Alice.com

I am obsessed with Alice.com. It's gotten some press lately for good reason. You order things like toilet paper, shampoo, and dishwasher detergent online and get them shipped to you for free.

Somebody called Alice.com "the Netflix of consumer packaged goods" (though I assume Alice.com does not actually want you to mail them back your used deoderant).

Alice.com

Bear Paw Slippers

I've been in the market for a pair of slippers for a while now. I want something that will keep my feet warm while protecting them from the floor.

I looked into various bells, whistles, and advanced features. There are slippers with soles that can go outside, for instance, but my feeling is that once a pair of slippers has gone outside, they become shoes. Then they are banished from touching the couch. Another option is slippers filled with goose down.

But I'm afraid then I'll just end up with hot feet, which is gross and unpleasant. Ditto for shearling slippers. I also looked into memory foam footbeds. The problem there is that most of them look like the slippers I gave my grandma for Christmas in 1993.

I think we all know what's left: bear paw slippers. I love them because they will be warm and soft and machine washable. They will allow me to stomp around the house and growl. They will make me seem cool when I go to the door in my pajamas. And they wil make me feel more confident around woodland creatures.

Bonus points because my husband will hate them (or at least the stomping and the growling).

Bear Paw Slippers

Other Animal Slippers

World of Goo

World of Goo is an awesome game. The first thing I did after downloading it was look for instructions. But there are no instructions. You just start playing and the rules become obvious.

The graphics are sweet and the music is more like a movie score than a video game soundtrack. It's like if Tim Burton wrote a video game. A video game about balls of goo.

World of Goo is available as both a computer game and a Wii game, but I highly recommend the Wii version. You can get the game code from Amazon and download it straight from WiiWare.

I can't tell you too much more. The joy of the game lies in unfolding the the story level by level. For that reason, I recommend not reading any reviews. Just buy the game and start playing it.

Do it. Do it immediately. Seriously, what else are you doing? You're just reading some stupid blog. Stop reading. Play World of Goo instead.


World of Goo

Leak-Proof Travel Bottles

Lots of things make me angry. Bad grammar. Payday loan companies. Prescription drug commercials. But few things make me angrier than the TSA. Thanks to the government's refusal to admit that making liquid explosives on an airplane is logistically impossible, I can't travel with reasonable quantities of shampoo. So, like every other person whose husband doesn't let her check bags, I must put my toiletries into little 3-oz bottles.

Unfortunately, NONE of the travel bottles on the market right now meet my two basic prerequisites for use as travel bottles. A travel bottle should:

A) Hold 3 ounces

This is important because 3 ounces is the limit under TSA regulations. Yes, you can get 2-oz bottles, but that's suboptimal. Why would you want 2 ounces of something when you can have 3? This is America.

B) Not leak.

This is even more important than a travel bottle's capacity because it gets to the essence of what defines a good bottle.

Aristotle once wrote something about how the way for a chair to be the best possible chair is to be the chairiest chair in the world, excelling in all the things that make a chair a chair.* That means that for a bottle to be the best possible bottle, it needs to excel in bottlehood. According to dictionary.com, a bottle is "a portable container for holding liquids," so good bottles are really good at holding liquids.

Containers that don't hold liquids include sieves, wicker baskets, and reusable canvas shopping bags. None of these things are running around claiming to be bottles. Yet the plastic thing from Walgreens that can't manage to hold 3 ounces worth of moisturizer without leaking all over the inside of my quart-size plastic zipper bag claims to be a bottle. Don't let the name fool you.

According to reviews I've been reading, no travel bottle on the market today meets my two criteria, so I've decided to settle. Nalgene refuses to manufacture 3-oz bottles, but at least they're guaranteed not to leak. Before the stupid liquids ban, I had several Nalgene travel bottles (though they were all over 3 ounces). I can attest to the fact that Nalgene bottles do not leak. Ever.

You can get sets of them on Amazon, but the Container Store sells Nalgene travel bottles individually so you can mix and match. Don't tell the TSA, but I might get the 4-oz bottles and try to sneak them through.

Nalgene Travel Bottles from Amazon

Nalgene Travel Bottles at the Container Store


*I'm paraphrasing a lot here. I might also be making it up.