Masculin products

Taking a cue from my sister, there is going to be a theme this week: Masculin products. This doesn't mean they're masculin in themselves, like an older Bentley, it means that they are products for a man. They stand-out with subtlety and boast frillless performance. They are products marketers hope you forget, in hope that you might buy the latest.

Tonight, we’re going to take a look at Gillette Foamy Regular. Later on we’ll touch pickup trucks, raincoats, bikes, and magazines. Sports cars as well. Maybe sports car drivers.

Gillette Foamy Regular. Gillette’s most generic shaving cream—it doesn’t have Vitamin E, or Advanced Gel, and it isn’t for Sensitive Skin. It’s just fluffy and white—pure shaving cream. And we don’t have Barbasol in the US, so men have to use Foamy Regular.

Contrast that to Gillette’s Edge Advanced Shaving Gel, Extra Skin Protection. Just read:

From drugstore.com:

Sometimes you're cool and contained. But other times it feels good to get into a real lather. Edge Pro Gel is dispensed as a gel, but oh, baby, look what happens when you rub it onto your face. It lathers right up for a sinfully luxurious shave. Extra lubricants allow your razor to simply glide across your face, making it especially nice for guys with sensitive skin.

But if you aren’t quite ready to leap to Regular from Jack Black’s Face Buff, or your girlfriend isn’t ready to switch from her Satin Care, Gillette’s Foamy Lemon / Lime can ease the transition.

New York City is the "greenest" place in the US

I used to think that cities were filthy, dirty places that consumed vast quantities of resources. The thing is though, they house vaster quantities of people--and consume less resources per capita than rural areas (apologies for the goofy font choices).

The Herald Tribune agrees:

"The old paradigm of the pollution-filled city as a blight on the landscape and the leafy-green suburbs as the ideal is outdated and does not lead us to a future of energy independence, clean air and a stable climate. Cities are the best hope to realize our need for a bright, sustainable, and promising future.

New York City, for example, is the most energy efficient place in America. Yes, it houses 8.2 million citizens and uses an enormous amount of energy to do so. Its electrical load, more than 12,000 megawatts, is as large as all of Massachusetts. Yet because the buildings are dense and thus more efficiently heated and cooled, and because 85 percent of all trips in Manhattan are on foot, bike or transit, New York City uses dramatically less energy to serve each of its citizens than does a state like Massachusetts. Indeed, it uses less energy, on a per capita basis, than any state in America."

There's some pretty heavy red-taping going on when you compare a 20-some square mile island to spread-out states, but the article is still worth a read..