Author: Joe Zimmerman
If you own a dog with an undercoat, you already know that shedding season is less of a season and more of a hostile occupation of your home. The furniture grows fur. Your clothes grow fur. Your food somehow grows fur. Eventually, you begin to suspect that your dog is quietly manufacturing a second dog and distributing the parts throughout the house. The FURminator Undercoat deShedding Tool is one of the most effective weapons I have found for fighting back. It reaches through the outer coat and pulls out loose undercoat before that fur migrates to your carpet, couch, bed,…
Buying an expensive guitar creates an interesting relationship with gravity. You spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a beautiful instrument, carefully inspect the finish for fingerprints, wipe it down after playing it, and generally treat it like an object worthy of preservation. Then you lean it against an amplifier. That’s when gravity begins filling out the paperwork. If you actually play your guitars instead of keeping them permanently locked inside their cases, sooner or later you need a safe place to put one down. For us, that’s the Hercules GS412B PLUS. And if you’re regularly pulling an expensive Gibson…
There are certain accomplishments we expect from modern medicine. Prevent disease. Relieve pain. Extend lives. And then there is the equally noble task of keeping a deeply relaxed dog from pissing on the couch. In our house, that job belongs to Incurin. Our girl Scarlett is a former foster momma who apparently reached the point in life where falling peacefully asleep and maintaining bladder integrity became two activities she could no longer reliably perform at the same time. She wasn’t deliberately peeing in the house. She could go outside and urinate normally. The problem showed up when she got comfortable,…
There are normal households, and then there are households with dogs. We live in the second kind. In our house, dog hair isn’t something you occasionally notice on the floor. Dog hair is a renewable natural resource. It blows across the room, collects along the baseboards, embeds itself in carpet, attaches itself to clothing and periodically gathers in sufficient quantities that you begin wondering whether somebody brought home another dog without mentioning it. This is exactly the environment where our Shark Stratos AZ3002 has earned its keep. This thing picks up an astonishing amount of dog fur. Carpet. Hard floors.…
There are carpet cleaners that clean carpet. And then there are carpet cleaners that get the shit out of the carpet. Having dogs has given us more experience with this distinction than we ever particularly wanted. We’ve used carpet cleaners that technically picked something up, judging by the horrifying color of the water in the tank, but left the carpet looking like the original stain had simply been negotiated into a larger territory. You know the look. The poop, pee, mud, dog grime, or unidentified household substance is technically less concentrated than it was before. Unfortunately, it now occupies four…
iPhone 17 Pro Max Review: Expensive Crap, But Surprisingly Good Crap Product Overview Let’s get the obvious part out of the way: the iPhone 17 Pro Max is still a very expensive rectangle. Apple did not reinvent the phone. They did not solve world hunger. They built another giant slab of premium technology and attached a price tag capable of causing mild emotional damage. The annoying thing is that they did a pretty good job. The iPhone 17 Pro Max combines a 6.9-inch ProMotion display, Apple’s A19 Pro processor, a triple 48MP camera system, and storage options reaching all the…