MAGIC         PORK

I’ve been using the Gillette Mach 3 Power razor. That’s the one with three blades that vibrates. It’s a good razor. But they came out with a 5 blade razor a while back called the Gillette Fusion. I’ve been meaning to give it a try for a while and finally got around to purchasing one. I mean why not? They price the razors really low because they get you on the replacement blades.

FoodMike posted about the Gillette Fusion last September, so he scooped me by 7 months on this. But I haven’t seen an update about how awesome it is, so I’m assuming he didn’t try it out yet.

Well make whatever jokes you want, the 5 blade razor rocks! Like the one I had before, it also comes in a vibrating model, which of course was the one I chose. I like the weight of it, the feel of it, and I swear it does irritate my skin less than the 3 blade one. I still haven’t figured out if the vibrating thing is just psychological or if it really makes a difference, but when I first tried the 3-blade vibrating one, I was blown away. I’ll never go back to a non-vibrating one. I mean if you were an Indian would you go back to using a tomahawk once you discovered guns? Wait, that was one of the worst analogies ever. I don’t even know what it meant. Nevermind.

If you look at the shelf in my bathroom (please knock first), you’ll also see Gillette shaving gel, Gillette after shave lotion, and Gillette deodorant. But I haven’t been using the Gillette Fusion Hydra Gel, just some other Gillette gel. According to the website:

Its proprietary aloe-rich formula is designed to partner with the Fusion shaving system for an incredibly comfortable shave.

Well holy cow, I better pick that up! Here I’ve been using a gel that’s not designed to be partnered with my razor. I could be having an even better shaving experience! I don’t know how a gel could possibly work better with one razor over another, but I’m not director of their research laboratory. No, that’s Cassandra, who guides you through the website and also happens to be really really hot. Now a cynic would suggest that she’s just an actress but I would never want to imply that beautiful women can’t become directors of shaving research laboratories. (But seriously, that website is hilarious!)

Now you may be thinking “MagicPork.com has sold out!” but I swear I’m not getting any money from Gillette. But only because I haven’t tried. I would sell out in a heartbeat. If anyone from the Gillette marketing department is reading this, feel free to post a comment and I’ll get back to you. I’m sure you know that viral marketing is the hot thing now and magicpork.com could be the perfect vehicle to push your products. I could just place a “Powered by Gillette” logo on the page, but it would be so much more effective if I worked Gillette into my posts. I could make it so subtle that no one would even know.

For example, here’s a snippet from a recent post:

There’s something that I’ve been afraid to admit. I know I’m not going to make friends with this post, but I’m going to come clean here. I don’t like Family Guy.

OK, now here’s the Gillette-friendly post:

There’s something that I’ve been afraid to admit. I know I’m not going to make friends with this post, but I’m going to come clean here. As clean as a shave with the Gillette Fusion razor. Its 5 blade shaving surface technology distributes the shaving force across the blades to help reduce pressure – for less irritation and more comfort. I don’t like Family Guy.

If you had trouble seeing the difference, try reading it over again really carefully. It’s almost undetectable yet it will work on my readers at a subconscious level.

There’s something that I’ve been afraid to admit. I know I’m not going to make friends with this post, but I’m going to come clean here. I don’t like Family Guy.

When Family Guy first came on the air, I watched an episode. I thought “this sucks” and never watched it again. I didn’t know anyone else that watched it, so I was under the assumption that others had the same opinion of it. I was therefore not at all surprised when I heard that it got canceled. Then I started to hear stuff about how it was finding an audience on DVD, and lo and behold it actually got put back on the air. There was much rejoicing. Not by me, but by the legions of fans the show apparently had. I read people posting online about how it was the funniest show on TV, some even said the funniest show EVER, how stupid Fox was for canceling it, and so on.

Family Guy is pretty edgy / controversial in its jokes so of course for all the fans, it meant that if anyone didn’t like the show it must be because they’re offended by it. Well that’s not the case at all with me. I didn’t like the show because it wasn’t funny. I started to doubt my sense of humor, which I had always thought was pretty good.

Friends would forward me video clips from the show. Some were funny, some not so. Finally I figured I’d better check the show out again and see what I missed. Maybe I just saw a bad episode.

Well I did see an episode that I would call funny, but it guest starred Norm MacDonald as the voice of the Grim Reaper, and he was the reason it was funny. So I don’t know if I can really count that one. I watched another episode, and this one I really wanted to turn off half way through but I forced myself to watch the whole loooong half hour. I then determined that I’d seen enough to make my conclusion. But just before posting this, I thought maybe I should give it one more chance, and I looked up some more clips of the show. I rated these clips on the following scale:

1. Didn’t even smile. Not at all funny.
2. Parts of it made me smile. But still not funny overall.
3. Elicited at least a chuckle. Could possibly be considered funny.
4. Outright laughter. It’s funny.
5. Sustained laughter. Hilarious. I gotta forward this to someone!

Here’s my results: Six clips rated a 2. One clip rated a 4. The other five rated a 1. I’d tell you which was the 4 but I think it’s more fun to make you guess. I will say however, that the clip was a solid 2 until right near the end.

(OK, I lied a little. One of the clips was very long and was a 1 except for one tiny part of it that made me laugh out loud. It just didn’t seem fair to rate it a 4 because of that, so I rated it a 2. Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, I must say that almost all of the clips that I’ve seen online involving the character Quagmire were funny.)

I think I don’t like Family Guy for the same reason I don’t like to watch Robin Williams do stand-up. He rattles off a million jokes that have no relevance to anything he was talking about. They’re completely random. Maybe 20% of the time he’ll hit on something funny but it’s bound to happen just by mere chance. The other 80% of the time he’s not funny and I just want to slap the guy and tell him the shut up. In other words, sitting through the 80% crap just to get the 20% funny isn’t worth it for me. Yes, you just switched to an Ed Sullivan impersonation. I get it. Not funny.

So just when I was thinking something must be wrong with me that I’m not liking this show, the most recent two-part episode of South Park was shown. In it, everyone is up in arms about an episode of Family Guy that’s going to show a cartoon Muhammad. There’s a lot going on in the episode which I won’t get into here, but the point is the writers of South Park completely trash Family Guy. They even show some fake Family Guy clips that the South Park writers made that are spot-on. Those could 100% be from a Family Guy episode. They’re basically saying that it would be a cinch for them to write Family Guy because the writing is so bad.

So thank you Trey Parker and Matt Stone for allowing me to realize there’s nothing wrong with me for not liking Family Guy.

Side note: South Park had an episode years ago that featured Muhammad as part of a group called the Super Best Friends, a spoof on the DC Comics cartoon Super Friends. The group also had other religious figures like Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, and Joseph Smith (now that’s funny!). I forgot all about that when I did my post about the Danish cartoon.

I visited my friend and his wife in Cleveland recently. I had a great time, but this isn’t about that. It reminded me of something that happened last November when I was in Cleveland for their wedding. After the wedding, some of my friends and I took a minivan taxi back to our hotel. The driver provided some very entertaining conversation.

I’ve come to determine that I have a pretty good recollection for conversations because whenever someone is telling a story that I was involved in, I usually think to myself “that’s not quite what the person said”. But I have to try to keep my mouth shut so I’m not the annoying guy that interrupts the story for no good reason. However, this was a while ago so I’ll do the best I can. I’ll have to censor it a little.

The driver was a large, middle-aged black man. Since this was soon after Thanksgiving, somehow we get on that topic with him.

Driver: I had Thanksgiving dinner with my ex-girlfriend.

Me: Wow, that sounds weird.

Driver: Well, she wasn’t my ex-girlfriend when we started dinner.

He then tells about how she told him on the way home that she wanted to see other men. But he doesn’t sound too brokenhearted about all this.

Driver: I’m never going to share my emotions with a woman again.

Me: Never?

Driver: NEVER

Me: (trying to think of something to say) What if you want to have kids some day?

Driver: I already got four!

Now… I don’t want to make any assumptions here. Maybe he’s divorced. But he didn’t mention being divorced. He tells us he’s forty-something. I had thought he was younger but I couldn’t see his face well. He then starts a rant about how he’s done with women and he’s only interested in having sex with them now.

Driver: When we’re done, she can clean herself up, do whatever she needs to do to get herself straight, then GET THE @#*% OUT!

That second-to-last word had extra emphasis on it. I was trying not to laugh out loud at this point, mostly because I don’t want to be White Man In Suit laughing at Stereotype Black Man. Part of me even wondered if he was just making stuff up, playing up the black stereotypes for us as a way of poking fun at us. But sadly, I don’t think he was.

He starts talking about how he doesn’t have time for dumb women. She doesn’t have to be really smart but she has to have a head on her shoulders. Sounds reasonable to me, but he takes this one where I wasn’t expecting.

Driver: A woman’s got to be able to tell me what 7% is as a decimal.

That was such an odd thing to say that I figured I must have heard him wrong. So I say “what?”

Driver: If a woman can’t tell me what 7% is as a decimal, I don’t want nothing to do with her. I was dating a girl once and I asked her what 10% of 500,000 was. She couldn’t tell me. I never called her again.

I had to laugh at that one. But he wasn’t done.

Driver: If a woman can’t tell me what the definition of “pontificate” is, I don’t got time for her.

I think our cab ride was over at that point so end of story. He definitely made what could have been a boring ride much more enjoyable for me. I think the story lost some of the humor in the telling, but there it is. Others that were in the cab too: how’d I do? Leave anything out?

When I posted about Morningwood, I should have received a deluge of comments about how awesome that band is. I did not. I had two friends post comments basically telling me (if i may paraphrase) “well, they’re not the suckiest band I’ve ever heard”.

I’m left to assume that the rest of the throng of Magic Pork readers felt that it was so obvious how right I was that they didn’t need to chime in to echo that. In fact I think that will be my assumption with my posts going forward. But just so you know, I always welcome comments about my supreme rightitude.

So I’ll move right along and mention a couple other bands. These aren’t anywhere in the same league as Morningwood. But I think they sound interesting, have some catchy songs, and I love their names so I have to give them points for that.

Say Hi To Your Mom is mellower that I usually go for but I’m digging them. On their site you can download some full MP3’s. My favorites are “Let’s Talk About Spaceships” and “Yeah, I’m In Love With An Android”. The latter has a great line: “She beeps for me every time it’s time to go water the fern”. Also check out their bio page which is really funny.

Architecture in Helsinki has a pop sound, but it’s kind of… weird. I don’t feel like trying to describe it, just check it out for yourself. Song clips stream when you enter the site, and you can control them at the top right of the page. Plus there’s videos which for me always would play all choppy. “Do The Whirlwind” is my favorite of theirs.