Tiny Prints for Mother's Day cards

Tiny Prints cards, including Thank You cards

So we were ready to revel. I had beautiful Mother’s Day sample cards set out. There were pretty Thank You cards included as gifts to the guests.

L'il sliders

The catering arrived. Mmmm, bbq.

Ahhhh, wine

But wait!

We had an old school corkscrew that no one had the upper body strength to use properly!

Crisis! Surely moms of a different era were accustomed to drinking alcohol and had real corkscrews on hand!

And, lo! we had plastic juice cups instead of wine glasses!

I guess you can tell we are, uh, infrequent wine drinkers.

All's well that ends well

I walked the women through the gorgeous selection of cards. Each one had been given a special discount code so they could create their own card on heavy paper stock, with patterns, colors, and photos of their choice. With Tiny Prints, you customize the cards the way you like, then they mail them out for you direct.

My friends all got chair massages.

The Herman Munster look

My husband got his nails done.

And then, we all had red velvet cake.
Happy Mother’s Day, mamas!

When Tiny Prints reminded me of those childhood memories, and invited me to host a party featuring their beautiful custom Mother’s Day cards, I immediately agreed.

When I heard it could be a gorgeous Tiny Prints + Clever Girls Collective party with an opportunity to create and personalize cards for the special moms I know, and include the kind of pampering moms want — in-house manicures and professional masseuse available for chair massages — I leaped at the chance.

I don’t often get an opportunity to hang out with some of my favorite bloggy women. Weekday nights are usually for catching up with my kid’s doings during the day, overseeing homework, and following up with the shower/toothbrushing/bedtime routine. And I really did vacillate between inviting everyone’s families and just having my women friends over.

A sample of the Tiny Prints Mother's Day cards

Ahhhh, wine

In the end, the chance to treat women I know with a relaxed, catered meal and wine — lots of wine — was just too tempting to resist. It was nice to take a minute to focus on our own pleasure, even as we talked about Mother’s Day cards we made for our own moms. And as it happens, it was a lovely event and I wish the evening could’ve gone on into the wee hours.

Stay tuned to find out what the cards look like, and how we survived the Great Corkscrew Disaster that was a speedbump to our revelry.

Now, I missed the whole Starbucks/coffee craze. So I’m thrilled to have a new selection of beverages on store shelves that I’d actually drink. And most appealingly to me, Steaz is what Schnell calls a “triple-bottom-line” company.

Now as much as I’ve blathered on in this blog about how we don’t buy this or that, what you might miss is that once I find a product I like, I am insanely loyal. It’s just that I’m pretty particular about what I’ll be loyal to. Most companies pay scant attention to the quality of ingredients used, the care or craftsmanship in making a product, and pursue the most shortsighted bottom-line driven ways of manufacturing and shipping their goods, usually in a way that damages the environment. Speed plus sloppiness plus carelessness, all in the name of bottom-line pressures, often add up to a large carbon footprint. Who wants to be loyal to that?

But ever since I learned about Paul Newman’s delicious salad dressings, popcorn, and sweet and salty snacks, I’ve been a loyal consumer. I like what Paul Newman has stood for throughout his life and work, and he was among the first to create a market for, and thus develop a supply chain, foods made with organic ingredients. I like that it’s a family business. I can find the items in most groceries, although the widest selection tends to be in Whole Foods. And this is what I like about Steaz’s “triple bottom-line” company policy:

1. the company goes through the trouble of buying carbon offsets to make a carbon-neutral footprint, covering the environmental cost of transporting organically grown teas from growers around the world,
2. it also ensures all raw grown ingredients are fair-trade certified. Steaz is happy to provide these certifications on all their drinks,
3. plain old profitability for the company’s workers.

I’m glad to see they’re now in Target stores all around the country! It’s not iced-tea season here yet, but I’ll be sure to drink some when it gets hot this summer. Because it’s nice to enjoy something that’s guilt-free.

Excuse the iPhone autofill typos

My son drinks your milkshake

I’m not going to bury the lede:

My son accidentally zinged a Got Milk? frisbee off the head of the president of the California Milk Processors Board at a Got Milk? event. Color me mortified. The head of the trade group–i.e., our HOST– was extremely gracious, and offered that he has small kids of his own.

When I asked the president of the California Milk Processors Board what milk his kids drank, he answered that his wife gives “hormone- and anti-biotic free organic milk” to his own young children. I gently pointed out the milk used at the milkshake event was hormone- and antibiotic-full, and presumably not organic…and that for a lot of moms, especially of young kids, organic milk is a “gateway drug” to other organic foods and healthier eating. He said, That may very well be. Certainly his own wife had those kinds of concerns. But his job as head of the California Milk Processors Board was to promote all milk producers in the state, and the organic milk farmers were but a few producers out of all. So it would be favoritism if he promoted one kind of milk over another.

Hmmm. (Both AmysFunny and Bernadette Batts were there, they can vouch for my paraphrase! Right ladies?)

I guess you could say my son and I gave him the socially gauche double-whammy. You know what? I’m gonna own it. I live to ask all the embarrassing questions you want to ask, but are too …something… to ask.

Here’s a little more information on the California Milk Processors Board: they created the hugely successful “Got Milk?” campaign, which has been parodied on T-shirts and bumper stickers and as such the tagline has firmly wedged itself into the cranial crevices of probably 99% of sentient beings living in the US.

As a mom with a kid, I’m a prime target for milk marketing like this. Given that I belong to a high-risk group (Asian women) for developing osteoporosis later, and because I have a school-aged son who is very much in growth mode, I should be–and am, mostly–receptive to messages about milk as a healthful drink as opposed to soft drinks or sports drinks. I don’t allow my kid to drink soda, and for a while I made my husband drink his cokes with the can inserted into a foam beverage wrap (ostensibly to keep the drink chilled, but really to hide the logo hinting at the contents from my kid).

So I mostly offer organic no-hormones, no-antibiotics milk, water, or a real fruit juice or vegetable juice (no added sugars or artificial colors) to my son. At various times in his life, he’s also drunk fortified almond milk, oat milk, and rice milk–all milks I’ve tried with my cereal as a result of my intolerance to milk sugars. He doesn’t much like soy milk (nor do I, it has a nasty queasy-making beany scent and taste to me). He likes V8, of all things, and also fizzy drinks like Pellegrino (!!) or Perrier (!!) although he prefers the more refined bubbles of Pellegrino (!!!!!).

Okay, that last part about fizzy waters sounded ridiculous. Because it is. The bigger point being, I’m one of those uptight mamas that believes sweet sodas are The Devil’s Beverage and will schedule an exorcism accordingly should my child accidentally drink some.

When approached by the PR person and invited to this event, I debated whether I should attend. I’m lactose intolerant, and the idea of mixing oreo cookie milkshake with rum to make a mixed drink doesn’t appeal to me. I’m more a fruity confection/mojito kind of person. But I thought, if my kid can go drink a free non-alcoholic milkshake, sure, I’ll go.

BLD: Got Milk? milkshake event

The event was held on a sunny afternoon at a chic upscale diner called BLD–Breakfast Lunch Dinner. I’d been there before for a Hollywood-type meeting. Polished concrete floors, immaculate white tablecloths, hipster indie filmmakers “taking a meeting” over there, tv execs discussing a show huddled over here. Not normally a place given over to kids sucking down frothy drinks.

Kids got to assemble made to order milkshakes (alcohol-free, obviously) at various little tables set up all around the empty restaurant. There were add-ins, like Oreo cookies, gummy worms, Reese’s peanut butter cups, chocolate chips, and so on.

I thought my son would go whole hog on the add-ins, because normally I don’t buy that stuff for him and I’m always waiting for the other nutrient-free shoe to drop after all my encouragement to make healthy choices at home. To my great surprise, he chose the oreo cookies and that was it.

Got Milk? eensy dessert tray

Trays of delicious little desserts were passed. The BLD pastry chef had whipped them up for the event.

Milk and...tequila? Surprisingly tasty.

The mixologist at the bar whipped up several delicious-looking milkshakes. Some were named, inexplicably, after relatively unknown California legislators. As a political junkie, I appreciated the educational effort but thought maybe the drinkee would be so intent on the rum as to miss the civics lesson.

The grownup milkshake I liked best featured tequila and caramel. It was basically like a thicker Starbucks coffee drink with a large shot of tequila mixed in, and whipped cream on top. Let’s face it, it was a high-calorie liquid dessert for lushes. Right up my alley, in other words.

So there we are, milquetoasty moderates when it comes to milk. We don’t go so far as seeking out raw milk, which is a whole movement, as I understand it. I’ve offered my kid chocolate milk and he has refused it, much to my secret approval (24-30 g per serving, sugary stuff!). I understand Making Chocolate Milk Okay Because At Least It’s Not Soda is the new secret California Milk Processors Board campaign, or why else “science-ish” like articles like this one saying that it’s darn near better than a sports drink for athletes, this one, or this one? At least this news story puts the California Milk Processors Board $1million campaign to push the issue at the forefront. Clearly, flavored milk is the next thing health activists are eyeing as they survey school lunch menus in their efforts to remove fats, high fructose corn syrups, and refined sugars from kids’ public school foods. And so the California Milk Processing Board has to have some way to fight back against all that healthiness.

Which led me to wonder, is it really a good idea to host a party where kids can get hopped up on sugary milkshakes and their mamas debauched on alcoholic beverages IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON?

The slightly tipsy, driving the sugar-freaked. Kinda demented, and maybe only in LA.

See why I thought the milk should’ve at least been organic?

Why? They had a stated strategy of wanting to build stores in underserved or ignored neighborhoods where the few other options might be a liquor/grocery store or an understocked, produceless discount grocer. As I understood the PR spin, Tesco was going to try to build a business bringing low-cost good quality food to people in moderate-to-low income neighborhoods; those neighborhoods are often “food deserts.” Good nutrition becomes a structural impossibility when healthy foods simply aren’t for sale where you live and shop. Also interesting to me was Tesco’s proposal to locate their processing and food prep operations in Segundo/Riverside, bringing lots of jobs to the Inland Empire.

I was a little surprised to be invited to a PR event introducing Fresh & Easy to a group of Los Angeles bloggers, but decided to go out of curiosity.

F&E, or Freesy, as we call it, has indeed ambitiously opened stores in a lot of communities around me–not all of them in upscale neighborhoods. There’s one near my parents’ retirement community in Orange County. There’s one near me in a community a couple of miles south, another in Pasadena, another in a working class community in the Eagle Rock area.

My loyalties mostly lie with Trader Joe, the organics line at Vons, my local farmer’s market, and I love the meats/fish and produce at Whole Foods. Not in that order. Yes, I realize Whole Foods is far from saintly. TJ’s too. However, in the categories I just mentioned, and for selection of obscure organic food/health & beauty products, the inventory is pretty comprehensive and high quality.

As for Freesy? Honey, you confuse me.

Freesy is more than a 7-11, but less than a Trader Joe’s. The stripped down, almost puzzlingly bare shelves and high ceilings scream out “wasted space” in a business with notoriously lean margins. I like the wide aisles–so different from the almost proudly congested, overstuffed aisles at TJ’s–but at the same time, I always feel like the space is too extravagant. Where’s the visual noise of bright food packaging that says to the average American consumer, “too many choices, not enough real difference”?

I kid, but am serious at the same time. It’s kind of right in the Famima spot (apart from Famima’s emphasis on Asian food): prepared food for a quick dinner pickup after work, as well as an edited selection of raw ingredients if you want to make something from scratch. In terms of size and selection, I bet Freesy would go over well in Manhattan, where many have West Coast Produce Envy and the visit to the Whole Foods with their Gaia-weeping carbon-footprint fruit-&-veg section is like a pilgrimage to Mecca. (Here in Cali, we urbanites are spoiled by true locavore riches from the Valleys nearby.) However, the comparison to Famima isn’t a happy one; Famima’s closing stores almost as quickly as they opened them during the subprime boom.

I’m guessing another reason Freesy doesn’t do so well here in Cali is precisely because of the strong and well-attended farmer’s market culture. The neighborhoods that are upscale are slavishly devoted to Whole Paycheck, Pavilions, Bristol Farms, or TJ’s; the modest and ethnic (and modestly ethnic) neighborhoods have their Vons, Albertson’s, “Jon’s,” 99 Ranch Asian supergroceries or Latino carnicerias. Then you have your super-inexpensive Food 4 Less groceries and the good old 99c store (which I love). And while I don’t shop at Costco, many people do.

If I had to take a guess as to what niche Freesy hopes to occupy, it’s that it aspires to be the Target of grocery stores. That is, it’s for the value shopper who doesn’t like to feel like a value shopper. I mean, you could buy paper towels at KMart, but you might feel oppressed by the stark fluorescent lighting, dingy floors, and haphazard, neglected-feeling placement of items on the shelves. So you’d go to Tar-zhay to buy your paper towels and walk away feeling so Gen Xly hip, what with the cheeky store-branded pseudo artisanal chocolates, the fun swingy Mossimo clothes and all.

Having shopped at Freesy before, I do have a few preconceptions of what they’re all about: it’s a mixed bag. There aren’t enough organic/local produce items among the fruit & veg offered. (However, there are several house-brand organic juices which are pretty good.) I personally like spicy food, so the prepared items I’ve tried (like the breakfast and other burritos) are too bland for me. But aside from that, Freesy offers some good values on staples, especially if you use the coupons they often mail out ($5 off a $25 purchase, sometimes $6 off a $30 purchase).

So, on to the blogger event sponsored by Fresh & Easy that prompted this post…

I’d never been to an event like this before. When I entered the demonstration kitchen at The Grove’s Sur La Table, I saw little work stations had been set up. I also knew there’d be a chef attending.

The menu

Below: ingredients set out for us. Also known as Performance Anxiety For Indifferent Cooks.

What, peanut sauce on a pizza?

Pizza before

Pizza after

I wasn’t a huge fan of the salmon in peanut sauce. The salmon was fresh. I had no information on whether it was line caught or farmed. In general I don’t go for vaguely sweet-ish sauces on my fish unless it’s a crisp-fried Chinese-style sweet and sour fish. Me personally, I think I’d try the peanut sauce on a Thai noodle salad first as opposed to garnishing the fish with it.

Salmon with peanut sauce before

Salmon with peanut sauce after

Below: the vegetables used to accompany the chicken fingers. I forgot to ask if Freesy had a frozen ready-to-nuke short grain organic brown rice like they do at TJ’s, since Freesy is obviously competing with TJ’s head to head. What’s shown here is organic jasmine, a long grain, rather dry rice. And I have no idea as to the provenance of the chicken. (We usually don’t eat a lot of meat in our family, but when we make it at home we splurge on the best quality, hormoneless/antibiotic-free/uncaged stuff and eat small portions of it.)

Frozen vegetables and organic jasmine rice

Now *that's* what I'm talking about. Men who cook.

Again, not a big fan of somewhat bland Mexican-ish food. Hel-lo? We live in LA! Melt-in-your-mouth dreamy tacos for $1.25!! Land of the gourmet taco truck! I used to feed my family on fresh-made fish tacos at a neighborhood joint–all three of us–for under $12. Drinks extra.

The beef fajitas Chef Mike made in the previous picture.

These chicken fingers I’d actually try, except I’d get creative with the breading. I’ve always loved naked croutons…wonder how the chicken fingers would taste with crouton breading? Yeah, you know what I’m talking about.

And again, my personal preference is to lose the apricot sauce.

Chicken fingers with apricot sauce.

Did I mention the desserts? They were truly the highlight of the night. (The free wine was also great…problem is, I can’t tell Two Buck Chuck from the good stuff.)

Below is a picture of the Freesy-made tiramisu, banana cream pie (which I really liked because the custard lacked the usual gummy texture exhibited by many cream pies reliant on corn starch as a binder), and chocolate cupcake.

Left: chocolate cucpcake. Middle (above): banana cream pie. Right: tiramisu.

The upshot? I’d buy frozen desserts, staples, and a few fill-in things at Freesy. If I liked less-seasoned prepared food, I’d probably try that sometimes too. But when I wasn’t wondering why they couldn’t take a few chances with their flavors like Trader J, I’d be musing that it’s a lost opportunity to sell Walker’s Crisps (Thai Lemongrass potato chips…To. Die. For.) or Cadbury chocolate–the kinds of things you can only get in a London supermarket.

See, Freesy needs to get a little personality. Get down wid yer funky Mary Quant self. And…don’t run from the UK and whatever your parent company Tesco’s record is there. If you’re setting apart desirable parking spaces next to the store’s front doors for hybrid cars in an effort to go green, then GO ALL THE WAY WITH IT. Don’t attempt window-dressing; don’t put your head in the sand if you have problems. The FreshandEasyFacts.com web people have damn good SEO; they’re on the same Google page as your official website.

SuperWhy characters L-R: Alpha Pig, Wonder Red, Super Why, Princess Presto

The purpose was to let blogging moms know that PBSKids has a number of shows that are educational, commercial-free, and vetted by numerous children’s math, science, and literacy consultants so when your kids 2-5 years old watch them, the experience isn’t brain rot. Instead, kids often learn quite a bit from the programs.

Now even though I fit the profile of a parent who’d be pleased to have my child watch PBS programs, it took my kid to turn 5.5 years old before he seriously watched any PBS shows on broadcast tv.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children younger than 2 3 avoid all screen time–whether it’s tv, computer (less likely), or video games. In addition, I also read a controversial Cornell study that found that tv watching in infants and very young toddlers before the age of 3 was strongly correlated to increased rates of autism. (Granted, the author of the study is an economist who teaches at a business school doing research in social science/early childhood development. A possible reason to discount the findings.)

I was one of those people who didn’t take any chances with my child. Only well after the age of three did my son watched Thomas the Tank, Bob the Builder, and Elmo dvds, but never any broadcast tv. (Bob the Builder, I love you and your solar sunflower drying sheds! So prosocial! No weaponry of any kind! Yes We Can!) In keeping with my Free Range Mama leanings, I believed my toddler should have lots of time to play outdoors and plenty of time for restful naps.

Mostly, my son’s daily routine as a toddler didn’t really allow for much tv watching anyway, as he was busy digging in dirt or playing with other kids at preschool. If he was at home with me we were reading, singing, learning ABCs, at the playground, or playing in some other way with blocks or trains. Or, you know, just hanging out and shooting the breeze.

So I came very late to the “sit down and watch broadcast tv programs for kids” bandwagon. And I’ll return to this later as it’s a crucial bit of information on PBS’ potential audience members and their parents, and the onset of what I’ll call StarWars-itis in little boys.

But what I learned about PBS Kids’ programming, specifically Super Why and Sid the Science Kid, was reassuring.

PBS TV Show executives & Super Why creators

Each Super Why program is written and tested by PhDs in early childhood development and literacy acquisition. It’s further tested in preschool classrooms in real-life situations to measure how actual children respond to the programs. Are they engaged, attentive, eager to answer back to the questions Whyatt/Super Why asks? Do they jump up in excitement to name letters or shout out words they can read onscreen?

(I think the real-life testing is interesting–necessary, but also questionable in the sense that if teachers at my child’s preschool were showing children tv shows, even PBS tv shows, during schooltime, I’d take my kid out of there so fast their heads would spin. I just wouldn’t be happy with a preschool that included tv watching as part of the curriculum. And I say this as someone who sent her kid to a private preschool, for what that’s worth. So this is may be an ethical question or one relating to transparency: if, as I suspect, preschools where the shows are tested–on low-income kids? often but not always kids of color–agree to show PBS kids’ shows-in-progress as part of their school day, are they right to trade the children’s class time for allowing the children to be “guinea pigs” and have the shows tested on them? What agreement is there between the parents and PBS with regard to program testing? What arrangement is there between the preschools and PBS? Are shows debuted to children outside of class hours? It’d be good to know if the preschools received extra educational materials from PBS for the kids by way of compensating them for their time and input. And I’m also cognizant that children from low-income/low-educational attainment backgrounds are at a disadvantage because studies show they tend to have heard quantifiably fewer words than children from middle/upper class and highly-educated parent backgrounds. So if SuperWhy helps fill a literacy/vocabulary gap for low-income or non-English-speaking kids, then the research done is necessary because it’s done on the population it’s meant to serve. Though I am still wary of the possible opportunity to glean research at the expense of the kid’s time to play in other, possibly more productive ways.)

We were given an episode of Super Why on dvd and some instructional materials to go along with the show, and asked to see how both went over with our kids at home.

My son TOTALLY ATE UP Super Why.

1) he’s on a superhero kick. He invented his own superhero with self-defined superpowers.

2) he’s been reading here and there, off and on, for well over 18 months now.

3) he likes the call-and-response parts of the show

4) he loves the problem-solving aspect of the show and that by changing a part of the story, you can change the outcome.

That was very satisfying. He adored the Sid the Science Kid blue plastic microphone that came in the goodie bag containing all the instructional materials.

But. The instructional materials themselves? He couldn’t be bothered.

This I found puzzling. Having suffered through workbooks and my immigrant Chinese parents’ version of “summer school” as a child myself, I swore I wasn’t going to be a flashcard-wielding, practically home-schooling, almost veering on grade-grubbing “achievement”-obsessed typical Chinese parent with my toddler. We did a little of that, but I wasn’t going to push my son to do alphabet flashcards if we could learn it some other, more fun way.

What’s puzzling is that my son was the one who drove me to buy Kumon workbooks so he could work out whatever cognitive ya-yas he was going through. Having a stage where he dashed around the playground with a piece of chalk marking X’s everywhere like a small, slightly few-letters-off Zorro? Grabbing a pencil and making straight lines on every piece of paper? Kumon books have exercises where kids do mazes and draw lines and zigzags in preparation for writing letters. I didn’t pick that particular philosophy over another, I just looked for a workbook that had exercises for things he was already doing.

So my son’ll rip through much of these Kumon workbooks on his own. But when I sat down with him to go through the PBS-provided instructional materials–no dice. Not the least bit interested. (I didn’t present them as “work,” I presented them as enticing “extra toys from the goodie bag.”)

Oh, well.

But then again, he sat with me and read me “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus” mostly by himself, so I guess something’s brewing in his brain.

As for Sid the Science Kid? Ever since we went to a birthday party where the hosts replicated the famous Mentos Geyser in a 2-Litre Diet Coke Bottle experiment, he’s all about hands-on learning. He eats it up. I’m convinced we’ll have to reconstruct the Egyptian pyramids using heavy stone blocks, pulleys, and inclined planes in our back yard soon.

So the upshot is that this summer, he’s been watching the occasional 1-hour block of Super Why and Sid the Science Kid shows on PBS. I’m delighted that he’s found them. I’m pleased there’s a commercial-free alternative.

And most of all, I’m glad Whyatt and Sid have taken some of the shine off  StarsWars-itis.

The lunchbox, the Jedi Symbol

Here’s the thing: by age 4 and definitely age 5, exposure to Star Wars seems like a forgeone conclusion. Especially for boys. Now since I unleashed this meme on my own son, I have only myself to blame. But now I have something to leaven that obsession. Star Wars might present interesting moral questions which are themselves educational, but as my son’s interest intensified, I wasn’t really thrilled with the militarism and fascist undertones in the movies. But given that Star Wars is now thoroughly embedded in boy culture and a rite of boyhood (like Pokemon), I knew that to take away an imaginative world my son uses to connect with other boys of all ages (that should read, MY HUSBAND), would be to hold him back. Because according to my son, Thomas the Tank is for “babies,” even though the kiddoo still sneaks an occasional peek.

So PBSKids really walks a fine line, promoting their preschooler-appropriate shows to moms who may feel reluctant to get aboard the couch potato train with their infants due to autism or other fears, but not waiting so late that they miss cultivating 5 and 6 year olds who are venturing into the noisy, commercialized world of Star Wars, Ben10, Pokemon, and, just shoot me now, Transformers. They really have a narrow window of opportunity with Free Range Mamas like me, who aren’t so keen to hook up our kids to the tv in the first place.

I for one feel glad to have an ally in the overstimulated world of kids’ popular culture. I remember my own days with Sesame Street, Electric Company, Zoom, and The Muppet Show all very fondly. I’m looking forward to filling in the odd hour here and there by watching these shows with my kid.

So I’m genuinely glad to be reintroduced to PBSKids and their offerings. But I’d be even happier if I could view the complete shows online. alongside the fun computer games on PBSKids. (The Sid the Science Kid game with the birds and caterpillars you use to balance the levered birdhouses on a fulcrum? Hiro Protagonist would’ve played FOR HOURS had I let him.)

Find out why I prefer to watch Robot Astronomy Talk Shows, or just about anything, online–here.

I am picky. Sometimes ridiculously so, or, my standards are absurdly low. Sometimes on the same day.

Hopefully you’ll find information here that’s either entertaining, useful, or both.

If I do a review, I’ll tell you if

• I paid for the item/service
• it was sent to me/comped
• if it was pitched to me by a publicist

If the product or service was pitched to me by a publicist, chances are I was paid to give my honest opinion, or I received some sort of goodie bag in exchange for writing the review that contained my honest opinion. I view that transaction much as country doctors used to do: products are a payment of a sort for services rendered. But it doesn’t change the diagnosis or the status of the patient.

Read all about my preferences and some of my past reviews here.

And if you still think I’d be a good match for reviewing your product or service, contact me at cyn3matic (at) gmail (dot) com.