Reckitt Benckiser, distributors of Lysol, have decided to give themselves a raise. Already overpriced, the big spray can used to cost $4.97 at Walmart. Yesterday, it was $5.97. Can someone tell me what’s in Lysol that justifies paying $6 a can at Walmart’s low-low pricing?
Never mind. I bought Walmart’s house brand for $2.57 or something. It doesn’t smell as good, but it claims to kill germs just like Lysol.
Let this be a lesson about something.
I have recently faced the fact that Diablo 3 is the king of ARPGs. I like Grim Dawn pretty well. Other titles have their good points. But D3 is the undisputed champion of this genre. Because I am very busy at school these days, I tend to spend an hour or two grooming my wizard and other characters. If my wizard were real, she would look like this:
. . . only much scarier. She is presently so scary that I don’t see how I’m going to avoid taking her into Torment 8 much longer. Here is an update of her gear and stats:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/simmery-1600/hero/41726720
As always, I have to point out that the paper damage you see there does not reflect her real in-game power. The Firebird set alone is conferring stupendous damage not shown on the stat page. Also not factored into page damage is the tremendous bonus to fire damage she gets from various items.
If you click around on that stats page, you can see my other toons and how they’re coming along. I’m especially pleased by the crusader, who I frankly never thought would amount to anything. She has a ways to go before she can comfortably enter T7, but that shouldn’t take long. She’ll never be the monster my wiz is because she (the crusader) is really a support character and not a damage dealer. Still, she’s pretty good.
As you can see, I’m kinda sorta working on my demon hunter, too. He’s not as unappealing as I remember. I’m trying to collect more of the Marauder set, upon completion of which he may be able to enter T6. His paper damage is quite high, but the in-game reality is not that impressive. He’s certainly nowhere close to the wizard or barbarian.
More as things move along.
For some reason, most of you don’t have the DIY Network. I won’t say you should be ashamed of yourselves, but this isn’t anything to be proud of either because you’re going to miss the renewal of the best flip series in the world, to wit, The Vanilla Ice Project.
I don’t know what this season has in store. Probably Wes Kane will be back as Rob’s right hand man. Unless the earth has turned incorrectly on its axis, Jeremy the College Kid should also be a regular. The identities of the rest of the crew are a mystery, but they may be pretty good. I don’t see how they can be as great as Pork Chop, Handsome Dan, George the Plumber, or other erstwhile cast members, but I could be surprised.
What I can count on is very high-end house flipping the likes of which no one has ever surpassed. The bling will be mighty, and I don’t doubt that Rob will bring his usual ingenuity to every crisis. Over the course of an unspecified number of weeks, prepare to watch a hopeless wreck of a mansion go from zero to hero. Kitchens will be destroyed and rebuilt with state-of-the-art accessories. Swimming pools full of unspeakable detritus will be transformed into sparkling water attractions. Tiki huts will almost certainly be fabricated on white sand beaches. Yard flora will rival the gardens of bygone sultans.
If you don’t watch any other do-it-yourself flip show this season, you owe it to yourself to be awed by the VIP Ninjas. Send word to your mother.
(I’m supposed to give credit for the photo, so here goes: By Dave Kleinschmidt from Williamstown, MA – Is this real? Cropped from original image., CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2558759)
My basement is flooded. We got a new washing machine because our old one was about 12 years old and the lid didn’t work right and it smelled funny.
The new one has a computer in it and makes little soft computer noises. It was that or some economy thing that looked like it would fall apart on the truck.
So Day 1, it wouldn’t work at all. The white haired repair guy showed up in his NRA ball cap and plaid shirt and PLUGGED A FREAKING LAPTOP INTO IT to run some diagnostics. Turned out a molex connector had come undone… on the truck. He had to carefully remove the front plastic bezel without destroying the clips (no mean feat) and undo about 14 pan screws to get to it. All better.
Until it started pouring water all over the floor.
Turns out that when I hooked it up, filled with pride and hubris and feeling invincible in my righteous superiority, I didn’t replace any of the rubber washers and just hooked it up with the same ones that had been in there for ten years.
Yeah, when I took the lines back off to replace them today, they were utterly shredded to pieces. Good times.
That’s uhh.. all. Chewbacca did not get wet, although his feet were mere.. err.. feet from the flood site.
I don’t mean to imply that I’m neglecting my housecleaning, just that I haven’t had much to report on this subject.
Things have moved along efficiently and happily. I continue to approach cleaning with a spatial rather than temporal mandate in mind. That is, I do not set rigid schedules but instead remind myself that I did X room last time, so I need to do Y room next. If you go by schedules, you will certainly fall behind. If you fall behind, you’ll get depressed and fall further behind. If you think of roomscapes instead of clocks and calendars, your priorities will stay intact. To do a room properly and knowing that a certain other room must be done properly during the next session — this is far superior to agonizing over how you can do Tuesday’s room when you don’t have time.
Swiffers and feather dusters, of course, remain my weapons of choice, but the reason I’m touching on this subject again is to introduce a new device which I’m ashamed to say I’ve overlooked as a cleaning necessity. As you know, I love my Riccar vacuum cleaner. I love it so much that I consider it my pet. You don’t need a dog if you have a good vacuum cleaner. It’s also nice to have a broom and a dustpan for general sweeping, as well as a whisk broom for small dry messes. However, whisk brooms sometimes don’t quite catch everything. More correctly speaking, the little plastic dustpans that accompany these brooms don’t lend themselves very effectively to collecting certain small objects, like shreds of paper or other flat things that seem to cling to tile in spite of energetic sweeping.
This is when you need a spot vacuum. And the best spot vacuum I’ve found is the Black & Decker Dustbuster.
The virtues of this product speak for themselves. For under $25, you can get a battery-charged sucker-upper of surprising power and reliability. Did you drop some little slivers from your paper shredder? Did you spill some peppercorns? Notice some bits of tracked-in dirt marring your recently mopped tile floor? Just run over to where you’ve hung the Dustbuster on its charging hook, suck up the offending particles, and you’re good to go. Every once in a while, dump out the little canister and wash the filter. That’s it.
I cannot recommend this device too highly. Maybe the competing Dirt Devil is just as good, but I prefer to support a company with “Decker” in the name because I’m reminded of Carl Weathers’ CIA character in Predator, and that’s the best reason I can think of to choose one product over another.
Go out today and get your Dustbuster. You’ll send me lots of thank-you notes.
Sim’s majik man was melting monsters last night. Too bad At&T gave you the big FU after we killed the boss.
If you ever get a chance to see The Gunfighter with Gregory Peck, you should do so.
It’s based loosely on the career of John (Johnny) Ringo, who was allied with the Clantons and McLaurys at the OK Corral. He was not a nice person, but neither was he the psycho preternatural super-killer so wonderfully depicted by Michael Biehn in 1993’s Tombstone. He was something in-between, an acquaintance of the “bad guys,” a gun hand who happened to be there and managed to survive.
The movie imagines an archetypal gunfighter only loosely based on the historical Ringo (in fact, the name John is changed to Jim, apparently to emphasize the fictional liberties).
Everything about this movie works. It’s a sterling example of perfect plotting, perfect character development, perfect staging, perfect black and white cinematography — whatever you can think of, this movie does it perfectly.
I would say it’s one of the three best things Peck ever did. The other two would be To Kill a Mockingbird and Twelve O’Clock High. The latter movie was directed by Henry King, who also did this one. Twelve O’Clock High is probably the most perfect World War II movie ever made, so Henry King is a genius in my book.
Long story short: see this somehow. It’s as good as movies get.