Product report: Hoodia, the Wonder Cactus

If you’ve ever looked over on the right side of this page, you might have noticed that I’ve got a little ad up trying to sell some hoodia. I’ve never had any myself, but a lot of people seem to like it, so I made a whole blog about hoodia to try and get some money out of it before the whole thing blows over. If you click on that ad, or any of those on the hoodia page, the vitamin company sends me a cut of what they make on it. It all comes out of their part, and the people buying the hoodia don’t have to pay any extra. So it doesn’t hurt them to click the ads, but they’ve got nothing to gain from it either, since they’re gonna have to pay the same no matter who gets the money. My plan’s to try to work with the hoodia a while, and then if things don’t pick up there I’ll probably move on to something else that there’s a lot of interest in, like iPods or pornography.

I thought it might be a nice gesture on my part if I checked out the hoodia to see if it really did anything, rather than just relying on some bushmen and TV news people. I didn’t really want to take it myself and kill my own appetite, cause if I didn’t want to eat there wouldn’t be much left that I did want to do, except maybe watch some TV, and I’m not even so keen on that until they get some new shows on. I don’t have much interest in watching those old shows over again, because by now I already know that they’re not any good, but with the new shows you don’t know that yet. You know what they say, hope springs eternal. Besides, I don’t weigh a whole lot as it is, and if I quit eating it’d just make things worse.

So instead I talked my roomie Linda into clicking on the ad and sending away for some. It came last week and she’s been taking it a few days, so I asked her what she thought of it. (This next part is the real product report. All the rest is stuff I threw in extra because I drank a little more green tea than usual.) Linda says that it did take away a good deal of her appetite, and that also she felt a bit more energetic than usual and that it knocked back the ADD and improved her ability to concentrate. She hadn’t expected anything more than the appetite part, and seemed pretty pleased to have gotten the other effects for no extra charge.

I wasn’t surprised about the extra effects, because I had read a similar report from those bushmen. They like to take it to go on these long hunting trips--seems it keeps them from getting tired of hunting quite so fast, and furthermore if they don’t catch anything, they don’t feel as bad about it as they usually would, but just eat some more hoodia. I don’t know if that occurs generally for most people, or if it’s just the bushmen and Linda, but if it does I hope the FDA doesn’t get wind of it, or I never will get anything out of those ads. For the most part the government doesn’t mind you taking something to fix a problem you’ve got--even if it gives you something worse than you already had, like that Vioxx--just so long as it doesn’t make you feel any happier than you did before you took it. If it comes out that people are taking something that makes them more cheerful than seems reasonable, the government will step right in and put a stop to it. For example, if you were to go on a big hunting trip but you didn’t catch anything, then when you got back home there wasn’t anything to eat there either, but instead of getting down about it you just thought “Oh, what the hell!” and kicked back with a glass of water and a big smile on your face, that’s the sort of thing the government would find vexatious, and would have to try to do something about it.

I would like to thank Linda for taking the hoodia and then reporting back to us about how it worked for her, and for clicking on that ad when she went to get it. I often test stuff first on Linda, because she’s got a strong constitution, and nothing bothers her very much. Over the years I’ve tried out a bunch of things on her, radioactive isotopes and all sorts of stuff, and she’s never had much of a problem with any of it. Once this guy told me that it wasn’t ethical to use Linda as a guinea pig, but you know how some people never are satisfied with what anyone else is doing, if they didn’t think of it themselves. The thing is that if I’d wanted a guinea pig, I’d have just gotten one at the store. I picked Linda on purpose because I thought she’d do a better job than that guinea pig, and not require so much cleaning up after.

It’s not like I try to hide the stuff in her food or something and trick her into eating it like you have to do with a cat—I always just hand it to her and say “Here, take this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s like a vitamin, kind of.”

She’s always come through OK, and I think that isotope thing is working out really well for her, cause if she has to get up in the night now for some reason, she can see where she’s going, and not run into stuff, and other people can find her in the dark too, if they need to. If I’d had some isotopes myself I probably wouldn’t have hit my toe on that mop bucket that Linda left out in the hall when I got up to go pee last night. The fact is I was meaning to have some, except that a little later I read where they’d given it to some rats, and they didn’t take to it like Linda had, and then they pulled it off the market. Though by then it was too late for those rats, and they never did quite get over it. I was sorry to hear about that, because when I was a kid I had a rat named Fred who made a pretty nice pet, so I have more feeling for rats that people do generally. Anyway, I wasn’t sure whether I’d prove to be more like Linda or a rat, so I decided to steer clear of that stuff, even though you could still get it on the internet for a while.

Love Potion No. 9

The train got me again this morning, but this time I’m sure it was not my fault, because I was thinking good thoughts, and besides I was like five blocks away from the track. I had just turned onto University and right away had to stop at the back of this long line of cars. I still feel that the basic principle is valid though, and that somebody in the car line must have been thinking bad thoughts, exceptionally bad thoughts it would seem, because I’ve never seen it catch so many cars all at once. I wish I could have counseled those negative drivers and maybe helped them to experience the peace and contentment that I have come to feel in my own life since last Friday morning, but unfortunately I was unable to sense which cars were causing the trouble. I sort of got a feeling that the problematic vibes were emanating from a clump of cars up around the intersection with Maple, that were blocking the intersection so that the Maple cars couldn’t go either, even though there was no train in their way, and despite the fact that the University cars had nothing to gain from blocking the Maple cars, other than to be about 10 feet closer to a moving train, which I feel sure did not even appear to be made of chocolate from their perspective. Anyway, it was just a vague sense of a small cloud of negativity, more like a negative patch of fog really, nothing concrete. I guess I don’t possess that particular psychic gift of being able to precisely pinpoint negative thoughts, though I do possess several other gifts, some psychic, some not, which I’m sure are equally useful to mankind, or will someday prove to be.

Fortunately, there was a song playing on the radio that has always troubled me, and I have been meaning for years to think about what the hell was going on with this song, and whether it really didn’t make much sense, or if it maybe made more sense than a regular song, and I just didn’t get it, but up to this point I’ve never had the time. Now, because the train was having to go to extraordinary lengths to nudge this recalcitrant group of drivers into the higher plane of existence that the train and I occupy, I finally had the time.

The song’s name is “Love Potion No. 9” and this is what disturbs me about it…well, first let me give you a brief synopsis of the plot, in case you don’t know the song. There’s this guy, and it seems that he’s a flop with chicks. This is a situation that I’ve experienced on occasion, incredible as that may seem to those who know me, and I can feel his pain, which for me is like a dull ache in the left upper chest that I sometimes mistake for a heart attack and have to go to the emergency room. Though he may experience it differently. It’s my understanding that the perception of chickflop pain varies greatly with the individual. I had a friend once who claimed that for him it was a sharp, needle-sticky kind of sensation in his right leg, but I don’t really buy that—everybody knows that this is a variety of heart pain, and the right leg is just too far from the heart for it to have gotten down there. I suspect that he was having sciatica, or maybe deep vein thrombosis, but I just nodded sympathetically and said “Ummm.” Once people latch on to these irrational beliefs, there’s really no way to dissuade them, and it’s a pain in the ass to even try.

What I think is really sad is that the guy in the song sought out the help of a trained professional—in fact, he did everything just like they tell you to in those public service announcements—and still things went so poorly for him.

First off, he made the sensible decision to go to a gypsy, not some phone psychic, or an unlicensed charlatan like that hippy guy that lived in an abandoned pig shack in Hawaii and told me and Kirsten that our love would last forever, when in fact it didn’t even make it through the end of the return flight. A gypsy would’ve know that.

And he didn’t just go to the first gypsy he happened to come upon, but instead went way across town so that he could see a gypsy with a gold-capped tooth, which is the ne plus ultra of gypsy love doctors. It’s similar to the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, but shinier. So the poor guy did everything like he should have, but due to the egregious malfeasance of that darned gypsy, obtained results that were far from satisfactory. Isn’t that the way of the world? You know what they say, there’s a rotten apple in every barrel. I don’t know if the gypsy just wasn’t paying attention, or maybe she was burned out on love doctoring and didn’t take any pride in her work anymore, or possibly she had some kind of weird brain tumor that made her hear things opposite from how they really are, or to hear stuff correctly but then do the opposite thing from what she should have done without meaning to, or maybe the bottles came from the supplier labeled wrong and it wasn’t really her fault. Oh no, it couldn’t have been that last one, cause the song says that she mixed it up there on the premises, in a sink, which doesn’t sound very sanitary to me. But all the others are still possibilities. I don’t know. All I know is this is one gypsy that ought to be sued the hell out of, and reported to the Better Business Bureau.

Cause the last thing this guy needed—that part of the song is clear even to me, and I’m not a gypsy—was an aphrodisiac for himself! But that’s what he got, and as a result of this prescribing error, he kissed a cop on 34st and Vine, a course of action he would never have considered had he not been under the influence of drugs. In the ensuing fracas, his potion bottle sustained multiple fractures, and the potion leaked out all over his new khaki Dockers, staining them so badly that even a Vietnamese drycleaner couldn't get it out. Frankly I still feel like he got pretty lucky with that cop, just losing a bottle of potion that wasn’t right for his condition to start with, and a pair of pants. A lot of cops wouldn’t have been so restrained in their response, and the situation could have turned real ugly.

Now some gypsy apologists try to claim that the gypsy was giving him the LP9 to slip into girls’ drinks while they were gone to the bathroom, and that he was the one who misunderstood, and didn’t bother to read the package insert, but this argument is completely refuted by even the most cursory examination of the lyrics. The song clearly states that he took the drug right there in the gypsy’s office, in full view of the gypsy herself, who didn’t lift one finger to stop him. And furthermore he engaged in substantial preparatory activity prior to quaffing the potion—holding his nose and closing his eyes, etc.—so his intentions would have been perfectly obvious to any gypsy worth her salt. I’m not even a gypsy, and I recognize the international signs that someone is about to drink medicine that smells like turpentine and looks like India ink. Hell, a two-year old child would have known what was going down, or a four-year old for sure.

So in the end, the poor guy was still a flop with chicks, but now it was worse than before, because he had taken that aphrodisiac and was even hornier than he usually was, which was already more than was constructive, given his situation. Not to mention that he’d had a very traumatic day, what with having to drive across town, and that little run-in with the cop and all, plus he was out whatever he’d paid for the potion. Cause there’s no way you’re ever going to get your money back from a gypsy. Don’t even try.

You know, I was thinking of trying to seek professional help for my own chickflop issues, but now I don’t know what to do, because my insurance won’t pay for a shrink, or a hooker, and this song guy’s experience has really put me off gypsies.

I hate that stupid train!

I still haven’t felt like doing anything about that fly shoe, but now it’s gotten covered up with some newspapers anyway, so I think I’m just going to forget about it and go ahead and throw the other one away, cause one shoe’s not much good to me.

Well, this morning I woke up and it’s 8:58! Seems that the electricity went out during the night and ruined the alarm clock, so now I’m really late for work. But I took the time to eat my cereal anyway, because breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and it’s a good thing I did, because it turns out that I was not destined to arrive at work any time soon.

The problem is that stupid train that always seems to be able to get right between me and work—or even worse, between me and home—no matter what time of day it is. So this morning it’s there and it’s just creeping along, not even as fast as I could walk, and it’s pulling like a hundred cars. I’m not kidding you—and there’re all just those flat ones with no sides, and there’s nothing on them. Completely empty, every one. Maybe that’s why it’s going so slow, they figure what the hell, we’re not pulling any real stuff anyway. I think if I were driving a train that didn't have anything on it, I'd be in a hurry to get somewhere where I could put something on it, but apparently these train guys don't share my sentiments. Then finally it comes to the last car and we’re all getting ready to drive and then the damn thing stops like three feet past the crossing, so of course the bars won’t come up and we’re all still stuck there in the hundred degree heat! And it sat there for 9 minutes—I timed it!

I hate that train! And you know what, I think they can tell when you don’t like them, and it’s because this train can sense my negative thoughts that it’s always getting in my way and making me late for work. It’s like cats, you know how they can always find the one person in the room who doesn’t like cats, and get in their lap and do that thing they do like they’re kneading bread, which is really just an excuse to claw somebody’s leg. Maybe that sounds crazy, but I really believe it’s true. And it’s just trains, not planes or cars or boats. I know some people think that cars are like that too, but they’re not. It’s only trains.

However, I think that the people in the cars could tell, some of them at least, the ones who are attuned to this sort of spiritual energy, because a couple of them kept looking at me kinda weird—the guy in the white pickup next to me in the middle lane, and the woman who was right in front of me. She kept fiddling with the mirror, like she was checking her makeup, but I could see her eye in the mirror, and she was looking right at me. I think they could tell it was my fault that we were stuck there in the heat, and it was starting to piss them off, especially after the thing just completely stopped dead on the tracks.

So I decided to try thinking positive thoughts, to see if that would help, but it wasn’t easy because I really hate that train. First I cleared my mind, which is always easier first thing in the morning, because not so much has gotten in it yet, and then I imagined that the train was made of dark chocolate, and that all of the flat cars, instead of being empty, had cheerleaders on them, waving pompoms. It was working pretty good, I was feeling a lot more positive toward the train, and I decided to imagine that we were on a beautiful beach in the Caribbean, with that clear turquoise water like I like, and there were a bunch of girls there on the beach too, wearing bikinis. And sure enough, it wasn’t thirty seconds before the train moved on and let us by. To tell you the truth, I kinda hated to leave, because of the bikini girls, but I knew I needed to get to work, and besides the people behind me were getting impatient now, and starting to honk.

I was so impressed with the results I had obtained that I decided I’d try it when I got to the office too, but that didn’t work as well. I was about an hour and a half late, and my boss was pretty annoyed, and even though I imagined that she was wearing a bikini most of the day, her disposition did not improve noticeably.

A fly-blown night

I’ll try to make a blog today, but I don’t know if I’m up to it, cause I really didn’t get much sleep last night. I’d gotten in bed and was just about to turn out the light, when I see this fly buzzing around. I was really tired, and I wanted to ignore him and go on to sleep, but I couldn’t stop thinking that as soon as I was asleep he would land on my face and start walking around on my mouth. In fact, I sleep with my mouth a little bit open—it’s a lot cuter than it sounds—so there’s no guarantee that he wouldn’t walk right in my mouth. That wouldn’t be good for either of us, but you know flies are not that smart, and there’s no telling what they’re liable to do.

The prospect of mouth flies seemed totally unacceptable to me, so I got up and looked around for something to hit him with, but the only thing readily available was a pair of Jockey shorts that I had thrown on top of the dresser instead of putting in the drawer. I tried those but they were too floppy, and besides I got to thinking that if I did squash the fly with my underwear I’d have to throw them away because there’s no way I’d be wearing anything with smushed fly on it.

Besides, while I was chasing him around with the underwear he flew into the closet, so I shut the door and stuffed some dirty clothes into the crack at the bottom, and figured I’d deal with it in the morning. But then I went to the bathroom, and when I got back he had somehow gotten out and was flying around the room again, all abuzz with excitement about his great escape.

Anyway, I was pretty much awake by now, so I put on my shoes and went out on the back porch to get the fly swatter. We actually have a collection of four flyswatters that we keep in the flyswatter area, but the only one I like is the turquoise plastic one with the wire handle. There’s another one that’s all plastic, but it doesn’t work too well, and another one that has a wire handle but with a wire mesh head instead of the plastic. You can kill a fly with it, but the trouble is that the squashed flies tend to get stuck in the wire mesh, and once they’ve dried there’s no getting them out. With the turquoise plastic one the dead flies just bounce off and fall down behind the couch or whatever. I’m really not sure what happens to them then, if they just disintegrate, or if the cats eat them, or the Roomba gets them, but I never do see them again, and that’s all that matters to me. Out of sight, out of mind.

So now I’m back in the bedroom, wide awake now and armed, but all this fanning around has stirred up my floaters. I had a detached retina a few years ago, and now I have this crap inside my eyeball, little black things that float around and look just like flies. So I’m swatting away at stuff, but there’s not really anything there—it’s just the floaters. Finally, just by pure chance I hit the real fly, and he falls right into one of my black Rockports, that are my favorite shoes. I was really sick of messing with this fly, so I just put the shoe out in the hall, thinking I’d deal with it in the morning, but this morning I didn’t want to deal with it either, so it’s still sitting there. I may have to throw it away, cause I’m not so keen on the idea of wearing a shoe that’s got a dead fly in it. That’s one of the main reasons I prefer to swat them in the living room, cause they just fall behind the couch. That and the light’s better in there.