Stay Tuned/Things That Annoy My Wife and Other Delights

Although my usual method is to try to keep my private life out of these items, it bears noting that there is another person who regularly contributes bits to these columns, and I am married to her.

While I wouldn't describe her as a grumpy person all the time, in many ways she resembles Nicole Hollander's creation, The Woman Who Is Annoyed About Everything. I recall saying to her once that she really should budget her righteous indignation, so as to reserve it for the more important irritants in life, to which she replied, "You seem to think I have a finite supply."

Sometimes, I admit, I exploit this. I did, for example, deliberately lead her to the display of pink Wilson athletic equipment in our local Target because I knew it would make her gnash her teeth.

No, this is not the breast-cancer line you'll find on Wilson's web site. These are not to be found anywhere on Wilson's web site. If I were them, I'd be embarrassed about them too. The line is called "It's a Girl Thing" - no, seriously - and all the equipment is pink with white accents. Girly accents. Like polka dots. Because, of course, if you are a girl, you have to be pink, especially if you are one of those unfeminine girls who like sports - clearly those girls especially need more pink and why don't they just give up on this sports stuff now and go sew a dress or something and leave the sports to the boys?

OK, sorry, I may be reading a little much into this appallingly bad promotion, but really, this stuff was very pink. Worst part: The tennis racket in the line carried an endorsement from the Williams sisters, who really should think these things through before they follow the money.

A lot of things that annoy my wife have to do with gender roles and expectations. Since the subject is moderately touchy with me too, for different reasons, this is the rant we find ourselves agreeing upon most often. The Pink Topic has come up in many places and in many ways. Why pink especially? Because pink is the one reserved color, and it's a one-sided situation. You may find female-directed products in many other colors, but you will never find a male-directed product in pink. Never. And of course in the case of the Wilson products, as with toys and other such things, there is the question of whether the products should be sold with a gender bias at all - I'm not sure I approve of any toys being marketed just to girls or just to boys, since what it does is tell the boys that it's not right to have Barbies (and tells the girls, conversely, that it's not right to have Hot Wheels).

But let's move on, leaving behind only the faint echoes of the motto Wilson has chosen for this product line: Bold. Pretty. Pink.

It's a little harder to get my wife into a state of high dudgeon in the grocery store, because we are jaded, and also because our reaction these days is more likely to be amusement (and to make a note to write about it later) than irritation or anger.

But one thing that will almost always get her ranting is food for the lazy. The classic example is the cookie dough that comes in its own pan, prescored into portions, for those people who just couldn't be bothered to cut the chub of dough into cookie portions and put those on a baking sheet themselves. We have nothing against "heat and eat" products as a whole - god knows we consume a fair bit of frozen pizza, Marie Callender's pot pies, etc in this house - but some of them seem just a little too egregious.

For example, at the store this weekend we saw shrink-wrapped russet potatoes. That's right. Each potato in its own tight-fitting plastic cover. The label gets points for truthfulness: The product is called "Wrapped Russet Potato." Apparently the idea is convenience in microwaving potatoes (as a substitute for baking them). The label had instructions, which I did not read closely, but I imagine they said "Poke holes in plastic with fork so potato does not explode. Nuke until done." Or equivalent.

I also didn't check the price closely because I didn't want to think about how much more you are paying by buying one of thse things (as compared to a non-wrapped bulk potato and about a square foot of plastic wrap).

Of course, the zealot in me says that anyone who'd microwave a potato probably is the kind of person who'd buy this, but that's personal taste, and I will spare you the rant on why microwaving a potato is nothing at all like baking it.

Another interesting product I had been seeing lately is a Keebler (Kellogg's) cookie called Dunking Delights. I think my wife hadn't encountered these until she got to the store, where she was mildly appalled.

They are oblong cookies (someone needs to come up with a better name for that drug-capsule profile, which is not an ellipse). The television ads are fairly amusing, explaining that the reason they stretched the cookie is that the elves are too short to dip the normal-shaped cookie into the milk down in the bottom of the huge glass (picture them leaning over the edge on stepladders, etc etc).

Unfortunately, as of this writing, the useless new-product page at Keebler's site doesn't show you the package at a large enough size for you to realize that the cookies have an arrow embossed into them. It's the major feature of the cookie design, in fact. THIS END TOWARD MILK. (No, they don't really say that.)

I'm sure Keebler probably intends this to be part of the fun and games - someone somewhere thought this was fiendishly clever. One side of the cookie has an indentation for one's thumb and the arrow; the other side has wave-like little depth lines calibrated as "Dab," "Dip," and "Dunk" (in order of increasing submersion).

At this point you may insert a rant from my wife about "cookies do not need a user interface" and "how stupid do they think we are, anyway" and so on. We'll just take it as read.

By the by, I notice that one of the two flavors of Dunking Delights is "cheesecake" flavor. There seems to be a trend in this direction lately, with a lot of cheesecake-flavored things (is cheesecake really a "flavor" at all?) and recipes for cheesecake-like substances and so on. (And let us never forget the Tub o'Cheesecake.)

I have a recipe here, from a coupon circular, for little miniature cheesecakes-after-a-fashion made in cupcake cups. The product touted is not cream cheese, mind you, but Nestlé Toll House Swirled Morsels - that is, black-and-white swirled chocolate chips. Under the circumstances, the choice of cheesecake as an underpinning, instead of other baked goods, is interesting.

I'm not clear that there is some sort of special demand for cheesecake right now; cynically, I am more inclined to think that this is yet another appeal to the people who are too lazy to actually prepare food. I don't know that mixing cream cheese with sugar and a little flour and pouring that into a container is any more or less tricky than, say, making normal cupcakes ... but maybe it looks less threatening. I don't know. At any rate, it's definitely fertile ground for the development of new recipes in the "mix and dump" genre so beloved by food conglomerates.

Understand, sometimes I find things which annoy me irrationally as well (as should be obvious to regular readers). Then sometimes I find things which are so out in left field that I'm not at all sure what to do with them - I honestly don't know whether to be annoyed or bewildered or what.

For example, I have a note sitting around here about a "Colorology" line of scented candles I saw at Target. These candles come in six colors - red, orange, violet, green, blue and white - and those colors are also the fragrance names. That is, the blue candle is Blue flavor. Beyond that, one can only guess. What we are told is the effect each scent is supposed to have; which are, respectively for the colors above, passion, energy, indulgence, renewal, serenity, and peace.

Putting aside such quibbles as whether there is actually a difference between serenity and peace, or why white stole yellow's slot, the question here is whether anyone in the world seriously buys into this. Sure, you can punch "colorology" into Google and get back reams of deep flakiness, but those are not necessarily the same people who are grabbing overpriced candles from a Target endcap.

Certainly it seems clear that the nice people at Chesapeake Bay Candle, despite their touchy-feeliness, don't take this color stuff seriously - to them it's just another way to sell candles. And I'd like to think, similarly, that the average buyer is just saying, "ooh, nice candle" and not thinking too hard about the batty parts. But maybe I am being too optimistic.

Finally, it was brought to my attention that we have not yet mocked the Betty Crocker (General Mills) Warm Delights line (speaking of products for the lazy), and expectations must be met. So I reproduce this conversation:

Her (in checkout line): Where did you go?
Me: I just went to make a note of "Warm Delights."
Her: Do you eat it or do you have sex with it?
Me: Have you seen the ads?
Her: Yeah - looks like both.
Me: That was my thought.

She was just having fun with the ridiculous name, because at the time that conversation took place, she had already tried the product - we were sent a sample some months ago. She said it tasted like somewhat undercooked brownies, not bad, not great. Certainly nothing to provoke the kind of reactions the woman in the commercial has. You know, I don't actually mind using sex to sell products, but I also don't expect my brownies to give me orgasms.

In fact, I think it would be a little disconcerting if they did.

and now back to our program

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