Consumer Review: MyVu!

Woot.com


Every once in a while, electronics clearinghouse woot.com runs an event called a woot-off, which is a good way to make me buy stuff, because it makes purchasing needless electronics into a game, with timers and sirens and competition and congratulatory messages.

Recently, I got swept up in the madness and got the MyVu Personal Media Viewer, a purchase based on overcaffeination and the promise that I would look like Geordi LaForge. It plugs into an Ipod 5th Gen and gives a floating, Viewfinder-sized video image from your Ipod in glasses. I got it for fitty bucks, and am pleased to see that the parent website offers it for two hunnert, because that makes me look like slightly less of a sucker.

Maiden Voyage

First thing: obviously, they look awesome on. As I put them on during my train ride this morning, I was slightly self-conscious plugging in the attached earphones. Put in your ear-plugs, put on your eye-shades, you know where to put the cork. The video screens on the inside of the glasses are about the size of a fingernail each, and in a dark room, it looks like you are watching a small screen in a theatre.


The video quality is the same as the Ipod. This toy would make most sense to use to watch vids on a long car or airplane ride. I like the privacy of it. The two screens made me feel a little cross-eyed upon first wearing, but I got used to them.

(People keep commenting on my gloves, but I swear they’re just to wear on my bike!)

Now I see this clearly. My whole life is pointed in one direction. There never has been a choice for me. I am a nerd. I know it, Jackie Kashian knows it, and woot knows it.

Self Reflective Blogging

POSTSCRIPT: ZOMG, Woot found my post and linked to it from their blog- so if I link back to a blog linking to my blog, will the universe implode? Let’s see!

POSTSCRIPT PART DEUX: Well, the Woot.com link was interesting, as I watched 800 people traipse through my blog over the next couple days, leaving neither comments nor footprints, just like they were never here at all. Maybe there’s a lesson there about the internet. Et tu, page hits?


The real thing I wanted to mention was the danger of wearing the MyVu Personal Media Viewer in public. I wore them on the train one day and realized that an ex-boyfriend was in kicking distance and I had to pretend not to be myself, or if I was myself, absolutely I was not wearing wack-ass glasses.Yes! I am an asshole.

Oh, Oh, Oh, Sexy Vampire!

My friend Pete, owner and proprietor of Disko Warp records, mentioned to me the other day that his single, Oh Oh Oh Sexy Vampire, had gotten a lot of attention because people thought it might be connected to the teen novels by Stephanie Meyer, the “Twilight” series.

I hadn’t heard of it, when I was a teen we went to Anne Rice for our sexy vampires. Then, I went to a party and wound up getting into a discussion with a group of girls that were obsessed with the selfsame series aimed at teens, but read by adults, as all too often tragically happens.

I pointed to an article that posited that vampires had to be fictional, because mathematically they are impossible. If every vampire created a vampire every day, in five days we’d all be vampires, like some sort of bloodsucking Ponzi scheme.

By day 4, none of us would be going to parties, because we’d all be locked in our houses wearing neckbraces and garlic necklaces, because holy shit, there are fucking vampires out there! This girl got REALLY MAD and refused to laugh at any of my hilarious jokes. People suck, and that’s why I’m becoming a vampire. At least then the sucking will have some sort of purpose.

Meeting Roddy Piper

I am hosting for the fantastic Troy Thirdgill and feature Darrin Meyer at Portland’s Harvey’s Comedy Club this weekend, and last night who stopped in but “They Live” star “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, as handsome as ever with a titanium hip.

Fatty Carbuncle- Another Repost From I Could Kill Her

Dear Elaine;

Listen. I know you’re concerned with your weight. How do I know? Because you’re a girl and because you’re alive. Our guy friend wondered to me why most women think they’re fat when they’re perfectly lovely, and I think it might be because when we go to the clothing store, the only items that fit us have a silhouette of a whale on the label.

In general, if the size number is greater than the age at which we lost our virginity, we start getting concerned that we’re hideously fat. I just read the touching book about funnyman Chris Farley, and evidently I weigh the same as Chris Farley at a “good” weight. So we’ve gotta do something.

A lot of people say they just don’t know how to get in shape. I know how. It’s just that it’s hard work. I was watching a show about weight loss, and how it’s just an equation- if you take in fewer calories than you put out, you’ll lose weight. I said, thanks a lot, TV- you think I’m fat *and* bad at math.

The last time I lost a lot of weight, women would ask me all the time how I did it, and as I explained that I was training for the Portland marathon, running 40 miles a week, I could see their eyes glaze over with disinterest, and they would say, oh, well, my friend’s been sleeping in a hydraulic tube, wrapped in Saran Wrap smeared with lard and beeswax, and I was hoping it was something like that.

I’m not working hard anymore. This time I’m working out smarter. This time I’m gonna lose weight in a fast and easy way!
What are my options for nutty-ass, health-endangering fad diets?

I do know a guy who is the last living Atkins dieter. I am not a good candidate for that, because I don’t eat meat, so I am not swayed by the magic of eating bacon smeared with butter. As far as I can tell, all that would be left for me to eat is celery and dust. Also, I read that carbohydrates are not just the fuel for your body, they’re what powers your brain, which is why every Atkins aficionado I have known has had ketosis breath and the attention span of a potato-starved gnat.

I was curious about Alli, the little blue diet pill that makes you shit fat*. There is a helpful booklet that comes with Alli that reads: There are some side effects, which include “oily spotting” and shitting when you hadn’t planned to. Don’t be a baby, Elaine – it’s all the same symptoms as you get from eating at Taco Bell.

The book also says: the excess fat floating on the toilet water may look like oil from a slice of cheese pizza.

See that? Already Alli has helped me! I’ll never eat cheese pizza again! Blarg! And it’s classic Clockwork Orange-style reprogramming: instead of feeling watching violent films and feeling nauseous, you’ll grow to associate eating a doughnut with the very real possibility of crapping a stick of butter on the subway.

* This is not their official motto- yet! I have helpfully emailed it to them and am patiently waiting for a response.

All the skinny bints at work go on about the Master Cleanse diet. A couple of years ago, it gained some popularity because Beyonce went on it so that she would not be mistaken for the fat, talented girl in Dreamgirls.

Apparently, the difference between this and real-life anorexia are the duration and hot lemonade, which has just enough maple syrup in it to keep you alive- and it’s supposed to turn you inside out with the mastery of its cleansing.

It seems that when people are not worried about the size of their ass, they’re concerned with what’s inside of it. A very similar diet is the cabbage soup diet, which is the same thing except you pretend you’re eating soup, and then you fart yourself thin. I guess I’m not clear on the details.

Repost- Sympathy for the Haley

I’m reposting what I sent in to I Could Kill Her last week.   (update: a local comic had a blog with her best friend for about a year, now I see that it’s a spam site.)


Barbie portrait by Miss Aurora.

My name is Virginia. I’m in my thirties, because I screwed up my original plan, which was to OD in a nightclub bathroom at 25 with panties around my ankles and a wet cigarette in my mouth.

I am constantly going to baby showers and being made to endure foul acts, such as sniffing and identifying various brands of chocolate melted into diapers, which is against the Godiva convention. I have, on some level, become inured to it. But nothing hurts like your first time.


My first time was Alisa. We met in Dallas, Texas, where we took drugs together, went dancing together. We had matching candy-colored vibrators. I was thrilled when she joined me in Portland, and I started dreaming about us growing up to be Cougars together.


Then the day came that she told me she was expecting. Worst of all, SHE HAD DONE IT ON PURPOSE! I felt like I was punched in the stomach. I pointed out to her that a baby is like a wild animal that will shit anywhere they happen to be. Babies are terrorists, and their weapons are noise and tears.

I tried to put on a brave face, but I don’t know how to do that, so I complained and felt sorry for myself. One day, she gave birth to a thing that I had to pretend was awesome, and whose fontanel she expressly forbade me to touch. I continued to call and pretend that times were still good, but if my stories were more than ten seconds long, or did not center on her little homunculus, she tended to drift off.


The breaking point came when her baby was approaching a year old. I will never forget baby’s birthday, because not only is it Cinco de Mayo, a day where I express my love for the Hispanic culture by drinking margaritas. That day, I stopped by the house to say hello and found a party in progress. A party I had not been invited to. A baby party.


The house was insanity. There were people putting food in their pants, smashing M&M’s into the floor, and talking about babies. A woman asked how I knew Alisa, and I said, I’ve known her all my adult life, how do YOU know her? Oh, I see. Three months of play group.

The words dripped from my mouth like toxin. I ran out of the house crying, tripped over something shaped like Snoopy and fell, sprawled on the grass in front of the picture window to the amusement of the adults inside. I swore never to return.

You Say You Want A Revolution-

Every Summer, there is a visible increase in bike ridership in Portland. Every year when the Tour de France starts, there are more bikes. This year, with gas topping four-bucks-fifty, there are still even more bikes.

In general, this is a good thing- for one, for the first time since the Carter-era gas shortage, car fatalities have gone down nationally.
On the other hand, I read that bike commuters are bad for the planet, because we live longer and use more resources, and if we really loved the earth, we’d all ride scooters and smoke.
Despite this, I like when there are more bikes, except when it inconveniences me- like when helpful wags wave at me manically as they approach in the wrong direction in the bike lane, or when the Portland police take it upon themselves to set up “sting” operations, like the one at the traffic circle in Ladd’s Addition on Monday. (In Little Rascals style, a bike who had been stopped at the Stop Sign Which Seems Superfluous circled back to the entrance of the Addition to warn the morning bike traffic that we’d better stop for once, which was very nice.)

This morning, a new commuter pulled up and we had the following conversation:

Nice Lady: Hey, I saw that you tripped the signal at 21st and Division! I thought we had to wait for a car!
Me: Oh, no, if you see a tar circle on the ground, pull into the outer third and it should trip the signal.
Nice Lady: That’s great! How long have you been bike commuting?
Me: (Bashfully) Well, several years anyway- I just hit 9000 miles on my odometer!
Nice Lady: Oh my gosh! Well, thanks so much!
Me: Um…Excuse me, but isn’t your helmet on backwards?