Last decade, I went on the Atkins diet for about a year. Why? Because I’m fat sometimes and that was the diet everyone was doing in 2003, get off my case. Also, because you could eat a lot of steak.

Sugar-free candy was a refreshing break from the meat, eggs, and meat you eat on the Atkins diet. This stuff seemed miraculous (“No net carbs!”) until the fateful day I ate more than one piece of candy. Which was also the fateful day I bought my first bag of sugar-free candy.

The main ingredient in Russell Stover sugar-free candy is maltitol. This, and other sugar alcohols, are replacements for sugar in candy. They have similar physical properties to sugar, which makes it easy to use as a bulking agent in candy. If you use aspartame or sucralose, they’re so much sweeter than sugar that you have to add fillers like maltodextrin (a starch) which screws up the no-carb thing.

Maltitol and other sugar alcohols are not absorbed well in the small intestine, which means your blood sugar doesn’t spike so sharply when you eat sugar alcohols. Which is kinda good. The bad part is that they’re still in your intestine, and when the bacteria down there eats the sugar alcohols, you get gas. A lot of gas. A lot of really horrible-smelling gas that bloats your whole digestive tract. Sometimes accompanied by diarrhea, which, propelled by the large volume of gas generated by your gut flora, shoots out of your b-hole with frightening velocity.

The moral of this particular shit-velocity story is that if you want to diet, portion control and moderation always beat loopholes and fake food. But you can’t sell willpower in bottles. Well, actually, you can, but it’s aromatherapy, and let’s wait until another day to open that particular can of worms.

Look at those sports! LOOK AT THEM LITTLE CHAMP!!!! You ain’t growin’ up to be some kind of communist fuckin’ book reader, you’s gonna play man sports with balls! I’m hangin’ this over your cardboard sleepin’ box so you ain’t end up like one them college kids, touchin’ their goddamn phones all the time.

Kids, I know we haven’t eaten dinner in five months… but I’ve been saving up for something really fun. Disney? Ha! No, not Disney! Something even better.

Give up?

It’s a Windows game called Family Fun And Learning and it was only $583.60.

Why are you crying? It comes with Animal Fun, AND Kid Pack, AND Fun Pack. It’s a 3-in-1 Value Pack.

The unrealistic figure of Barbie has been criticized in the past as giving girls an unhealthy body image. But Barbie looks like Mrs. Old & Fat next to this twig-like doll called Frankie Stein.

Most arresting about Frankie Stein is not that she is skinny, but that her clothes are draped on her as they are on women who are actually anorexic. If you’ve ever seen an eating-disorder documentary, or known an actual anorexic woman, it’s eerie how closely this doll mirrors the hallmarks of anorexia. Her skin is pale, her size-00 clothes hang loosely off her body, and her elbow and knee joints bulge from her birdlike arms and legs.

Maybe I’m over-reacting here, or maybe I just like women and don’t think they should starve to death and have mental and physical problems because of companies.

After a long day, I love to relax with a nice cold glass of 48 FLASHING LED ICE CUBES!!!

The product listing insists these plastic hellcubes will impress my friends, but none of my friends are raccoons or babies, so I don’t think it’ll work.

The concepts of “holistic food” and “organic” are pretty thin when applied to human food. Holistic means nothing at all, and realistically, organic just means that farmers spray shit and piss on your vegetables instead of pesticides. I agree that organic farming is more natural, but if we’re talking natural, we should still be living outside picking bugs out of each others’ body hair.

I almost feel like if you’re spending $145 for “holistic” cat food that you’re just trying to get rid of that money and someone else is going to take it if the cat food company doesn’t. You’ve got that money out in your hands, and you’re waving it around, and as soon as the first person walks by with a crystal or a dreamcatcher you can finally get rid of that horrible money you hate having.

The English language is ugly and nonstandard, so it’s hard to pick a worst combination of two words, but I’d say that “Bling Baby”, the brand name on this pacifier, might be up there in the top ten.

It has a total of 3 carats of pave diamonds (278 small diamonds in all.)

Someone had to sit and stare at this pacifier while they fitted these diamonds to it by hand. “I am putting diamond #159 onto this pacifier,” they thought, and later, “I am putting diamond #160 onto this pacifier.” It’s easy to feel weird about it, but then again, I live in a country that values unborn fetal cells over adult soldiers, and this kind of thing happens all the time here.