We Have A Winner! - Part II

Don't let the soccer ball motif on the medal fool you: you’re looking at the winner of the second non-annual albertnet Amateur Product Review contest! As you will surely recall from my blog post back in November 2015, “1-Star Reviews: The Fun & The Folly,” I ran a contest to see who could spot the fake reviews that I wrote and hid among actual one-star amateur product reviews. As you can see, I was very generous with the contest entry time period but I’ve decided to finally cut it off and announce the winner: John Lynch of Ithaca, NY. He is pictured above at his victory party in Albany last night. His prize: a First Endurance EFS Liquid Shot. That and untold glory.

[I feel I need to come clean about something: I doctored the above photo because John wasn’t actually in it. Last-minute logistical issues prevented him from attending his victory party but we held it anyway. I did manage to take him out for a celebratory dinner, but for some reason he ended up paying the check. Anyway, I used A.I. to add him to this photo and it didn’t come out quite as convincingly as I’d hope so I figured I better just fess up.]

Amazingly, John is the same close reader who won the first non-annual Amateur Product Review contest. (Rumors that he is the only reader of albertnet are greatly exaggerated.) This time, he upped his game and actually nailed every single question. That’s right, a perfect score. This is particularly impressive given that I myself, taking my own quiz some eight and a half years after I wrote it, scored just 4 out of 5.

When asked to comment on his contest victory, John replied, “Sure, I won again, and by definition the award has to be given to just one person: me. But it must be said that I can’t do any of this without my team. My publicist, my agent, my assistant, my driver, my foot masseuse, my macchiato guy, my dental hygienist, the guy I pay to say ‘top o’ the mornin to ya, guvn’r!’, my landscaper AND my manscaper—they all played an important part! And I want to thank them all from the bottom of my heart, because without them I could never do what I do—which is to tell the difference between actual poorly written Amazon reviews and fictitious poorly written Amazon reviews created by Dana Albert. It’s a hard job—not a job I’d wish on my worst enemy!—but it’s one that I love, and one that I am truly blessed to do (at least once every 3 to 5 years). Thank you.”

Contest background and correct answers

To review: after my discussion of the strange phenomenon of the one-star amateur product review (click here for details), I provided a list of five products, each with three reviews. In each case two of the reviews were real (however improbable they may have seemed), and the other was a fake one that I wrote. I did my best to stymie everybody.

Below are the questions again, for your convenience, followed by John’s responses with his colorful commentary. If you like, you can pretend you’re yelling at the TV during a game show by guessing the right answer before checking the response. (Of course it is far too late for you to enter.)

Review #1: The Turn of the Screw (novel)

a) The Turn of the Screw is quite possibly the stupidest and most pointless story I have ever wasted my time on. Purportedly a ghost story, the “ghosts” are nothing more than occasional appearances by the former governess and valet, both of whom are now dead.

b) A friend told me “I couldn’t put it down.” Couldn’t put it down? I couldn’t pick it up! So hard to read...took me weeks to get through. If Henry James wrote this today, he would NOT get laid.

c) The story is lousy, the characters are unbelievable, the protagonist is annoying, the plot development is glacial, and the ending is absurd. But what makes this book really bad is the writing.

John’s response: “ALL of these reviews are just amazingly good. Review (a) is angry that it is a ghost story about “ghosts” who are actually just people who are now dead! Genius! Review (b) first suggests that the book is an immovable object, and then impugns the author’s potential sexual acumen in the present day—for no reason! Double genius! And review (c) is a straight up list of grievances that ends with a wallop of an insult. I love it! Isn’t the internet marvelous?!? I honestly don’t know which one to choose… But of the three, I guess (b) has the most Dana-ness to it (“I couldn’t pick it up!”). I’ll be sad when I find out that I was wrong.”

Review #2: Apple Watch

a) I had a hard time charging the watch.. The instructions read that that the charger attached magnetically to the back of the watch. When I placed the charger to the phone it seems to repel the watch instead of attaching to it. I tried resetting the watch twice but that did not help. I was finally able to get a charge by physically holding the charger to the phone and strapping it down, but this took 8 hours and I only got a charge 62%. It is our assumption that the magnet was placed backwards in either the watch or the charge.

b) this is poop

c) i thought this watch would replace my iphone (or actually I wouldnt have to buy one and watch is actually reasonable compared to phone cost) but it turns out WITHOUT THE PHONE THE WATCH DOES ALMOST NOTHING also battery life sux

John’s response: “Review (a) is not by Dana, but it almost is. By that I mean that it was clearly written by Harry Albert. Who else would so gamely try to make a defective product work and then reverse-engineer where the manufacturer had gone wrong? Review (b) was written either by my friend O— or his son, C— (both of whom are total poop aficionados, and know “poop” when they see it). So this leaves (c). Review (c) is one of those “Hapless” reviews, or maybe “Irrelevant” reviews, but it hews close to the formula for Terrible Reviews by A) misunderstanding the product and then blaming the product for the buyer’s ridiculous expectations for a product to do things it clearly was never intended to do (e.g., “This stupid external 1TB hard drive doesn’t sort my paper clips by size when I drop them in the little slots in the top! Total garbage!!!”) and B) uses ALL CAPS TO EXPRESS THEIR DISBELIEF THAT THE PRODUCT DOESN’T DO THINGS IT WASN’T DESIGNED TO DO, and C) adds a final jab to the review that looks like an afterthought, but is actually the only relevant part of the review. Well constructed Dana — I think (c) was yours. Again, abject sadness when I find out I’m wrong.

Review #3: toaster

a) Mostly works well except something is catching on the bread and tears bits off that get “stuck” down in the toaster and hard to get out. So I tried to fish it out with a knife (with the toaster off, by the way) and got this big electric shock! My wide actually laughed at me and said next time just turn it upside down and shake it. So I tried that and burned the crap out of my hand! Toaster is going back for sure.

b) I was so excited to buy a four slot toaster, morning arguments solved. However, this toaster was highly disappointing. The level that lowers the slots down is thin plastic and wobbly. The right side of the toaster quickly stopped lowing. The left side often burns part of the bread, while the rest of it is still cold. Overall, a shotty machine. Do not buy.

c) I looked on line and read reviews and decided to get this one, HA! This does not even pop the toast up high enough to grab! It says that you get even toasting on both sides, not! It worked for about a week and after that half the side of toast would cook and then only half of a half, When I use the Bagle button the Bagle is cooked on both sides, not one like it should have been.

John’s response: “Oh goodness… I can’t decide. Is this a trick? Did Dana write all of these? Each one has critical misspellings that seem impossible unless you were impersonating an internet troll (‘wide’ for ‘wife’, ‘lowing’ for ‘lowering’ and ‘shotty’ for ‘shoddy’, and ‘Bagle’ for ‘Bagel’). Sticking a metal object in a plugged-in kitchen appliance?! With ‘wide’ laughing at you?! Complaints about a toaster that has stopped moo’ing?! And let’s consider this sentence: ‘It worked for about a week and after that half the side of toast would cook and then only half of a half…’ They’re describing the Zeno’s paradox of toasting!!! So much genius. In the end, I guess I have to go with (a). Something about fishing out toast bits with a knife while a man’s ‘wide’ is laughing at him suggests a Dana story. But (c) is so good! With that bit about the toaster not even popping the toast up high enough to grab! Ugh. Too hard. But I’m going with (a).”

Review #4: Tom Danielson’s Core Advantage: Core Strength for Cycling’s Winning Edge (book)

a) I would buy this book but not from somebody who was suspended for doping-specifically for using Testosteron-as a Physiciian I know that Testosteron is useful in the recovery and healing of tissues, especially muscles.If his training was as beneficial as he describes why did he need Testosteron-also being as long in the Pro Peleoton as he ,he must must be pretty stupid not to know how easy it is these days to discover Testosteron.Therefore with me he has no credibility and I will not buy the book

b) It’s a shame how these books get published. The so-called co-author, Allison Westfahl, actually knows a lot about core strength training and theres lots of useful info here. Problem is she’s a nobody and couldn’t publish a book without tying it to a celebrity name so she let TD (aka Total Douche) pretend to co-write this. Almost worked but she should have hitched her wagon to a clean rider, if there are any left.

c) I noticed the chapter on doping was missing. Can’t trust a doper. Maybe I will wait for the B sample of this book before buying again.

John’s response: “All of the reviews focus on Tommy D’s doping career, so there’s no hint there. Only the one that is supposedly written by a ‘Physiciian’ is terribly written and full of grammatical and punctuation errors, and I think this is a red herring — it reads like it was written by a doctor for whom English is a second language and who may in fact be hopped up on ‘Testosteron’ RIGHT NOW. Review (c) was short and snarky, which I don’t associate with Dana’s prolix proclivities. This leaves (b), which might actually be right. ‘Total Douche’ sounds like it could have been written by Dana? Maybe? ‘Hitched her wagon’ sounds like Dana? Maybe? Yeah, I’m going with (b).”

[I got this one wrong, having no recollection of writing any of these reviews and supposing that the little bit of research I’d have had to do for response (b) above would have been more than I’d bother with. I underestimated myself!]

Review #5: cordless drill

a) never should have bought cordless drill, remember when drills had a cord and you could just go whip it out and use it, now i always have to plan ahead and charge the batteries, this one particularly bad won’t hold a charge and tajkes forever to charge up do not buy!

b) Only lasted two years and stopped working while my son was assembling soccer goals. Thought it was the battery and installed fresh one from the charger. My son came running to me yelling the drill was on fire. When I got to the drill smoke was pouring from the battery.

c) came with black marks along handle, tip and back of drill. case had interior scratches, battery had a charge, and scratches, second battery had scratches. im not talking about scratches you could blame on rough shipping, this thing was dropped a few times outside of its case. nobody wants somebody elses tool. *cough*

John’s response: “Jeezus, another hard one. I am suddenly feeling a lot of sympathy for Dana for having to read through (I assume) so many on-line reviews to find just the right utterly ridiculous ones to throw us off. I’m going to rule out (c). Sounds like a legit review with a snarky joke at the end about using other people’s tools (*cough*). Looks real. That leaves Mr. ‘Whip Out Your Drill When You Need It’ and Ms. ‘Drill Almost Burned My Son and His Soccer Goals’. I’m going with (a), Mr. ‘Whip It Out’. I love the idea of whipping out a drill with you need it. Also, the punctuation and the insertion of the ‘j’ in ‘tajkes’ (just to remind us that Dana still remembers what a QWERTY keyboard looks like) looks contrived. Then again, most things on the internet look contrived. I’m probably wrong. But (a) is my final answer.

“Dana — your fake reviews are all so inventive and creative. You’ve really mastered the genre! You have a great future ahead of you as an internet troll.”

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Three Toasters

Introduction

This is a tale of three toasters. Any resemblance of any characters to real-life persons is, like, duh! Because everything below is true.

The Sunbeam

The Sunbeam was probably not the first toaster my family had growing up. We surely had some boxy, cheap toaster that flung the (usually burnt) toast up in the air like in cartoons. But very early in my childhood, when I was too young to timestamp the memory, my mom bought a Sunbeam. It ran the bread perpendicular to how all other toasters do it, which I always thought was a bit cheeky. It was also the first toaster I ever saw that lowered the bread slowly down, automagically, instead of you pushing down a lever like a cash register key. The toast rose slowly out of it as well. It looked a bit like this:

Like all toasters, it was capable of toasting bread properly under certain conditions. If the brownness setting was set just right and the toaster was cold, you might get a good result, but then the next pair of slices would be underdone because the heat detector mechanism was fooled by the ambient heat of the  rest of the toaster. (At least, that’s always been my theory.) So then, in frustration, you’d put the pale toast back in, and have another go but watching carefully, tediously, and then you move the lever to a darker setting for the next go, and so on (ours being a family of six). At the end, bored and frustrated and distracted, you’d forget to slide the adjuster back to any baseline, so the next time the toaster was used, when it’d be cold, it would of course burn the crap out of the bread. The Sunbeam wasn’t particularly bad in this respect; it’s just that I expected more. When we first got it, and I peered into it and saw the little springy-wire sensor that enabled it to lower the bread to save you the effort of pushing down on anything, I thought maybe this toaster was the special one that would always work right.

In junior high I read Good-bye, Mr. Chips, which took place at an English boarding school. The younger-year students would wait on the upper-year students, which included making their toast. This was before toasters so the bread was put in a little wire thingie and held in the oven (or maybe over some kind of flame, I don’t remember), so it was easy to burn it. The younger-year student would be flogged for burning the toast. The dialogue went something like this:

      “Henshaw, you little oik, you burnt my toast again.”

      “Sorry Rivers, I’ll try harder!”

      “I don’t like burnt toast.”

      “I won’t do it again!”

     “Wrong, oik. ‘I won’t do it again’ suggests you did it deliberately. You should have said ‘shan’t.’”

      [Paddling, cuffing, or ear-twisting ensues]

I didn’t tend to make toast for my older brothers, so they didn’t throttle me for burning it, but there were enough beat-downs in my childhood that I could certainly relate to the book. For much of my life I considered toast something that wasn’t worth the trouble.

But that Sunbeam toaster was built well and just kept turning out toast (burnt or not), decade after decade. So when I was visiting my mom this past week and she offered me an English muffin, I had that pleasant, familiar feeling of a family ritual being continued. Nothing ever changes, and you can go home again. I glanced into the kitchen to see the Sunbeam in action, and was surprised to see my mom toasting the English muffin in the oven, like at a boarding school. Because things do change: her Sunbeam burned up, along with virtually all of her other possessions, in a terrible fire a couple of years ago. For me to have imagined the Sunbeam doing my toast was just a habit, or perhaps some deep-down form of denial, I don’t know.

“Mom, why don’t you buy a new toaster?” I asked (perhaps insensitively). She replied, “I don’t really want a toaster. I don’t like toasters.” I can relate.

The hardware store toaster

One year, when I was in college, my dad almost forgot my birthday. I received no card or gift, but on the day he phoned me up. “I meant to buy you a present but I ran out of time,” he explained. “I was going to buy you a toaster. So let’s do this: go out and buy yourself a toaster, and then let me know how much it cost and I will reimburse you.”

I wasn’t exactly thrilled. I mean, why would he assume that I didn’t have a toaster, unless he knew I never wanted one? And, if he remembered that I had three roommates, why would he assume we didn’t have a toaster among us? And who asks his kid to run an errand for his birthday? This was especially inappropriate because all financial matters between my dad and me were routinely awkward and painful.

So, I wasn’t keen to go buy that toaster. Every time I burned my toast, I reasoned, I’d think about my dad and his ridiculous gifting scheme. So it became the kind of errand that just gets put off. And yet, through sheer weakness, I had some impulse to not let my dad down—some sense  of duty. But where do you buy a toaster? This was decades before Amazon, and I wasn’t about to BART into San Francisco and waste a lot of time wandering around a department store. I decided to ask my roommate M—, who, in addition to being probably the smartest guy I know, owned a toaster oven. I never used it (because I didn’t eat toast and didn’t know how to work the thing anyway) but I was frequently impressed to see M— actually cooking a steak in that bad boy. Unsurprisingly, he proved an excellent resource for my toaster investigation.

“Are you looking for something nice, or just some cheap, crappy thing?” he asked. I replied, “Oh, the cheaper and crappier the better.” He said any hardware store ought to have a cheap, crappy toaster. I worked right down the street from an Ace Hardware, and sure enough, I bought a barebones toaster there for like $8. It looked about like this, but was even cheaper and crappier.

Of course, by this point (two or three weeks after my birthday) it seemed silly to invoice my father for $8, because then when he (inevitably) didn’t manage to actually get over to the Credit Union to do the money transfer (because for some reason he wouldn’t ever write me a check), I’d be all bent out of shape over $8. So, the upshot is that my birthday present was a stupid $8 toaster I didn’t want, that became symbolic of the complicated, perennially strained relationship I had with my father. But don’t worry, this story has a very happy ending.

I’ll need to give some background first. Another roommate, J—, was basically the polar opposite of M—. I should probably try to be kind here but find I cannot: the simple fact was that J— was just a big dumbass. He was a rich kid, the son (he said) of a land developer, though we eventually found out the old man was a gynecologist, which for some reason embarrassed J—. J— loved to not only rock an actual Rolex, but to leave it lying around for us to gawk at and be envious of. And he played Nintendo all the time. It’s basically all he did. And it was always the same game, like he’d rather develop true mastery of one game than to try anything new. This was in the days when video consoles had to be plugged into the TV, which was in the living room, so we all had to witness his endless frustration with the game. He couldn’t go thirty seconds without shouting profanities at the screen. Eventually he’d get fed up and storm off to his room and play “Down In it” by Nine Inch Nails. Now, don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad song, but it gets old after like the 400th listening. And it boggled my mind that J— could be so simple-minded as to enjoy only this one song, to never want to hear anything else. And he had plenty of music; I once went into his room and counted his CDs, which numbered well over four hundred.

Oh, and when he blasted “Down In It,” it was freaking loud, because he had this giant stereo system, with the four-foot tall speakers with the really fat cables (as though electricity needed a lot of room to travel through). Actually, he had two stereo systems, because an identical one was in our living room. I think he said the systems cost thousands of dollars apiece. We were all permitted to use the living room stereo, but I never did. First of all, I didn’t own any CDs—just tapes, and even though J—’s stereo had a tape deck, it was the short-lived Digital Audio Tape (DAT) format, which never caught on because it was pointless, other than showcasing wealth and a taste for the cutting edge. Plus, I was afraid to go near that stereo. What if I damaged it?

Well, as luck would have it, I did manage to damage it. For some reason one day I needed to move one of those speakers, and I underestimated how heavy it was. I was partly holding it by one of the speaker covers, which couldn’t handle the stress and popped off. Some little plastic fastening bit was broken. Oh, shit! I almost considered wiping it all down to remove my fingerprints. No way was I copping to that—replacement parts for that stereo were way beyond my pay grade.

Needless to say, J— was livid. He was given to very loud orations to begin with, many of them unintentionally comical. For example, he was yelling at his sister on the phone once, due to some complicated matter involving their mom, and boomed, “Obviously it’s gonna take someone with more than half a brain to explain it to her—I already tried!” Another time he rousted me from my room because, for once in his life, he decided the bathroom needed cleaning. Our apartment had two bathrooms and J— and I shared one of them; I did all the cleaning whereas his sole contribution was putting one of those blue dye-infusing doodads in the tank. On this occasion he said, “We’ll do a coin flip. Heads I clean the bathroom, tails you clean the bathroom. Call it.” He flipped the coin and I just stood there. What was there to call? My silence seemed to piss him off. “Dude, you were supposed to call it!” he bellowed. “Try again: heads I clean the bathroom, tails you clean the bathroom. Call it.” He flipped the coin. I said, “Heads.” Now he looked confused, then dumbfounded. I could practically hear the gears mashing in his skull.

If his normal outbursts were annoying, his repeated indignant speech about the broken speaker became insufferable. “Look, you guys, somebody broke my speaker and somebody won’t even admit it. Somebody is lying. I mean, can’t you just admit it? Because here’s the thing: it’s not even the speaker I’m so mad about. It’s the principle of the thing.” He seemed to become addicted to this diatribe because he would trot it out again and again.

And that’s where the toaster comes in. One day, I got a wild hair and decided to actually make some toast. A slice of toast with peanut butter randomly seemed like a good idea. So I chucked the bread in there, pushed down on the little lever, and—nothing. No red-hot filaments, no charring of innocent bread. The toaster was dead as a doorknob. And I was stoked.

I waited until all four of us were together, and a couple girlfriends (including J—’s) for good measure, and then I confronted my roommates: who broke my toaster? Of course nobody fessed up because it’s kind of impossible to use a toaster wrong; it had spontaneously died. Or who knows, maybe it had never worked to begin with, cheap piece of crap that it was. I panned across my roommates, looking each in the eye. “Look, you guys,” I said, “somebody broke my toaster and somebody won’t even admit it. Somebody is lying. I mean, can’t you just admit it? Because here’s the thing: it’s not even the toaster I’m so mad about. It’s the principle of the thing.”

With the precision of a fine Swiss watch, the next step of the ruse clinked perfectly into place. “Yeah, exactly!” J— cried. “It’s just like with my speaker! It’s the principle of the thing!” Two of my roommates completely cracked up, while J— looked utterly nonplussed. As his incomprehension dragged out, I started chuckling too. His girlfriend, who’d heard the speaker harangue several times herself, whispered in his ear, and he stormed out of the room. That was so worth my eight bucks.

The Oster

Once I got married, a toaster was pretty much inevitable. No, we didn’t get one for a wedding present (not having done a bridal registry, which tradition I consider stupid and pointless), but went out and dutifully bought one. It was kind of a piece of crap, a Cuisinart or something (and everyone knows they only make food processors so they’d just slapped their rapidly declining brand on some generic thing). It died young. We got another, probably the same thing, and the only good thing about it was its mirror-like chrome finish, which could lead to the best kind of clowning around, which I managed to get a photo of.

That toaster also died—the sides actually came away from the base, it having been made no better than a Happy Meal box, following which we got yet another toaster which was fricking blue. Who ever heard of a blue toaster? I was starting to get fed up with my participation in this disgusting consumer culture where a never-ending series of poorly made products cycled through my home briefly on their way to a landfill, none of them costing much individually but giving me the vague feeling that if I ever realized how much I’d spent on them over time, I’d be pretty pissed. The days of my mom’s Sunbeam, which lasted like 45 years (and would probably still be going strong if it hadn’t burned up), are long gone. 

I don’t even know what happened to the blue toaster but one day, not so long ago, I was out for a walk with my wife and we came across this little number, which had been put out in someone’s driveway with a “FREE” sign:

I guess “little number” doesn’t really apply because it’s a pretty giant toaster. No more waiting around when two of us want toast at the same time. Plus, when you toast simultaneously instead of serially, you avoid the cycle of pale-and-then-burnt toast I described earlier. Best of all, the slots are long enough to toast a giant slice of San Luis Sourdough in one go, instead of dropping it in vertically, toasting one half, and then flipping it. I’ve come to love big sandwiches on sourdough, mainly because non-whole-grain bread is so notoriously bad for you with its sky-high glycemic index. When my dad was visiting many years ago and I made French toast, which I always make with slices of day-old Acme sweet or sour bâtard, he requested whole grain bread. What’s next? Whole grain croissants? Decaf? Near beer? Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a nice veggie sandwich on whole grain bread, but look at this bad boy:

But I mainly just love that this Oster toaster lasted long enough for somebody to get tired of it … that bodes well. After all, my mom’s most prized kitchen possession, a waffle iron that looked like it was made of sterling silver, she’d gotten at a garage sale. It made the hands-down best waffles I have ever had. It was so old it had a woven cloth cord, and lasted something like fifty years before it started catching fire. Actually, even after that my brother’s family continued to use it anyway for a year or two before, sigh, giving it up. Maybe a second-hand kitchen appliance is a good omen. And even if this Oster doesn’t give me years of decadent use, hey … don’t cost nothin’.

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