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Berries: Miraculous After All!!

/ Shane / 1 Comment

So, after yesterday‘s less-than-stellar trial, today I came armed with several things to try that would be more appropriate to test the properties of the pills.  Yesterday I only had my lunch and it was not really geared towards the type of thing that the fruit is supposed to affect.  Also, as pointed out in the comments by someone from ThinkGeek, the fats in my cheese and oatmeal cream pie were working against me and breaking down the proteins that make the whole thing work.

Trial II was nothing short of a rousing success!  You have to get a hold of these things, it was as amazing as I could have hoped it would be!!

1) A lime – Absolutely delicious!  I tried it before hand to make sure it was not some secret delicious sweet variety of limes and I assure you, it was very sour.  After letting the tablet dissolve, the lime was just so sweet and delicious and sugary like candy.  The weirdest part was that you could feel a feeling of citrus in your mouth but you couldn’t taste it as sour.  Very odd.
2) A plum – I had to prove that yesterday’s delicious plum wasn’t a fluke.  Sure enough, it was super ripe and sugary tasting.
3) A tangerine – This was crazy.  It was so sweet I almost couldn’t eat it.
4) A cherry – Mostly like a cherry still, but definitely sweeter, almost like cherry pie.

We had about 4 people from work trying it and every one agreed it was pretty cool.  One person was impatient and chewed his tablet and he didn’t notice any difference.  So the lessons learned are:

1) Make sure you dissolve it fully on your tongue.
2) Make sure you have the appropriate items to try (i.e. sour things and fruit).
3) Sweet things don’t really get sweeter, so don’t bother with those.

There are several items I would still like to try such as Tabasco sauce and sour cream.  The guy from ThinkGeek also recommended beer.  I would absolutely try it again at home when I could gather some more items together.

As a side note, why do people from companies only comment when I bash their products? 🙂

Berries: not so miraculous

/ Shane / 3 Comments

And now the berries finally ARE in my grasp.  A co-worker bought some tablets from ThinkGeek.

Unfortunately I didn’t have anything prepared to give them a fair try, so I will probably need to try this again.  This is what I had with me:

1) Oatmeal Cream Pie – It tasted about the same, I really didn’t notice a difference.  I was warned it could be super over sweet, but I didn’t notice.
2) Plum – At first I thought it tasted the same and I thought the pills were bogus.  But after eating it for a little bit I thought, “Either those pills are working or this is the finest, ripest plum ever picked!” By the end it was almost too sweet!  But I didn’t taste it before the pills, so I don’t know how much improvement there was.  It could have, in fact, been the finest, ripest plum ever picked.
3) Venison and Cheese sandwich – It seemed to taste extra delicious, but I think I am chalking that up to my heightened awareness of taste as I scrutinized every bite for the effects of the berries.
4) Diet Dr. Pepper – It had a sort of bitter taste at the end.  Definitely not an improvement!

Nothing was that dramatic however.  I’m wondering how much of it is a placebo effect, meaning, I know this is supposed to taste different so now I’m thinking it tastes different.  The Emperor’s New Clothes in pill form.  To be fair though, the pills are supposed to turn sour things sweet and I didn’t really have anything sour.  I will need to try again with some lemons or the like.

I will, of course, keep you posted.

Pickle Pop Redux

/ Shane / 1 Comment

In case you are keeping track at home, I still had one Pickle Pop left after our previous trials.  Well, Evie’s birthday party seemed like a good time to break it out.  I meant to blog this a long time ago when it was fresh in my mind, but I will try to do my best to remember everyone’s reactions.

A brave soul goes first

A brave soul goes first

Even though he doesn’t like pickles, we convinced Nathan give it a try.  I will let his reaction shot speak for itself:

Not so much

Not so much

 After the ice was broken, everybody wanted to try.

Dabu

Dabu votes no

 I can’t remember for sure, but I don’t think Chris liked it.

Chris gives it a try

Chris gives it a try

I thought Anna might like it since she really likes pickles.
A new hope

A new hope

I think she thought it was okay, but she wasn’t wild about it.  After that we thought maybe a kid would go for it if an adult wouldn’t.  In any case, kids are easy to trick and will do anything their daddies tell them to do.
Maybe it is more of a kid thing

Maybe it is more of a kid thing

Eliza didn’t dislike it, but she’s old enough to recognize an icy and therefore didn’t get what she was expecting.  Also the reaction was a little skewed, what with the camera and all the adults crowding around.  I think she would eat them under different circumstances.
On to the next sucker

On to the next sucker

If I remember correctly, Tom thought they were alright.  I for sure remember him requesting Sauerkraut Pops, but I told him they probably already had enough trouble selling Pickle Pops.  Sharon didn’t want to try them but she did anyway.

Dont forget the folks outside
Dont forget the folks outside

Well, obviously with a predisposition to dislike, the outcome was obvious.  That brought us to the last, but not least, test subject.  My dad LOVED them!  He would have eaten a whole box if it was available.  He even slurped up the extra melted juice at the bottom.

Finally, success!

Finally, success!

So, although it took a while to find the right person, in the end we did find a person just crazy enough to like the Pickle Pops after all!

Miracle berries, almost in my grasp!

/ Shane / 1 Comment

As I have previously reported, there is a crazy Miracle Berry that messes with your taste buds such that everything you eat tastes totally different and delicious.  I really wanted to try it out and a berry only costs about $3 a pop, but I couldn’t really find a place in Chicago to get them.  You could import them by the hundreds, but that was pretty expensive!  I even considered buying a plant and growing them myself, but they sounded pretty difficult to take care of.

But finally, a light in the darkness!  And from who else but my favorite store, ThinkGeek?  Now available for purchase, you can buy Miracle Berry Tablets, which work the same as the berries.  I am really itching to try them and now they are affordable (even if they are on back order).

So, anyone up for a flavor tripping party?

YouMail

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Okay, just because I was talking about it over the weekend, I have to post this up here.  This has been waiting to be blogged, sitting in an “unread” email that I sent myself on 5/22/07.  It has been so long that the URL I saved off was no longer valid.  I don’t even remember anymore where I heard about it.  I give you YouMail.

I’m sure you’ve probably seen services like this by now and I haven’t tried this one, but this just happens to be the one I stumbled across and it sounds pretty cool.  There are two features that seem particularly neat to me.  The first is that you can save and listen to your voice mails as mp3s.  I remember a couple of years ago, a co-worker had a VoIP service that would email him at work when he received a voice mail at home and the voice mail would be attached to the email.  How cool is that?  I assume this is the same type of deal.  It sure beats calling home to check your messages!  The second service that seems handy is the ability to leave an individual outgoing voice mail message per person.  It would be pretty fun in general, but I can also see some uses for it.  So like, imagine you know someone is going to call you to see what you are doing later and you really want to hang out with them, but you are going into a meeting or something where you can’t have your phone on.  You don’t want to change your outgoing message to “Hello anybody who calls me, but I’m not going to be home tonight between 9 and 12.  And prospective employer?  I’ll be out drinking.”  And that doesn’t even get into the implications for juggling multiple girls on the side! 😉

So anyway, I came across that link more than a year ago and I thought it was cool and I wanted to share it, but I never got around to it.  And now I have.