Never buy a Simmons mattress, ever. Seriously.

So a few months ago the husband and I decided to replace our aging mattress which was giving up the ghost. We read Consumer reports on where to buy a mattress, and we went to the highest rated seller.  We tried many mattresses - some as much as $4,000!

Seriously.

And while we are trying this mattress, the salesman (mattress salesmen are just an inch or two higher than discount carpet salesmen in my version of the food chain of life) says "this model comes with a twenty year warranty."

For $4,000 it should also come with magic fingers, says I.

After bouncing around from one end of the store to another, we settled on a Simmon's Beautyrest that was very firm, but had a thick tufted almost pillow top.  It came in almost two grand.

So we buy the mattress, it arrives five days later via deliver.  They took away the old, looked at the bed frame (wood, two steel cross members, each with two legs), set up the mattress and the new box spring and they leave.

The bed was heaven for about a month, and then we both started waking up with sore backs, which were caused by the divots formed by our torsos in the middle of the bed.  We also discovered a nice ridge developing straight down the middle.

So I go back to the mattress store and have a talk with the salesman and the manager.

They send the bed warranty specialist who comes out, measures, photographs and dismantles the bed, and tell me that I will get a letter in a week with what to do.

The letter arrives and says that there is nothing wrong with the bed, but that we have voided the warranty by not providing the proper support of said bed.  The writer, Miss Smith enclosed a warranty card with teeny, tiny type, that said our two steel supports are not allowed.  A wooden bed requires five wooden slats.  So I call the manager and ask, why weren't we advised of this at drop off?

"Because," says he, "Our delivery people aren't mattress professionals.  They just offer a convenience of bringing the bed to your home."

Then why didn't the salesman point it out when he sold the bed?

"Oh, because it never comes up."

So we put in the five slats, photographed that, sent it in and we get another letter that says "That's nice, but three of those slats need feet on them."  And how do I do that, asks me.

In a return email she says "You'll have to either build them OR buy a new bed."

Now I ask you, when was the last time that bought a new mattress and box spring and found out AFTER the fact that you either had to re-engineer the bed or have replace the whole thing to be in compliance with the warranty?

So today, we get the feet built - and we really outdid ourselves by adding in adjustable felt padded feet to the legs - and photographed them and sent them in to the warranty people.

And we get ANOTHER email saying that the new feet are OK, but that the bed slats really aren't perfectly spaced and that "we can't do anything until the slats are precisely spaced..."

Thankfully, the husband was home, and he is a whiz bang at algebra, and he actually gonkulated the precise measurement down to the centimeter so our slats were perfected for the Fuck Ups at Simmons.

And now we wait.  And will they next tell us that they don't like which direction the bed faces? What about just telling us to move?  I beginning to feel like I am dealing with the Dragon Lady who keeps taunting me with "snatch this pebble from my hand," while laughing diabolically.

So my advice to you is to never buy a product that ends up costing you your sanity.  And frankly, if simmons were building these correctly, they wouldn't need to have their customers upend their lives to retrofit a perfectly good bed to work with their inferior engineering and second rate product.

Simmons bedding stinks. Simmons warranty claims also suck.  If it were built right, this wouldn't have happened.  Go buy a Sealey, a Stearns and Foster, and if you have money to spare, then buy a Tempur-Pedic.  But steer clear of Simmons.   Or you can go buy a Simmons, see what I care.

I will tell you that if they come back and turn down this claim, that Cookie will be having a bonfire in the front yard.

What to serve MJ for dinner...

Sausages sound so common.  Would she prefer the Burns & Co. "Spork"?  Or should throw caution to the wind just go for the Burns & Co. "Speef"?

Features tell, benefits sell

But does it come with its own "answering cervix"?

Cookie often wonders, not who comes up with these ideas, but who buys them.

And then uses them.

And I mean uses them beyond the once or twice that they seem goofy fun.

And why doesn't the real phone look like the advertised phone?

Is this an objet d' art, or art that should be objected too? 

And where is the stunning detail, the highlights in her hair.

And, according to this image, one does not speak into her secret lady place, but into the leaves betwixt her knees.

And shouldn't her absent nipples flash red when an incoming call is announced?

And Cookie wonders who has more money than sense to plunk down $350 for it on eBay.

Yes, Cookie wonders.

Because, you see, if Cookie could find one, he would send it to Mr. Peenee as a NOLA housewarming gift.

Through the pain, I think of weird things

Cookie is the middle of another bout of his pesky acute disease, diverticulitis, a chronic condition that has ruined my life for the past 15 years.  The pain is unbelieveable, and once you take the antibiotic it takes about two days for everything start functioning.  I'm so familiar with it that they have me stocked with $30 a pill antibiotics, twice a day for day.  On top of being in pain and unable to stand up, its an expensive condition.

Anyhow, one of the pills that I take when this beast is taking over my colon is an antispasmodic which is like a muscle relaxant for your colon. (Once the infection starts, your colon loses periostatic function.  Which means you can't crap, even though you need to, and it cramps up, which is painful. )   It makes one terribly sleepy, and I for one have very weird dreams and waking thoughts.

One of my strangest was me in court, on the witness stand, unable to move.  The attorney grilling me wanted to know why I insisted that products be named for what they are, nothing something prosaic and detached from the item itself.    But I was unable to speak, and then when I told to step down, my legs felt like lead weights, so instead of stepping, I skated away with the greatest of ease.

This morning, my friend Deb posted this picture to her Facebook account:

Now, since this speaks directly to my dream, I am sharing it.  Both men are wearing something of polyester knit.  It's called the "Palm Springs Suit".   I see not a thing about this get-up that even harkens to Palm Springs.  I mean I know its been 40 years since I was in Palm Springs, but really - did this type of thing go on there?   Did Sinatra wear this?  Do they still wear this, only made of better materials?

I think its a sham.  No man would choose to wear this in Palm Springs.  Or anywhere for that matter.  Even these two guys were paid to put the thing on and even so the guy on the left is being held in place by a woman who, if she is still alive, is some person's grandmother.   Still, if they ever do a sci-fi movie about Palm Springs, here's your futuristic outfit.

Then there is this:

The irony is not lost on Cookie.  But except for the guy asleep on the doorstep, no one in this establishment is dreaming about gentlemen, and I think that the closest you could get to a Gentleman entering the establishment is the sign telling you the establishment is for gentlemen.

It's like those VIP lap dance clubs, where women parade around in high heels, a smile (or a grimace indicating that she is a wild hot bitch in heat), but there never any VIP's in the club. Don't believe me? Look at the parking lots.  No VIP would be caught dead in a 1999 Dodge Stratus with a bumper sticker reading "My kid beat up Honor Student", or "Every Child Matters at P.S. 89."

Now, if y'all will excuse me, I need to nap.  This pills have exhausted me.

Jury "UGH" Duty

Greetings.  Cookie has been hereby notified that he is to report to Baltimore City (County) Jury Duty in downtown Baltimore.

Ugh.

When you live in the city of Baltimore, which is both a city, and its own county, you get called to jury duty just about every other year.  And they do it so fucked up here.

In Ohio, you get called for a two week period, Monday through Friday.  You report each day at 8am.  If you aren't called, you go to lunch at noon, return at one, and if you still aren't called, they send you home by 3PM.  On your second week, if you aren't called by Thursday, you have done your civic duty, you get a get out of Jury Duty for three year certificate and your life

You serve for one day in the pool.  If you are not chosen for a jury, you can get called again next year.  In other words they can call you every freaking year and disrupt your life.

UPDATE

Looks like I dodged a bullet.  My number was not called.   So I can still receive ANOTHER summons this year.  UGH.

Maybe it will be after Labor Day and I can freak the defendant out by wearing white shoes after the holiday.  "Fashion has changed."  You know...

Why shouldn't my kitchen have Glamour Bins?

Well?

Its a terrible thing when love dies: Peaches and Daddy

It is a terrible thing, when love dies.

My mother was her father's daughter.  She never had very many memories that she shared about her mother, who I adored, but she had many fond memories of her father.  I loved my grandfather, but I was terrified by him, despite the fact that there wasn't a mean bone in his body.

One of the pieces of advice he gave my mother when she moved to the big city to enter nursing school was not to become "Some Daddy's Peaches."  I learned of this in one of those moments when Mom would tell a story about when she was younger when I was a child myself.  It didn't make any sense.  "Some Daddy's Peaches?"  Was it a riddle, or code?

Well, as I learned in my teens, it was neither, but rather an allusion to the 1920s scandal marriage of one Edward Browning, a New York Real Estate Investor and Developer, to one Frances Belle Heenan.   What made it initially so scandalous was that Frances, aka "Peaches" was only 16 at the time of the marriage to Browning's age of 51.  That's an age difference of 36 years for those of you with slow calculation abilities.  

And that's not all.  Browning began courting Peaches when she was either 15, with the consent of her mother, and 37 days later, on June, 23, 1926 - Peaches 16th birthday - the couple wedded.  Nevermind that Peaches mother was about the same as the gray faced Browning.  All was well now that New York's child protective services was off his back.

One of the conditions of the marriage was that the eccentric Browning, aka "Daddy" allow Peaches mother to live with them in their luxury apartment.

And then nothing, really, nothing.  The public assumed it was wedded bliss until until Peaches surfaced in the White Plains, New York, divorce court at Christmas time, a mere six months into the whole marriage.  All Daddy wanted to do were things that Peaches, who professed to be a good girl, thought were perverse. Oh, you know, coitus and such.   And she had been aggrieved.  Yes, that too.

Had Daddy simply just bought her out and set up Peaches in a nice pad in one of his buildings facing Central Park, this would have been the end of it.

But Daddy was having none of it.  Peaches had, afterall, left him.  And Daddy really wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.  So he wasn't giving in without a fight.

This is when the New York Graphic, the Weekly World News of its time, got involved.  The Graphic was notorious for lots of enhanced (read as doctored) pictures and lurid facts.  And the Graphic sent reporters and its very own court stenographer to the divorce trial to get every juicy fact during the proceedings, and with some creativity brought the whole circus to life with images such as...

Evidently what came out was that Daddy was a sex starved pervert who fancied himself a sheik, and wanted to act out scenes from Valentino's movie of the same name as an homage to the world's great screen lover who died in August 1926.  

It also came out that Daddy had a pet goose at his home in Scarsdale and Peaches was scared to death of thing.  So the goose made the pictures as well.  Why not, right? 

But it was something Daddy said to Peaches that made him a cultural icon of the 1920s and beyond: 

That's right.  Peaches - who answered "Positively" on the witness stated that Daddy told her "Don't Be A Goof!"  And with the publication of that factoid, Daddy Browning started a 1920s fad that is still popular with children to this day.  (We are, however, at a loss to explain what a "BONK" is other than the Graphic felt the need to rhyme "HONK" with something.)

And then there was this - my favorite of the Graphic images - and the most nonsensical:

And then there was an acid attack to poor Peaches face, while she lay sleeping in her bed, a couple days before she married Daddy.  She always felt that Browning was behind it, but the only one in the house with Peaches at the time of the attack was her mother.  Odd.

In the end, the courts ended the marriage, and Peaches got $6,000 for her trouble.

For his trouble, Browning got nothing, but wealthier at an alarming rate through savvy real estate deals.  One of the brilliant master strokes of his was to sell off half his portfolio in the summer of 1929 and invest in gold.  He barely noticed the collapse of Wall Street in 1929.   Browning did, however have a serious stroke and spent his waning days rambling about his Scarsdale mansion yelling at inanimate objects, ranting about peaches being served with his meals, before finally dying in 1934.  Find A Grave erroneously notes that Peaches got everything when Daddy died, but in actuality received a token sum of $6,000, with the rest of his estate going in various directions, including one of his adopted daughters.

And Peaches?  Peaches took to the stage and played Vaudeville for a number of years.  Evidently she could sing quite well.  And she married again, divorced again, married again, divorced again - you know.  She died in the mid 1950s when she fell in her own bathroom.  And who found her?  Her mother - the only person out of the mess to survive everyone else.

Her catharsis was not my epiphany

Cookie's work capers at the Strip Club and Beef House continue and despite some assholes, I am finding that I do enjoy the job.

Despite the fact that I received far more smiles that snarls, one woman - decided that I was THE WORST EMPLOYEE IN THE HISTORY of the Strip Club and Beef House.  Yes, the worst.  Ever.  And the more she vented, the louder she got.  And at one point in her tirade, she looked at Cookie and said "You don't even care, you are just standing there with your mouth open."

Yes, I was slack jawed, but honestly, I have never heard someone torque off like an air raid siren.

But what can you do?  She evidently needed to get something out, I thought at first.

Then she yelled "You aren't being very nice to the merchandise!"

Hello?

Since the Beef House and Strip Club doesn't sell any living being, this was an odd statement.  Something was off.

And what was off was her inability to see the merchandise as something inanimate.  A plant is living, yes.  And so is a pet, a person, family members, friends.  But a paperweight?  She couldn't even name the object, it was merchandise.

Having been around older people a great deal, I know the signals of dementia.  Easy excitability.  Inability to find words, names or recognize faces.

So just letting her go off on her own was the best thing for her.

And despite her tongue lashing, I hope she is OK.  Seriously.

But it makes me wonder.  Cookie is twenty years from his seventies.  Will I be the one screaming like madman and not making sense in a few years?

In any event, life is for the living and I plan on being around for a great many years.  To quote a friend, "you're too ornery to get old."