Tastes like disease

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

According to a Cambridge study "Coca-Cola sought to obscure its relationship with researchers, minimise the public perception of its role and use these researchers to promote industry-friendly messaging."

Specifically, Coca-Cola has been found to be manipulating public information to minimize their part in the obesity crisis and instead blame exercise instead of sugary drinks. The paper mostly focuses on the mountain of evidence showing Coca-Cola's misinformation campaign, but links to several examples where it's been caught putting that campaign into practice.

In the early 2000's I worked at Best Buy and was impressed how much better Sony camcorders were than the competition. Faster focus, better zoom, better durability, Nightvision, and so on. They were the only brand I've ever bought: a few 8mm ones, a miniDV, and finally an HDR thingy in 2013. That's where the problems started.

First, I was pretty annoyed that nightshot was no longer a feature on the cameras. If you didn't already know, taking video in darkness tends to make videos of darkness and that's not very useful. Still, by now we have good cellphones with lights on them so it wasn't too much trouble to use them together I suppose. But the main issue wasn't a missing feature; it's durability.

Sony HDR #1 - Cause of death - tiny splash
(See online!)

A few years back, I went to a water park with my family. I'm not a moron – I know this camcorder isn't an underwater version, but it was a water park and I couldn't avoid every errant splash. Because I've never had to treat my Sony equipment daintily before, I didn't think much of it and wiped the water off, but was surprised to find the screen go dark after a few minutes.

I did a little testing and realized the screen still works, but the backlight burnt out. There's no way it would be cost effective to repair so I just bought a new one instead:

Sony HDR #2 - Cause of death - tiny splash
(See online!)

Granted, the camera lasted for many years (mostly because I barely use it since phone cams are so good now), but every now and then you want to make sure you're capturing in the best light and have a solid zoom. That was the case when I went to the beach this summer. Once again, an errant splash and, one again, the camera is dead. This time, it's telling me that the battery has to be the "right kind" which brings up two problems:

1. The camcorder broke again with a tiny splash of water
2. Sony is using some kind of "DRM" brand management to force you to buy only their brand of batteries

DRM is often useless, overbearing, and downright offensive. Coupled with the absurd fragility of modern Sony camcorders, I can see that times have changed and the faith that I once had is clearly misplaced. Assuming I don't just stick with my cellphone (which somehow seems to know how to make better video devices than a company who's made cameras and camcorders since the 1980's), maybe I'll try Canon. They were always #2, but it seems that Sony has voluntarily flushed themselves into that position.

When you can put enough aside to afford it, a key purchase is your pillow. It's something you use every night and affects how sore and damaged you become during the weirdly dangerous act of sleeping (being over 40, yay!)

So I put my money to the test and, after research, bought each option in the "Cervical Pillow" series:

A cervical pillow. It definitely had support!
(See online!)

Though the pillows have a removable strip in the center in case they're too high for you, none of them (queen, queen soft, or standard soft) were low enough. I felt like my chin was scraping my ribcage the entire time and returned them all. It was disappointing, but the foam did seem comfortable – if only too high/stiff.

With a little more looking around, SHREDDED memory foam seemed a good option so that was my next buy:

This isn't the exact one I bought (that one's gone for some reason), but it's close
(See online!)

The first one I bought was MAJORLY comfortable. The kind of pillow you lay down on and can't get back up again because your body deactivates like a deflated pudgy robot. The two problems were that it was STILL too full AND it deflates very soon after buying (as it warns in the comments and reviews).

The first problem was easy to solve because all of the shredded foam pillows I found came with zipper-cases so you could pull out as much foam as you like. In one case, I had so much fluff, I was able to make two pillows out of it (I had another zipping pillow case lying around).

The second problem is based on them shredding too thoroughly. The foam was randomly sized even down to "cotton candy" shreds in some cases which meant that it compressed too much in a short time. They tell you to low-heat dry the pillows when they arrive to get rid of the chemical smell and to fluff them and also tell you to re-fluff them now and then the same way, but I lost structural integrity after only a night or two. Luckily, there's a simple solution:

Pillow #3!
(See online!)

I did not return the first shredded pillow because it was crazy comfortable; I bought the third pillow for one reason: cubes. The foam was evenly cut and not likely to compress easily which is exactly what I'd need if I was going to make an unholy meld of SOFT and SUPPORT. And that's exactly what I did… I grabbed a 32 gallon garbage bag and dumped the contents of both pillows together. I mixed them vigerously by hand and then started filling every zipping pillow case I had. Because they give you enough foam in these things you'd be licking your toes if you left them alone, I was able to fill probably 5 pillows to a degree that made everyone in the family happy (and I have some left over).

My final ratio didn't mix the cubes and other foam evenly so I ended up with a lot of the cubes left over. I'll just hang onto them for now or I could use them to fill other pillows for guests or something. Either way, much better than normal pillow

So it takes a little more effort, but basically:

1. Buy an overly shredded memory foam pillow
2. Buy an almost obnoxiously uniform shredded foam pillow as well. I looked for cubes
3. Mix them together in a big bag
4. Refill your pillowcases to whatever degree is comfortable for you
.

I've been so comfortable recently that my pain is lower, my sleep is better, and I have to adjust my rear-view mirror every morning because of how decompressed I've been.

Not just good; the best I've every tasted
(See online!)

With the weird macho BS surrounding hot sauces, it took me well into my thirties to finally realize that it's all silly bluster. When they say "hot enough to burn the hair off your future descendents", it's just juvenile posing. Grr! Death! Kill! Murder! RAR!

I can't even remember what led me to try this, but Blair's Jalapeno (complete with SKULL KEYCHAIN!!! RAR!! WE'RE SO EDGY!) is by far the best Jalepeno sauce I've ever had. Far from the promised pain and death that I can't see anyone actually wanting, this has actual FLAVOR. It's a bit spendy so you'll want to use sparingly, but in almost 10 years, I've yet to find anything even close to as good.

Bottom line, it's pretty hard to tell when a hot sauce is going to keep it's uncomfortable sadism-kink of hurting you versus just being a tasty condiment so I figure it's important to share when we find a winner. Blair's might be just one of the many emo posers in the market, but at least it has good flavor (and in the case of the Jalapeno, little to no actual pain).

2020.08 – UPDATE – The newest bottle I tried was actually fairly spicy. I can't tell if the flavor is as good because of the numbness, but it's still better than average even if they've recently erred on the side of pain over flavor.