Grooming

A discussion on MeFi about just how good bad was the algorithm for delivering you to social media advertisers yielded this wonderful riff from Mike Hoye:

Some friends and I used to antagonize each other by sending each other bizarre Amazon product links to playfully poison each others recommendations, but I think at one point we some how broke it and I spent a year and a half with this one ridiculous foot-long mall-ninja knife following me around no matter what I was shopping for.

• "Hey, guy buying children's socks: you also need a ridiculous knife, right?"
• "I'm good, Amazon. Thanks."
• "Hey, I see you're buying a soothing, uncaffeinated chamomile tea. May we also suggest this cheap-ass, fuck-off big mall-ninja shiv. What do you say?"
• "Um, no."
• "So. Coffee filters, dishwashing soap... and a shiv?"
• "Calm down!"

Well I don't know what I clicked on at all at all but I've been youtube-awash with a particular sort of grooming product called the Manscape Lawn-mower 4.0 - billiard play - army play - which is designed to trim down there . . . hence the metaphor of two pink snooker balls [L]. What could possibly go wrong?

• BeardTube thinks it's over-priced, under-powered and does a bait-and-switch on a replacement parts contract of $15 every 3 months.
• There are a load of counter reviews from articulate, desperately enthusiastic young men who are getting 20% of the take for their endorsement. 
• It is perhaps ominous that the trimmer is shipped with "Ball Toner" and "Anti-chafing Ball deodorant" containing soothing aloe vera. Cripes lads, if you'd just leave your pubes on, then none of these unguents would be necessary.
• Tommy Tiernan and Des Bishop are of the bumping uglies school of genital aesthetics. But whatever your position on whether groins are pretty, it's hard to accept that that removing the fur makes things more attractive. 
• Emilie Pine on the other side of the gender divide continuum also wonders why depilation is now so common and WTF the subtext is of removing / reducing that attribute of adulthood.