...Any Bar Weighting More Than 5 Pounds

A three-parter on consumer ridiculousness.

Number one, a complaint about the biggest waste of my dollar all summer long: spray-on sunscreen. Specifically, the one at the left, known as "Coppertone Continuous Spray Clear No-Rub Spray Sunscreen Whatever," or, as I've come to think of it, "Coppertone Sticky Wasteful Unpleasant Overpriced Human Shellacking Product."

It was almost ten dollars, and gave me about four thorough applications (arms and legs) before the can was empty. It went on like spray paint, and left me feeling sticky in a way that I worried attracted and attached more bugs to me that I would normally walked around with.

It also had a weird highlighting effect on my arm hair, sort of like after you have your first professional leg wax, and then you sit in the sunlight and realize that all the little blonde baby hairs were left behind. It left me looking strange, feeling like I'd been laminated, and determined never to spend money on anything like it ever again. Oh, and most importantly, despite it being SPF 50, it still allowed me to incur sunburn on both my arms and legs.

Number two, the phrase "Do not use any bar weighting more than 5 pounds on this station" is making me crazy. I have been staring at this sticker on one of the weight machines on my gym for over a year and have been fighting the urge to correct it with a Sharpie. Either that, or I want to go in and mess up all the rest of it: "Constult you're fizzician...faliure too complie could rezult in serrious injery or even deff!"

Number three is something I have no photographic proof of, because it's something I read when I was about 14, but it still pops in my head now and then and makes me laugh like crazy. My mom bought a set of ginsu knives, and because even then I was a word-crazy freak, I read the little inserts that came with the product. It was obviously written by someone in Japan with a weak grasp of English, because, among the admonitions in the text were the phrases "Warning: knives very sharp" and "Keep out of children."