Milk and Cookies

I absolutely cannot find any solid answer on the origin of milk and cookies. Or rather, the origin of dunking cookies in milk.

Some of the sources say that it was the result of a marketing campaign, some say it's just a tradition that cropped up, some say it was just obvious, others blame Santa Clause. At the very least the Santa Claus one is wrong.

The closest that I've been able to gather is that it most probably stems from the British custom of dunking biscuits (for those of you whom don't speak British, 'biscuit' in this context refers to a type of cookie. Yeah, I know, I don't like it either but whatcha gonna do. Crazy Brits) in their tea. From there it made it's way to America, but since we threw all of our tea into Boston Harbor, we decided to find an alternative. Water adds nothing to the cookie but sogginess, and really, we would just eat cookie dough if we wanted that (Not that we don't, but dunking it in water would add the unnecessary step of actually baking the cookie first). So the only options left at such a primitive age were alcohol and milk. Considering the only thing you should dunk in alcohol is a cherry, that left milk.

People realized it was delicious from there and started doing it. Then when mass produced cookies came along, companies like Nabisco started marketing the product in conjunction with the trend of dunking it in milk (Take the recent Oreo slogan into account 'Milk's favorite cookie') and it became a national sport from that point on.

Unfortunately this has proven to be a lot harder to track down any concrete evidence than I would have hoped. Which is too bad, because I wanted to publicly thank the person or company or whatnot that it originated from, as it led to the eventual creation of Cookie Crisp, which as of late has comprised 70% of my diet.

So cheers to you, initial cookie-in-milk dunker. May you have a special seat in the heavens.

No really, it looks great

Second opinions are important.

You should always bring a friend along when buying a car. Preferably a friend that is less of a drunkard and more of an individual that is mechanically inclined, lest you make the same mistakes I do and drive off with a motorized tricycle and a welded-on sidecar.

You should also consult your wife before buying and/or selling a house. Or renting out a room. Or your children.

You really can't trust your instincts on a lot of things, or even if you can you should still bounce the idea off of another person, if for no other reason than if it sounds good in your head than it must sound even better out loud, and if you're just talking to yourself then you'll look crazy.

And then sometimes you are crazy and everyone else is there to tell you so.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't look as good with a beard as I thought I did.

Update

There are a few people that inexplicably have been checking this site for updates.

Wow, to believe that the world hasn't crushed your spirits yet. I applaud you.

I feel I owe an explanation.

School and life got busy. These things tend to happen. Sorry about that. Plus I had a second blog that I've been taking care of.

Well, the second blog is ending soon, so I'll be concentrating on this one more. And there will be some changes.

The reviews are fun and all, but they're not as popular with people as I would have hoped. I'm not dropping them entirely, but they won't be for every update. I figure I'll start updating twice a week like it says I will on the sidebar there. One post will be whatever, and then the other one will be the random review. I'll try this out for a while and see how I like it and how it's received from all three of you that feel the need to check this site.

So starting next week whenever I'm supposed to update, I'll be updating again.

Bathrobe

Ah, the bathrobe. An article of clothing adorned by everyone from playboys to mostly nude old men at least since the advent of the newspaper. It has served us well through the generations, and continues to do so to this day.

The bathrobe is a versatile article of clothing, and as such does not always need to be worn immediately after taking a bath. It can be worn after waking up, after a vigorous session of baking, or even as a normal article of clothing, though only if you are an escapee from a mental hospital, traveling the universe with a man named after a car, or both. Bathrobes are designed for comfort, and with all such products the more expensive ones tend to be quite a bit more comfortable. The cheaper end of the spectrum tend to wear like either starched paper for the thinner models, or like a coat made of cat scratching posts for the budget version of terrycloth.

The usage of a bathrobe, or smoking jacket (the only difference internet searches have brought up is that bathrobes are designed to be worn otherwise nude, but I'm sure one could do the same thing with a smoking jacket) is either to cover one's modesty, or simply as loungewear. Some bathrobes contain pockets, in case you feel that it is appropriate outdoors wear and decide to run your errands with nothing but a loosely tied robe to cover your shame.

Oh I'm just on my way to the store to pick up some donuts. Why yes, this is my bathrobe!

As it stands, the bathrobe is a functional, but essentially superfluous piece of the wardrobe. It's underrated in one's youth and seems to become almost essential the older someone gets for reasons unknown, but it never seems to serve any real purpose aside from opening the door to collect the mail without being outside in your skivvies. Allegedly they're also used at spas, but considering I'm too poor to have ever been to one of those, this may just be part of an elaborate fantasy constructed in my own head as I stretched awkwardly backwards in an attempt to give myself a backrub and dreamt of a day when things would be better than that, and some nubile young girl would instead be giving me a rubdown.

Picture removed for various violations.

On the other hand, the bathrobe does get some cool points for its appearance of the manliest of real sports, boxing. It's well known that boxers enter the ring punching and biting at random extremities whilst wearing a light robe that they throw off last second in a show of manliness and an attempt to shock you into thinking that they are larger than you had thought they were while they were hunched under the robe. This technique works equally well against children. Speaking of whom, the other cool factor involves this being the only article of clothing that let you pretend to be a Jedi a long time ago in a bedroom probably upstairs from the basement you live in now.

The bathrobe is a purely superfluous garment, but as with most things, superfluous tends to be equatable to luxury, and even the poorest of men realize that anything that allows you to sit around almost naked for most of the day is truly luxurious. It's difficult to look down on such a pimptastic product, but I'll be damned if I didn't try. The bathrobe gets a pantsless 7 /10.

One more for the road

Soft Drink Bottles

The soft drink bottle is a most useful invention. Heralded as the god Contanus by the Babylonians, it has been in use since at least the 1800's. It saw its usage in World War II as an indispensable close quarters combat multi-functioning weapon. After the war it starred in several movies and then settled down with its wife and three kids to a quit house in the valley.

So I sort of phoned the history lesson in there, but I've used enough bottles to accurately review them, so let's get down to business.

Soft drink bottles come in an assortment of shapes and sizes. Some are economically flat, and some are ribbed for her pleasure, while others will be in gimmicky shapes or contoured to fit better in one's hand. For some unexplainable reason, most brands keep a consistent bottle opening width with the exception of the 1 liter bottle. Some 1 liter bottles are wide open enough to drop two or more hamsters straight into the opening, with little to no shoving involved. It would be a nice improvement for other bottles to utilize this size, as it would eliminate the suction problem for those not skilled in drinking from bottles.

Bottle anatomy. Because I know you've never seen one before.

This is a serious issue that is oft ignored. Some people have a bottle-drinking-from handicap. The majority of us know that one can simply tip and sip the contents of a bottle, but those select few will wrap their mouths around the opening and suck like an infant, extracting all the sweet nectar from inside the container. This causes the sides of the container to contract and create a suction effect with the individual's mouth, causing a need for it to be released afterward, with a slight chance of expelling some of the bottle's contents in various directions; occasionally they will fly into the person's eyes. Also, this makes disgusting noises and is loud, so people should really stop doing that.

Soft drinks bottles have numerous uses, which range from refreshment to entertainment toward biodome. They are capable of housing any number of things that can fit through the mouth; from soft drinks, to marbles, to pond water saturated with tadpoles. The uses go beyond merely holding things, though. With a small spiral plastic attachement and TWO bottles, one can make a scale representation of a twister that can be seen as the water drains through the contraption! Empty bottles may also be beaten rhythmically against things to create musical concertos that will leave your friends and relatives speechless in awe.

And finally, like any great invention, bottles can legitimately be used as a weapon. Beating someone with an empty bottle is somewhat pointless, but a full one may hold some heft to it, especially if the contents are aforementioned marbles or a carbonated beverage. If you still live in the 1960's, you could simply break your glass bottle over a table and use it as a stabbing implement. If you do not have access to old fashioned bottles, however, grip the bottle firmly in hand and strike your foe in or around the temple with the bottle cap. It's guaranteed that they'll be down for the count. Be sure to remember this the next time your friend that always brags about the knife they carry is left frozen in terror during your routine Thursday night being mugged.

With many (see: several) uses and designs, and widespread popularity, the soft drink bottle is one thing you don't want to be left without. Due to its potential to annoy, it'd seem like that would bump it up a few notches. Unfortunately, annoying things tend to be a double edged sword, and the potential to be used against you is a detractor to the overall score.

Walking the Box gives it an 8.....out of 10. Said in the voice of Adam Sessler.

Psychic Powers

Ah, Psychic Powers. The daydream of every middle class American that becomes too restless at work. Your boss requests a file and then yells at you for not making the margins 1.2 despite his never telling you to do so. You mentally retort "What do you think I am, a mind reader?" Ten minutes later you're being ushered out of his office because you've drifted off in thought about the different ways that you could use your powers for personal benefit, starting with forcing him to give you a raise and ending smeared in blood and pancakes after waking up from a blackout that you'll never full be able to explain or comprehend.

Psychic ability has a rich history of being part of every civilization known to man ever. Really, look it up. The word itself is Greek in origin, but the idea of the psychic has been around since time immemorial (I really just wanted to use that phrase). Considering in some included aspects of psychic ability include astrology and determining if somebody is sick, this is probably less impressive than one would think.

Of course, when we think of "psychic powers" we think of things like the X-men. Nobody cares if you can make guesses while looking at the stars or if you can accurately predict that I'm going to die in a week because science hasn't progressed far enough to treat my bear wounds, but we sure as hell care about the ability to steal thoughts, move things with our thoughts, predict the future, and blow shit up with our minds.

Woman, I predict that if you don't get me my scotch that I will psychically bitch slap you so hard your bra will come off. None of that mental backtalk, either. We've had enough movies, comic books, and comic book movies to ensure us that there is a definitively awesome side about psychic powers, much like cinema showed us the way that an explosion can really brighten up any decor. Unfortunately, there are always gypsies and Sylvia Brown to remind us of the more boring aspects of the psychic world, like tarot cards, crystal balls, and reuniting families with their lost loved ones.

The hands on aspect of this review didn't go so well. I've spent many walks attempting to read people's thoughts or trying to psychically command them, as I'm sure anyone as crazy as I am has (Turn around if you can hear my voice. Okay don't. Reach for that donut if you can hear me. That's not the donut I meant, I meant the other one! No you don't even care! Augh!). Along the same lines, inducing head explosions was met with similar results. I did try to move some things telekinetically, starting small with a pencil. After grunting at it and twitching for about an hour with no response but some weird hallucinations about Tom Cruise, I gave up with nothing gained but disappointment and some indigestion.

You're right, Tom, you were the greatest samurai ever! And you're so handsome, too!

Psychic powers are something that are half awesome, half mundane, with more grounds in the mundane and no proof in the other half. As much as I'd like to believe in it, it just ain't happening. They get a 5/10 for not living up to their potential.

Although if anybody can start me on fire with their mind, feel free to do so and that score will rocket up a few points.

Balls

Balls. As a child, everyone played with them. Some of us discovered them sooner than others, and some of us never had our own, having to rely on the neighbor kids or the generous workers at the local Y. Some are used for sports, some are used to ride on, and some are used for chucking at people and then getting caught by your parents and being forced to sit in the corner for 10 minutes. Ever since the first time a spleen rolled out of a mammoth incision and bounced along, manking had been fascinated with the rolling, bouncing device. There are depictions of circles in cave paintings, so we can't be quite positive what those indicate. Knowing cavemen, the circles could've been a ball or their children, we're not quite sure what cave spawn looked like back in those times (although we're led to believe they look similar to our own infants). The first mention of a ball in its modern English usage as a device to be played with can be found in Laȝamon's Brut (Chronicle of Britain) being used in 1205, but evidence such as the ball courts in the blood-thirsty Aztec ruins (the ruins themselves thirst for blood) indicate that the orbs had been around long before the greatest language in the world had a word for them. Balls today are used primarily in sporting events, even though some of the less boring ones (see: hockey, curling, spelling bees; not basketball) don't use them whatsoever. The variety of shapes, sizes, and materials used in sports alone demonstrate the flexibility and adaptability of the ball to any area that it can be fit into.

In-YOUR-end-o

Balls have also found uses in keeping children entertained (those huge rubber ones are awesome), machinery (what do you think ball bearings are? Squares?), medical therapy (balls are used in muscle memory, muscle relaxation, and coordination exercises),B.B. guns, juggling, pachinko, and probably other fields that I can't quite think of at the moment.

Now, as with paper, I've had plenty of opportunities to play with any balls that were made available to me. Recently, I actually purchased a three pack of balls, in a variety of colors (green, pink, and yellow are a variety). I attempted to juggle with them, but apparently this isn't something that you just can pick up in 5 minutes, so I decided that it wasn't worth my time. Much fun was to be had with the other activities involving the balls, though. It began with simply throwing it at the wall, a rather rudimentary procedure. Then I moved on to more advanced maneuvers, such as throwing it at things that were not the wall. This proved to be exhilarating. On a mad high of throwing the ball at things, I began throwing the balls at things with the intent of knocking them over, and in some cases, off of the furniture that they were resting on. Within minutes I found myself in the hallway whipping balls at the faces of people that I knew, indiscriminate of whether they wanted balls in their face or not.

No horses were harmed in this beating.

Balls are overall quite versatile, able to go from blissful childlike fun all the way up to maniacal bloodthirsty ball thwomping. I'm sure tons of you enjoy them for their sports or sports-like applications, but for me, nothing will beat the look of pleading "why?" in the eyes of my ball-destined victims.

Of course, that thrill only lasts for so long, and balls can deflate and aren't edible, no matter how hard you bite (apparently). In the case of sports it's not so much the ball itself as the sports that are being played that amount to the excitement, so the ball is just taking credit for a team effort.

That sort of bad sportsmanship nets the ball an 8/10 in my rulebook.
Rule number 1: There are no rules.
Rule number 2: Cooler Ranch Doritos are better than Nacho Cheesier.

Paper

For those of you not in the "know", Wikipedia describes paper thusly:

Paper is thin material mainly used for writing upon, printing upon or for packaging. It is produced by pressing together moist fibers, typically cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags or grasses, and drying them into flexible sheets.

Paper was invented millions of years ago, by the Egyptians probably, or maybe the Chinese even. I'm not sure. What I do know is that they both had it at some point ages ago, and that the Egyptians called it papyrus which is Egyption for "really crappy paper." The primary utilization of it as a surface to doodle on and the occasional replacement for when you'd run out of two-ply hasn't really changed much in the current age. The Chinese were at least a bit more inventive and made small, useless paper animals and flimsy cups that I can't ever get to work right.

What good is a toy that you can't take into the bathtub, honestly?

Paper is an invention that single handedly spurred progress. People could finally write down their ideas on it (which at the time must have consisted of "find more whores and slaughter my enemies"), they could draw things on it instead of needing to find an empty spot of cave wall (this also allowed them to carry it around showing people their pretty pictures of the moose they killed that afternoon) and they could fold it into airplanes and spit wads of it at their teachers.

Over time this led to the invention of books (as stacks of paper would fall over comically and scatter in between classes) which in turn led to the printing press (because monks are slow at copying things and they charge exorbitant prices), as well as computers (because using the printing press was hard work and evolution guides us back toward a sedentary lifestyle) and eventually into digital paper which is essentially a flexible tv screen that you can write on, and that's pretty cool.

Paper itself has come a long way since the days of barely usable pressed wood chunks. We still make papyrus for some reason, and the much flimsier recycled and construction papers. The paper technology has advanced in useful directions as well. We have loose leaf binder paper which is designed specifically to give as many papercuts to grade-schoolers as humanly possible, and synthetic papers that are smooth and plasticy that have made their ways into numerous school textbooks. Wax papers and carbon transfer papers, and durable printer paper with glossy sides. We've even developed a paper that can be printed on using heat, which should encourage a trend of kids breathing heavily onto their tests to obscure their poor grades.

Paper has even progressed as far as making pre-printed images that we can apply adhesively to other things, such as jackets, walls, textbooks, little brothers, and trapper keepers.

That's right, stickers.



Has there been a greater invention?

In essence, paper is possibly the greatest discovery of mankind, so to rate it any less than a 10 would probably not do it justice.

I'm giving it a 9.8 though, because to the best of my knowledge you can't eat it, or at least you can't digest it, and everyone knows that the perfect technology would be edible as well as-

What's that?

Edible Paper?

Well shit. Alright, 10/10.

Bravo, paper, keep up the good work.