Dandy Blend

Yes, it is the official drink of Dandy Reviews Everything. Created by Dr. Gail, a botanist from Rutgers University, Dandy Blend is an instant herbal beverage made of water-soluble extracts of roasted roots of dandelion, chicory and beets, and the grains of barley and ryes. It was created as a substitute for coffee, the caffeine of which Dr. Gail claims causes "accelerated aging, weakening of the immune system, impaired digestion, and blood sugar fluctuations, which contribute to weight gain and mood disorders." Not only is Dandy Blend caffeine free, it provides a panoply of trace minerals that most people lack in their diet. Furthermore, if you suffer from stomach ulcers, or are otherwise peptically challenged, Dandy Blend won't upset you like coffee will.

If that's not enough to pique your interest, consider this: coffee is not grown in the US. It comes from far off lands, and the scruples of the coffee dealers are usually highly dubious; most coffee farmers are not paid a fair price for their crop. Thankfully, you need not worry about the social ramifications of buying Dandy Blend. "Dandy Blend is the patriot's coffee. All the ingredients come from America's agricultural bounty," says Dandy drinker Sara Montrone, an expert in sustainable agriculture and fair trade, and a red-blooded American.

Dandy Blend is a safer, more nutritious, and more responsible alternative to coffee. That's why I'm happy to say my mug is half full.

Kick-Ass (Hardcover Collection)

Many factors caused me to resist reading the Kick-Ass comic books as they were released: I had heard that they were overly violent, there were long expanses of downtime between issues, and now they're making the comics into a movie that looks fairly cheesy. I'd heard a lot of exciting things as well, though, about how the comics create a realistic, modern story of a superhero, so when the collected version came out in hardcover, I decided to give it a chance.

Some of my concerns were justified, some of them not at all. The story itself is nothing short of incredible. ((Spoilers ahoy)) Some comic book nerd decides to put on a costume, more or less on a lark, and train to be a superhero. He doesn't have some dark origin story, he just loves comic books. So he goes out to try to protect his neighborhood, threatens some thugs, and then the brutal violence of the comic rears its head: he is beaten, stabbed in the gut, and then hit by a car. He spends the next several months in the hospital and in physical therapy. ((End spoilers))

The images are gruesome, and definitely not for those who can't stand to see violence, but I respect the artistic choice to show what would really happen to someone foolish enough to fight crime with no super powers or advanced military training. Beyond the realism of the violence, the book does a great job of showing how a real-life superhero might become famous through popular websites like YouTube and MySpace, and through coverage on the news and late night television. The characters also all have real-life origin stories which make sense in a world that, up until that point, only had superheroes in comic books.

Overall, I was incredibly impressed by the book, and the quality of the writing and plotting was such that I felt the graphic violence was justified by the content. I was dismayed to find, however, that in the back of the book was a compilation of the "Greatest Hits" from the stories, which was essentially all the most disgusting, violent images of the book all in one place. Why would someone add that to their comic? It undermines the intelligence of the rest of the book to cater to the violence-porn audience.

I give the book and story 9/10 asses kicked, but I give the decision to include the "Greatest Hits" pages at the end 0/10 asses kicked. Any comic book reader who can get past the extreme violence will find a lot to love about this story. Anyone who cannot should give it a wide berth.

American Science & Surplus

Maybe this sounds familiar: You’re at home making a shopping list. On your list you have written the following items:

127 Slime Slingers
2 Giant Horse Heads (fake)
15 Geodes (real)
4 Semi-Automatic Bug Bots
1 Radiation meter
1 African Pterosaur skull
2 Home Shrimp Growing Kits
Switches
Brake lights for head
500 pencils printed with “Louisiana Rural Water Assoc.”

Then you sit back and wonder where to purchase all of these disparate items. You think, “Well, Target and Walmart certainly try to have everything I would ever want to buy. However, they are on the other side of town, thereby requiring that a great deal of time and fossil fuel be expended. Furthermore, my chances of having a fender-bender in the parking lot are, like, 20 times higher than anywhere else, and everyone who shops in those stores is completely insane, and the customer service is crappy because the employees are paid peanuts and treated like lowly, vassal creatures, which makes me feel terrible, and I want to die every time I shop there, and the products suck and aren't made to last, and stores like that drive out family-owned businesses, and....” But alas, you go anyway. After four hours of exhausting scanning through towering, mind-boggling labyrinths of shelves, under blinding artificial light, you come up completely…without what you went in to buy.

Well, my friends, fret no longer! And look no further than the internet! No, not Amazon.com. Not Ebay.com, either. Everything on your list, plus thousands of other things you never knew you wanted, can all be found at one amazing online store: American Science & Surplus. This site is AMAZING. Not only can you get a brass sextant for $29.95, 100 mini cotters for $1.75, and a life-sized translucent green frog with colorful, anatomically correct organs for a mere $1.50, you also get a photo and a slightly humorous drawing and description of each item! Wow!

Rock-bottom prices, hassle-free shopping, a sense of humor, and wacky, high-quality stuff you never knew you could buy. Need I say more? No, I needn't. This amazing web store speaks for itself. Check it out at www.sciplus.com

Being Angry

*A guest post by Sara Montrone (not pictured above)*

People say that being angry is a waste of energy. I say being angry is the necessary obverse of being satisfied. Anger, as joy and sorrow and made-up feelings like love, is what propels us. Take inventions. Necessity the mother of invention? Try anger.

“Golly, I sure do wish my shoelaces would stop coming untied.” Does that seem like the type of emotional reaction that is going to result in a solution? Hell no, try this: “For F*#$ sake! My GD shoelaces keep bloody falling apart!” And that my friends, is how Velcro was born.

So I encourage you all to embrace this gift that only we as humans have been given. Keep the coals of that fire within you glowing and stoke it every now and again with the obnoxious and insufferable actions of your brethren. Love is not going to save the rainforest, but anger just might!

Anger is an ace in my deck!

Keanu Reeves

Keanu Reeves is not a good actor. At his very best, he is competent enough that he does not bother the viewer; in The Matrix he got by largely because he barely had any lines apart from "whoah" and "what." He's functional and able to play characters that are very dull, sort of annoying, or both. At his worst, though, he is an enormous detriment to the films he is in: see Constantine (although that one had plenty of other problems) and The Devil's Advocate (that horrible accent!) for examples.

Looking through his acting career, the highest praise I can muster for him is that he was okay in a few movies. The worst criticism I can muster is that he was a terrible abomination which brought an otherwise good movie to its knees. His range, therefore, is somewhere between okay and catastrophically awful. Not a great average.

One time I heard a rumor that he was being considered to play the lead role in an adaptation of The Sandman, and I almost cried. I think I may have made some threatening statements while I was not in my right mind. It is safe to say, however, that if someone is ever considering Keanu Reeves for a part in a movie, they would probably be better off with someone else.

Grade: F+

Pre-Ordering Video Games from Amazon.com with Release Date Delivery

Whenever I go into a GameStop, the people behind the counter try to get me to pay them for games that have not come out yet. This is ridiculous, first off, because you get no discount at all for the game. Also, they will have plenty of them on the day they come out, so it is entirely unnecessary that you spend money early. I'm amazed anyone falls for it.

It is even more amazing that anyone falls for this stupid ploy because you can pre-order the same games from Amazon with release date delivery, they don't charge you until they are about to ship them, they usually give you a discount on the game itself, and the cost of the game plus shipping almost always costs less than the cost of the game in a store, because there is no sales tax. The game will then be waiting for you at your home when you arrive there after work/school/whatever.

Of course, it's even more inexpensive to wait until the game is a few months old and get it once it drops in price, but if you want to buy a game new and have it the day it comes out, GameStop is never the way to go.

Amazon paid me no money to say this, and it is definitely worse for the environment to have all that packaging and fuel used to get something delivered to your home, but it is still worth saying that GameStop has been completely outmaneuvered by Amazon.com.

I mean, Amazon even takes video game trade-ins now. And you can use them for anything on Amazon, which means pretty much everything. I bought Annie's Macaroni and Cheese from Amazon one time.

The Supreme Court's Denial of the Petition for Writ of Certiorari in Haskell County, et al. v. Green, James W., et al., on Monday, March 1, 2010

Good move, Supreme Court. Well played.

Malayan Tapir

The Malayan tapir is an endangered species that is shaped like a pig, has a mini-trunk like a stunted elephant, and is genetically related to horses. It has four toes on its front feet and three on its back feet. Is it more cute or more weird? I'm not really sure. It's definitely pretty cute when it's little, that's for sure. When it grows up, it looks like this:

The strange markings you see are a form of self defense. The idea is that maybe, just maybe, predators will think that the tapir is a large rock or something. Oh, and they're mostly nocturnal and the largest species of tapir in the world.

I have very conflicted feelings about this animal. On the one hand, since their primary means of self-defense is looking like a rock, I am not terribly surprised that they are endangered. On the other hand, the main reason for their becoming endangered is illegal deforestation in southern Thailand, Burma, and the island of Sumatra, and that is definitely not their fault. Also, even as an adult, they really straddle the line between weird and cute. Whenever I have the instinct to say that I think they might be more weird than cute, I feel sort of sorry for them and don't want to say it out loud, because I would hate to hurt a cute endangered animal's feelings.

Would I hang out with a Malayan tapir? I don't know. They're vegetarian, which I like, but they communicate with shrill whistles, which could get annoying. They can weigh over 600 pounds, which is intimidating, but they don't look like they would want to fight me. I think I've decided that the baby Malayan tapir is cute now, but the adult one still seems pretty weird.

I know this is the part of the review where I am supposed to make up my mind, but I don't think I can.

My verdict? I just don't know how I feel about the Malayan tapir, but I can't stop thinking about it.

I decided! It's cute. No, wait. The nose is still so weird, and its ass is enormous. But the baby is cute, I'm sure of it now. The more I look at the adult, the weirder it looks to me. And I do feel a natural sympathy for endangered animals, but there's a part of me that knows that animals go extinct all the time and our attempts to prevent that are pretty weird and paternalistic. But it's definitely the fault of humanity with the tapir, and not natural selection at all. And the baby is really quite cute, now that I've gotten used to it, but I'm having trouble getting past the whole, "Don't attack me, I am actually a rock" approach to defense. Then again, that's sort of hilarious, and a great trick if it actually works...

A 30-Year Old Man with Four Cats

Is it weird? Four seems like an acceptable number of felines, especially if they have a mellow disposition and the man is attentive to his caretaker duties. Maybe he didn't even plan on having so many cats—I can imagine how that might have happened: strays showed up, the tomcat next door knocked up his lady cat, a new roommate came with one and left without it, Santa left a kitten in his stocking, etc. Then the man woke up one day to discover he had a house-full of fur balls. Seems like that could happen to any kindhearted animal lover, doesn’t it?

HOWEVER, I strongly feel that this guy is about to cross a line. Five cats is way too many for any single person to own. If he were to acquire one more cat, I would fully suspect him to be on the path to becoming “that crazy dude with all the cats.”

Some people have a lot of love to give, and they happen to choose cats as the recipient. Nothing odd about that. Yet.

My professional opinion: Not weird, but on the verge.

Scurvy

I’ve never had the disease and probably never will. To be honest, I don’t know much about it beyond the fact that it’s caused by a vitamin C deficiency. I also think that, because of it’s playful-sounding name, if it were to occur in me, I would eventually overcome it and the story of how I came to be afflicted by it would be a humorous one. The name also brings to mind surly and disgruntled pirates. Therefore, because I’m safe as long as I continue to regularly eat fruits and vegetables, and because the sound of the disease’s name and the image it conjures is enjoyable, I give Scurvy 4 out of 5 stars.

Making Sense

The jury has been out on sense and the formation thereof for nigh on twenty and time. After a dry shower, the verdict spells "C-A-T."

I think I said it best when I said what I said best: a tree is only as gullible as a shoehorn. But that was never and today is the day before the end of yesterday! (I am the master of disaster.) Allow me to point my proof with logic. Say: “Bloomin’ onion.” Did you sing a song of six pence? With a doubt, you smell what I mean. And, with a boat, this recalls my inland voyage to fairyland:

‘Twas but a melodic chance, atop a fiery mountain of shame, square corners a freedom shoppe, up the lane from Grandma Barnacle’s glass cottage, wherein she rocked and rocked all ‘round Christmas dinner, complete with turkey-stuffed pillows, towering as tall as a tall, tall tower, half lacquer elephant, half star-child, and half a cup of sugar.

It was then I knew what I had to do, wakawaka, zoodaloo: 3-2-1-Extravaganza!.

Twilight (Books/Movies)

Twilight is a poorly written series of books which include abusive relationships with vampires, pedophile werewolves, and an undead, murderous fetus. They have been transformed into uncompromisingly abysmal movies aimed primarily at teenaged women. Somehow they have reached a fever pitch of popularity with minimal cultural backlash from the expected corners of society.

This cultural detritus has gone on to spawn sparkling dildos for necrophiliacs, nightmarish abusive boyfriend body pillows, ridiculous careers for completely untalented actors, and a small army of knock-off books even more horrible than the originals. As far as I am concerned, the Twilight series is a weapon of mass intellectual and cultural destruction. Stephenie Meyer should be charged as a war criminal.

Oh, and on top of all that, it makes vampires seem completely lame and whiny. Not only is this a shame, but the ramifications may be profound. No one wants to give the real vampires an excuse to hate us and disregard our pathetic mortal lives as worthless even more than they already do.

The only redeeming quality I can think of is that as a result of these books, some human beings are reading words with their eyes. I'm not even sure that's a good thing, however, considering the words they're reading.

Would you recommend it to a friend?

No.

The Sun

Behold! On the Horizon! Again, The Sun rises!

Ah, yes. The Sun. I’ve always been a fan. Its warmth rouses the slumbering birds and blossoms; its rays chase away the shadows and all sorts of loitering spawns of evil; its sublimity exalts the minds of our greatest seers and thinkers; its energy is the very spark of life. From mighty mogul to vassal wight, who doesn’t rejoice at the sight of that majestic glowing orb returning after a long and tumultuous storm? From colossal planet to speck of dust, has anything in nature ever reproached The Sun? I think not.

And so, as a human being, a living being, and a corporeal thing, I give unto The Sun: two thumbs up.

Canada

Canada is awesome. When you make fun of me for being born there, and for my obsession with all things Canadian, it is because you are jealous.

True/False: True

Paper Clips

Pros: I'm not sure that paper clips could ever be made more effective than they are now. The design is so simple and elegant that it's almost erotic: The shape curves gently, and the metal is just pliant enough that it resists being bent, but slides apart with gentle pressure. Paper clips are also named almost perfectly; they clip papers together. They could also be called paper holders, or very-thin-things clips, but neither of those names have the same appeal. If you want to keep several papers together without damaging them with a stapler, a paper clip is probably your best option.

Cons: Paper clips are not very sturdy. They break with repeated use and degrade over time. This is, unfortunately, an unavoidable side effect of their already mentioned pliability. They can also leave marks on the papers being clipped, either imprints from pressure or gray dust from the degradation of the metal. Also, past a certain number of papers, the basic paper clip becomes useless. There are large paper clips, but they're not nearly as effective as binder clips for higher paper volume. (The binder clip is named very poorly, as it is almost never used to clip binders.)

Grade: B

The Weather: March 1, 2010, Zip Code 20005

The weather today is not nearly as cold as it has been. It is not immediately uncomfortable to go outside, and I was able to walk for several minutes with my coat open, though I did require a hat and a sweater. The days seem to be getting warmer, but there is still a chill in the air which subtly implies that things might get worse before they get better. The day is clear and bright, both traits which impart a sense of optimism.

The weather is a bit of a tease today: nice enough in the sunlight, but uncomfortably cold in shadow. It is also teetering between being comfortable enough to sit outside and cold enough to require shelter. I ate lunch outside, but my hot soup could not fend off the chill.

I would like it to be warmer, but the temperature seems appropriate for the beginning of March. I'll consider it quite rude, however, if things don't get more pleasant by the end of the month. Still, by comparison to most of the last few weeks, today feels downright lovely.

Statement of bias: I tend to like things a little colder than average. My favorite season is the Fall, though I am quite partial to hot days which include loud, chaotic thunderstorms and heavy rain.

Final Verdict: 6 out of 10 Rays of Sunshine