College girls love Tibet Snow
I just love this product promo sheet, which a colleague showed me today. It's from a skin cream product called Tibet Snow, which a friend of hers bought in Little India.
The text for this is wonderful - that antiquated colonial ESL that's spelled properly but still not quite right.
"College girls love Tibet Snow. Its use not only makes faces charming and fascinating but keeps off dust."
And this anti-dust property is so magical that "skin remains free from all diseases"!
The winning line has to be this one, though:
"Tibet Snow turns unpleasant odour of perspiration in armpits into most desirable flavour."
(The woman to the right does look like she's ready to lick her armpit.)
Ewwwww.
The product itself didn't stay long in my colleague's boudoir, though: "It was dreadful stuff, with a texture like sugar syrup and corn starch mixed together," she said. "It was dry and sticky at the same time. It took me a long time just to get it off." It hit the trash within a couple of days.
Good thing, too. A quick websearch yeilds few, but fascinating, results - including this query on Yahoo! Answers:
Has any1 ever used tibet snow face cream?
heard its good for blemishes and pigmentation marks....but does it reli work?
And the answer:
tibet snow face cream has mercury in it;
this skin lightening ingredient is harmful to the skin;
not to mention body poisoning especially after long term use;
before you buy any skin lighteners;
know the do's and don'ts...
So much for remaining disease free. Though aspiring beauty queens should have been tipped off by the notice down there at the bottom that Tibet Snow is produced by the esthicians at Kohinoor Chemical Co. in Karachi.
A little alarming to see that their entire website is now defunct.
The product is still listed (but not currently available) at an online Islamic shopping store, with this endorsement:
Classic... You must remeber this on your mothers
shelf? The smell...MMmm MMmm. Now you can smell just like mum!
My mom didn't smell like mercury poisoning, but still, if after all this you really must have some Tibet Snow, you can buy it at the Asian Cookshop for the whopping prince of £1.09. Just don't expect me to enjoy the desirable flavour of your armpits.
Starred
First I was Ninja'd, now Starred. Saturday's Toronto Star ran a piece on the Bookninja "book covers revisited" contest, and wouldn't you know it, my Handmaid's Tale (tail?) copy was pictured first.
I created four entries, but that one was the least clever yet most racy image - somehow I knew it'd be the one with legs, so to speak. Sex sells, still.
For those of you wondering, the French maid pictured there is not, in fact, my good lady wife. No, I just snagged it from a Halloween costume website - very likely breaking someone's copyright, although there may be some defence in altering it. And heck, I doubt the Barney's Version guy got permission from Hanna Barbera. Hopefully the Star won't object to my screengrab, as they didn't include the story in their online Ideas section.
Can't wait to see who wins....
Ninja’d!
So, two of my photoshopped CanLit revisionist covers made the final cut in the Bookninja contest!
Give it a look, and maybe e-mail your votes (mine are The Whirlpool and The Handmaid's Tale). I'd love it if you voted for mine, but I'm not going to ask you to, as I think there are much better ones on the list.
It's too late for me to send it in now, but I had another entry idea yesterday. Margaret Atwood gets it pretty hard in the contest, since her titles lend themselves so well to spoofing. So here's another, particularly appropriate for Bookninja.
CanLit Redux
There's a very fun photoshopping contest that I noticed on John Gushue's blog the other day, and just couldn't pass up.
The competition, being held by Bookninja, is pretty simple: take a novel and rebrand it with a cover designed to boost sales.
Most of the entries so far lean proudly toward CanLit, so I thought I'd chip in a few entries in that vein. They don't hold a candle to the samples posted thus far on Bookninja, but this stuff sure is fun. Here's what I came up with:
The contest closes on Sunday Oct. 19th.
This might pinch a little
One of the great things about working on Front Street in Toronto is being able to look into the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, and seeing all the weird-ass things people hold conventions about.
This afternoon, an ad-bearing truck parked outside our office to advertise this product (apologies for the cellphone pic):
The product advertised: The Facet Gun. Looks a bit like a pop riveter, or a caulking gun. But when you look it up online, you can see it's used for quick 'n easy ... spinal surgery.
The Facet Gun is made by US Spine, a major manufacturer of spinal surgery equipment. Apparently it's "an entirely new type of posterior fixation" (oh man, the pun factor... can't... resist... "posterior fixation"... tee hee.) It quickly bolts on spinal implants. You know, in case you are up for a little DIY.
As my cellmate Kev says, the most disturbing part of this ad: "Shouldn't that guy be wearing gloves or something?"
As it turns out, the North American Spine Society is holding their annual general meeting in Toronto. There's even some sort of workshop being held behind closed doors here in the CBC building. It's awfully tempting to crash the Cervical Spine Stabilization workshop or sneak into the Interbody Fusion Technologies class, although perhaps I'd be better suited for "An Introduction to Spine Care for Nonphysician Providers".
But it does amaze me - how many people walking past this mobile billboard are going to be in a position to make spinal surgery purchasing decisions? Obviously enough to keep US Spine in the green. And if you look at their Thoracolumbar products page, you'll see something even quicker and easier: a "Percutaneous Locking Facet Fixation" product called "LocTite". Yes, that LocTite - the guys who invented superglue.
Maybe you can do this spinal fusion stuff at home after all.
The Great Pumpkins
Now that I've got a new camera, I've finally had time to fool around with some different techniques, including HDR (high dynamic range imagery.) These days it's pretty simple to do - basically you take three images of the same scene - one underexposed, one overexposed, and normal) and then use a program such as Photomatix to stitch them together. The technique brings out the colours and subtleties of both light and dark parts of the picture.
This pumpkin patch is my very first attempt at an HDR image - no masterpiece, but I do like the slightly surreal and spooky feeling it created. And as my colleague Tim Neesam says, HDR is great for skies.
Spiders update
What the hell is it with spiders at this time of year?
I don't know about you, but in my part of the world the spiders have suddenly grown to the size of small mice, and are brazenly casting webs across anything that might come into contact with human flesh.
Faithful readers, if there are any, will recall that there's already bad blood between me and the order Araneae, as they routinely string invisible traps across my front porch. But last week they got serious about it. A hamster-sized beast strung a garrot line across the porch first thing in the morning, but lucky for us it caught a bumblebee instead of one of my kids.
And these things are hyper-aware in the fall - when I went to get wife to show her, it had hauled its catch over to the railing to hide.
And yesterday, as I carefully exited the house with my customary mine-sweeper arms flailing about, I caught a thread that was not stuck to the railings - it ran directly over my head to a giant fat arachnid dangling above me. It was clearly orchestrating one of those Peter Parker neck bite assaults - one that would not bestow superpowers, just nightmares.
I dispatched him with a broom, but when I went to get my bike... well, they'd been there too.
I don't know if this web was supposed to immobilize my bike, or just muffle the bell so I couldn't use it to call for help.
And yes, I'm obviously still playing with my new camera. Those using dialup should feel free to walk away with no hard feelings.
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