Life Hacks, All Under $20

I recently made some cheap purchases that made my life disproportionately better.  They might improve your lives too.

Cheap, easy coffee

For over 25 years, the only way I've made coffee at home is with a Melitta pour over cone.  The process is simple and the results are delicious.  Put a #2 paper filter in the cone, put coffee grinds in the filter, put the cone on top of a coffee mug, pour hot water over the coffee grounds, put the cone in the sink, drink the coffee, throw the grinds in the garbage once they cool.  I paid $4.99 for each of my two cones in 2006 or 2007 and they still work great.  The only tricky part is you have to periodically lift the cone to see if the mug is full, else it might overflow.

Until recently!  We went on vacation and forgot to bring our cones so zwoman ordered two from Amazon for $7.84 apiece and when they arrived we were surprised by their new design.  It now has two holes along the base you you can see the level of the coffee in the cup without lifting the cone.  Brilliant!

If your K-cup machine breaks, or if you're sending a youngster out into the world and they need some housewares, get one of these.

Keep your outdated charging cords

I assume that everyone's home has a drawer like this.

Ok, maybe you don't have a cat brush or a fabric shaver (although you should) or an old AppleTV remote but you probably have a bunch of charging cables and blocks.  And if you have Apple products (not looking at you Squeaky) you probably have cables that don't work with all of your devices or all of your blocks.  In my case, my iPhone requires a USB-c charger while my iPad, keyboard and mouse need a Lightning charger.  Those Lightning devices are old so I have a lot of Lightning cables that accrued over time, including a few very long ones that weren't cheap.  For $7.19 you can get a pack of four little dongles that turn your Lightning cable into a USB-c cable.  They even come with little silicon tethers so they're always with the cable!  Similarly, for $6.98 you can get four dongles and tethers that turn your USB-c cable into a Lightning cable.  You can use all your cables to charge everything for about fourteen bucks.  And when you're traveling with your new iPhone and your old iPad you only need to bring one charger.

Keep all your old peripherals

I recently started a new job and they issued me a laptop with only three guzzintas, an HDMI port and two USB-c ports.  The power cord uses one of those USBs so when I'm working from home my peripheral connectivity is limited.  For $16.95 you can get a 7-in-1 USB hub that provides another HDMI port, two USB 3.0 ports, a USB-c port, and SD/TF slots (which you'll probably never use).  Now I can use two monitors and my old camera and speaker/mic, all at the same time.  Even if you already have a big baller hub at home, this one is nice for travel, especially if you've got one of those big baller travel monitor extenders (I bet Danimal rolls thusly given his big baller balls).  

For $38.96 you can make your life a lot easier and/or give someone a helpful gift.  Enjoy!

Next Step, Profit

Unbeknownst to us, although the Teej might've felt a disturbance in the force, researchers at the University of Zurich have been quietly working on one of our enduring challenges. That being solving the problem of how, exactly, to extract riches from underwear. 

My friends, we may have a breakthrough.

The summary of a recent Science News article tells the whole story:

More than 1,000 volunteers buried cotton underwear across Switzerland to help scientists measure how active different soils are. The faster the fabric disappeared, the more biological activity was taking place underground. Gardens showed the fastest decomposition, while lawns had the least, revealing how strongly land management can shape soil life.

Researchers enlisted the help of those 1,000 volunteers for a study entitled "Proof by Underpants". (As if Trey and Matt weren't involved.) Each volunteer buried two pairs of cotton underpants at sites around Switzerland. Two months later, the volunteers dug up the underpants, photographed them, and sent the images to the research team in Zurich.

The results were interesting scientifically. Turns out that private gardens are the most active biological sites, as measured by the decomposition of the underpants. Agricultural fields and meadows were next, with lawns the least active. 

Now comes the slightly harder part. We have findings that are a signpost towards the future. All we have to do is:

• Collect underpants
• ? (but it somehow involves soils)
• Profit

I think you all know the next step.

The First Time... Ever I Saw Your Face... and Heard Your Jokes

It's pretty cool to see these fresh faces get their shot at the mountaintop. Carson. This is it. 

Nervous. Fidgety. Almost each of them stammers or stumbles at least once. 

And each of these people crushed it.  

You all are in for a treat tonight, and I think you all sound like you're in the right mood for it, because this is a young comedian, this is their first time on the Tonight Show with us, and they're very funny. 

They've come all the way from ____ to be with us, so won't you please give a warm welcome for...

Drew Carey, from Cleveland, OH - 11/8/91

Steven Wright, from Boston, MA - 8/6/82

Garry Shandling, from Tucson, AZ - 3/18/81

Ellen DeGeneres, from Metairie, LA - 11/28/86

Freddie Prinze, from New York, NY - 12/06/73

A Good Boi* at Twilight

*Eight times out of ten 

He barks too much. He likes people more than other dogs, but not that many people. He doesn’t go for walks as much as outdoor sniff sessions. He’s a quirky, funny, stubborn little nugget, but he’s our quirky, funny, stubborn little nugget. As he approaches his 17th birthday, he’s slowed considerably and is less steady on his paws. His movements are more deliberate. He doesn’t see or hear as well as he used to. He pees and poops more frequently. He exhibits brief bursts of energy, followed by lengthy stretches in recline – all traits he shares with his hooman dad. 

I decided to write about him while he’s still with us because I’m not sure I’ll be able to after he’s gone. Yeah, I’m gonna be a wreck. 

Truth is, I was skeptical about owning a dog. I like dogs, and plenty of friends had and have dogs that I enjoyed. But I never owned a dog growing up, and working as a newspaper guy, with its long days and odd hours and periodic road trips, didn’t seem to lend itself to the care and feeding of a dog. 

My wife returned from a road trip to visit family and had bonded with a cousin’s dog, a lively little Yorkshire terrier, and said she would like to have a dog again. She grew up with a cocker spaniel she loved and thought the companionship would be a nice addition to our little duo. With some hesitation I said, sure, let’s give it a go. 

We settled on something in the poodle-mix family; my wife has a mild allergy to animal dander, and poodles and their various cross breeds have hair, not fur, so they don’t shed. Several months later, we saw an ad in the paper that a nearby family had a litter of cock-a-poo puppies (cocker spaniel-poodle mix) available. When we visited the family and were wondering how to choose, the guy suggested that I sit on the floor cross-legged near the puppies and see if any of them react. Sure enough, one little fellow about the size of a cornhole bag crawled toward me and climbed into my lap. 

Four weeks later, in early Dec. 2009, we brought Nappy home (brief aside: Nappy was my nickname in high school and college; I had a curly Afro and Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish” was all over the airwaves at the time – “Looking back on when I was a little nappy-headed boy …”; my wife learned of my nickname from friends and insisted our dog be Nappy Jr.). He was an active, bouncy puppy who grew into a 22-pound, crotch-seeking missile. When one of us returned home, he bounded toward us and launched upward so that he collided with our bits, his tail spinning like a helicopter blade. There’s no question that he loves both of us, but very quickly he became “my dog.” 

Almost from day one, he followed me everywhere. I had to change the way I walked around the house when he was little, a kind of shuffle rather than picking up my feet because he was often so close that I frequently clipped him or stepped on him. I do roughly 99.6 percent of the feeding, walking, peeing and pooping duties. He’s disrupted my sleep pattern for years, either by flopping on top of me in bed overnight or mewling at us at 5 or 6 a.m. that he needs to go outside. 

Some quick calculations estimate that I’ve made approximately 43,000 trips outside with him and picked up about 7,750 pounds of poop. Between food, toys and vet bills, my wife jokes that we’ve spent the equivalent of two years of college on him, and he’s no closer to a degree than the day we got him. Sometimes, you just write the checks and don’t think twice. 

I concluded that any shortcomings in his behavior or training were my fault, not his. We’ve never boarded him because he’s our guy and we want him with us and because he seems to have a neurotic streak that caused us to worry that he might gnaw off a paw if he went days without seeing us. We’ve taken only car trips to places with dog-friendly accommodations since we’ve had him. I haven’t been on a plane since the middle of 2009. I wouldn’t change a thing. 

Dogs are a marvel, a blessing. They’re always happy to see us and love us unconditionally. They ask nothing more than belly rubs and ball-playing sessions and car rides with the windows open. Our little fellow is winding down. I can see it, I can feel it. I’ll be a mess when it happens and it will leave a huge hole in my heart, but I’m grateful for every day we had with him. Now, if you’ll excuse me, at least one of us has to pee.

Emergency Masked Rapper Filler

Lonnnng weekend for your boy. Harrisonburg and back on Friday with our exchange student to check out the Green Valley Book Fair, show her Buc-ee's for the first time (a monument to American excess), and visit James Madison University. Followed that up with a round-trip 12-hour drive to/from Columbus, OH on Saturday and Sunday sandwiched around a fantastic wedding of a friend's daughter (and a mini-summit with Danimal). Topped it off with a cookout with Marls and fam and a few too many beers. Marls might've overserved himself on Johnny Walker Gold, as well.

So you can see why I might've slacked on my content creation duties. Not sure what excuse the rest of you mopes have (The Teej flew to South Korea, so he's good.).

Quick filler it is, then. Tom Hardy is a talented dude, but he often plays to a type. He's also long been a fan of old-school American hip-hop. Turns out his talents go beyond playing a tough guy with a penchant for a quip. 

Hardy recently joined the hip-hop supergroup Czarface (which incudes rap duo 7L & Esoteric and Wu-Tang Clan member Inspectah Deck) on their new album "Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer". In this case, Hardy and Frankie Pulitzer are one and the same.

Hip-hop heads will have a more informed opinion than I, but to me, this sounds like credible flow that takes us back a couple of decades, stylistically. Hardy/Pulitzer is the dude in the mask. Enjoy, and let me know if I've got it right.

Lewis Hamilton knows where all the coolest barns are

Lewis Hamilton is perhaps the greatest Formula 1 driver ever.  His list of racing achievements is preposterously impressive.  After repping Mercedes for 19 years, he moved to Ferrari in 2025, giving him access to preposterously impressive cars.  And it appears that he knows where all the most preposterously impressive barns are.

Hamilton recently posted his barn find Ferrari F40 on Instagram and I almost passed out.  Much like the street-parked F40 I wrote about previously, there should be no such thing as a barn find F40.  But this guy found one.  And he has access to all the finest mechanics at Maranello to restore it.  Officine Classiche y'all!

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I'm jealous on many levels.  But I can't hate!  Look at how much he loves the car, you can practically see him morph into a 10-year-old as he looks at it, sits in it, rubs the badge.  He's in love.

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Call me if you know a barn with something even half this fantastic stored in it.

Food is Dumb. Or Is It?

We've seen some things around here, my friends, gustatorially speaking. We've eaten the KFC Double Down. We've chowed our way around multiple state fairs. We've tried (and enjoyed) pizza-flavored vodka.

The G:TB Taste Team has been handed another challenge, should we choose to accept it. 

Pringles are great, though not part of my regular rotation these days. Don't eat a lot of chips of any provenance, really. And I do love a dill pickle - I eat at least one a day. I can take or leave vodka.

All of which makes me mildly curious about Sugarlands Distilling's new Pringles Dill Pickle Potato Vodka.

Here's the product description from InternetWines.com, where you can purchase a 750 mL bottle for $21.99 (or could, before it sold out):

"Sugarlands Distilling took the briny bite of Pringles Dill Pickle Potato Crisps and turned it into a spirit that's tart, savory, and unapologetically bold. Think sharp vinegar, crisp dill, and a salty potato twist all in a pour that packs a serious punch.

Pop the top, pour a shot and let the flavor speak for itself. Perfect for picklebacks, martinis, or any cocktail that needs a little snap. Embrace the brine."

I can see the concept here. Little brininess adds something to a lot of different drinks. Color me curious.