people of Alabama to a vibrator-less wilderness where their only options were to carve wooden penises or sit on the corner of the washing machine during the spin cycle. Or both.

In any case it goes to show the huge hang-ups that parts of America still have with sex, especially parts where religion is deeply entrenched. (Guess what, the Taliban doesn't approve of vibrators either.)

So to the good women of the US I say: "Take up your vibrating sex toys, made to look like lipsticks so you won't get squeemish, and use them to their full potential. And maybe post the videos online so we can share the joy..."


Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

Rescue Pets

The thing about watching Christmas TV in a turkeyed-out haze is that you can easily miss things. For instance, if it weren't for Mrs Bison's careful attention to meaningless ads I would have completely missed the commercial for the Rescue Pets Train & Play Puppy. Let's gloss over for the moment the fact that, in the interest of cuteness, this monstrosity has the kind of massively oversized eyes that make you wonder if it shouldn't have been humanely destroyed, or at least renamed "Rescue Pets Genetic Freak Aberration Puppy". No, the "fun" thing about this particular toy is that you can feed it a plastic biscuit (included) and it will then walk off and deposit said biscuit as "poop", to the apparent delight of the kids in the commercial.

I believe that this toy is supposed to introduce kids to the reality of owning a pet, prior to them heading off to the pound with mum and dad, and picking up the real thing. However I believe I have spotted the minor flaw in this plan. You see, when the Rescue Pets Puppy drops its guts, you just pick up the plastic biscuit; you can stick it right back in the little bastard's mouth, or, if you are so inclined, in your own mouth, with no ill effects whatsoever. (Unless you happen to be one of Darwin's "special" children, and swallow the plastic biscuit.)

In the real world of dogs they don't deposit a small plastic toy right where you expect it. They leave you a massive pile of foul-smelling, sometimes worm-infested ordure, and often where you least expect it. Yeah, let's replay the commercial and see how the three little girls react when the dog leaves a steaming pile of logs on the table. Who's going to be laughing and rushing to pick it up then? Ready for your trip to pick out a REAL rescue puppy girls? Just grab a hold of that festering heap of warm, recycled kanga chunks and feel it ooze through your fingers as you scurry to the toilet / trash can / back door.

Herein lies the beauty of electronic toy pets. For a start they have an OFF switch, so you won't be awakened in the night by scratching and whining. They can be thrown away when they break, with no vet bills, and your running costs are limited to a couple of sets of AA batteries, before the kids get bored with watching the biscuit fall out of its synthetic fur arse. They need no feeding, worming, inoculating, exercising, grooming or attention, and as such are completely useless as a means of preparing for the reality of caring for a dog.

What's more, I've been to the rescue dog place, and let me assure you that it's not full of puppies. It is, however, extremely well-stocked with pit-bulls. And excrement. And more pit-bulls. There's an assortment of sad older dogs which part of you wants to bring home so they can be loved again, but you can't help wondering if the reason they're there in the first place is that they snapped one day and ripped a little boy's arm off. I mean, if you were shopping for an adopted grandpa you probably wouldn't start at the local Salvation Army hostel, would you. Sure, there's some good guys down there, but the odds are high that you'd end up with a meth-addled serial masturbator with klepto tendencies.

Plus, adopting an old dog is like buying an old car - the nice smell is gone, and you're on the hook for the expensive maintenance as it breaks down all the time. And there's always shit coming out the back end.

Maybe, for added realism, there should be a Rescue Pets Savage Pit Bull Puppy. Abused since birth, forced to mate with it's own mother and repeatedly fight in order avoid having its skull crushed by a black NFL player, it is now ready to come home with you and join your family. Only, WATCH OUT, as it randomly attacks a child and bites their finger in a "plastic biscuit poop" synthetic version of real canine violence. That should get the kiddies ready for the joy of being savaged by a seventy pound Chinese Shar Pei rescue dog like that kid in Wolverhampton.

Or just take a big shit on the floor, then have the kids pick it up and take it for a two-mile walk in a bag. Every day for three months. Then they'll be ready for a dog...


Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison