First, update on my homemade laundry detergent project, thanks to Tall Tales from a Small Town.

RAWK!

I mean seriously. First, I found the Super Washing Powder here, but reader DrOlaf tells me you can find sodium carbonate at any pool supply store and that it is called soda ash.

It took me five minutes to make the powder. Actually, not me; my husband grated the soap bar because he was watching me do it slowly and laborously and was all, “OMG. GIVE IT TO ME. YOU WILL BE HERE UNTIL CINCO DE MAYO.”

Aside:  A good way to get your husband to do something you don’t want to do is to do it slowly, with lots of sighing. Pause a moment to wipe the nonexistent sweat from your brow. He will then take over the task and will use the opportunity to feel virile and strong and hunter/gatherery. This housekeeping tip brought to you by Ginny’s Tips For Getting Out of Anything.

Aside #2: A good rule of thumb for such instances is to follow Calvin’s advice, “If you do something wrong the first time, you’ll never get asked to do it again.”

Anyway, so after the soap powder recipe was done, I threw in a load of stinky smelly bath and kitchen towels and for good measure, a couple of socks that if I had left them another day, would have collapsed under the weight of their own stench and committed sockicide.

Verdict? Ridiculously clean socks and towels! No smell at all. Just fresh and clean. And the homemade soap makes your entire laundry area smell fresh and clean, too. Like a natural air freshener.

I am so so so thrilled to take this moment to flip Tide the middle finger.

[flip]

ANSWER!

I’ve been asked about the $21 eyeliner that won’t budge. Gina from My Very Last Nerve told me about this stuff from Bobbi Brown and from the reviews on the site, it is apparently some ladies’ religion.

I haven’t snagged any yet because I need to get to the Macy’s in Monroeville to get it. But I will this week and I’ll let you know if it lives up to the hype. Gina described it to me and explained how once the eyeliner sets, you can’t even rub it off with your finger; it requires soap and water or makeup remover, and since my eyeliner tends to run, I’m dying to try this.  Now to decide between caviar ink and basic black. DECISIONS.

Now I feel like I’ve left the men out. Um. BEER BOOBS DUCT TAPE TOOLS WATCHES SEX ANGELINA JOLIE SPORTS.

That better?

I got the chance to pose five questions to DVE’s Randy Baumann.

I bet you’re dying to know the answer to this one:

Question: You were gone from the ‘DVE Morning Show from January 18 until February 16. Can I just tell you, it was surreal. People were emailing me. No one knew anything. For a while I seriously thought you were abducted by aliens and they did that time suck thing. I mean, the Bring Randy Baumann Back to DVE Morning Show group on facebook still has 4,600 members! So my question is this. What did you do with yourself all that time you were gone and working out your new contract? Did you hide out? Did you go out of town?

Go read the answer!

(video still from WTAE)

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is my esteemed pleasure to present to you the greatest paragraph to appear in the Post-Gazette since the “rough but entertaining animal sex”:

Officers on their way to the bank robbery call went to the station and arrested him while he waited in the car. He had dye on him, the wig stuffed in the waist of his pants and was still wearing the fake breasts.

If “rough but entertaining animal sex” had a cagematch with this paragraph, my money is on the violent rhino sex.

P.S. I must find this mugshot.

P.P.S. Violent Rhino Sex would make a hell of a band name.

My latest column is up at Pittsburgh Magazine, and in this one, I take exception to those people who think the only people that can be true Pittsburghers are those people who live in the actual city of Pittsburgh.

I beg to differ.

And I do it with lots of horror movie screams.

P.S. I WISH my arms were that skinny.

So this week, I asked my butler Woy:

“If I wanted to make changes to my sidebar without bugging you about it, I would do that how?”

“I would give you access to the sidebar editor and I would back that shit up.”

“Okay. I’m going to attempt some minor changes. So you should back that shit up before I destroy it.”

“When were you thinking of making edits?”

“I already started.”

“You are a dangerous woman.”

Church.

So I wrestled with my sidebar, with html, and with widgets (not really widgets, I just like to say widgets) for two and a half hours and I managed to add that little “Follow me” twitter icon you see there. Go me! But I couldn’t center it for the life of me. I also managed to entirely delete the border of my blog, and there were hundreds of gray divider lines running down the whole length of my blog. The coupons apparently taught the divider lines a thing or two about sex. I can only imagine the havoc that would be wrought if widgets started having sex. Regardless, my blog was a hot mess and it completely exploded when I forgot to close a <div> tag, which is apparently the virtual equivalent of pressing the detonator button on a hunk of C-4 in real life. I was covered in exploded remnants of incorrect HTML code. Brackets and back slashes all over the damn place.

Luckily, Woy backed that shit up and came riding in on his virtual white horse and saved the day.

He fixed what I effed up, and in a matter of 30 minutes total did all the other things I wanted.

So what you’ll notice has changed:

• I have removed the big “THIS IS THE YEAR” button because it was mocking me. I kid. I removed it because I’m trying reverse psychology on the Universe. Also, I asked real loudly to the angels if they thought I should take the button down and they whispered in my left ear, “Yes.”
• The Pittsburgh Mag button will actually take you to my archives over at the magazine instead of the magazine’s main page. Making your life easier.
• Mike put my blog archives into calendar form instead of the long list of months spanning five years. That list drove me nuts. It’s gone. It can kiss my grits.
• I deleted both the category listings and the tags, because my God, tag clouds are ugly, and because Luke Ravenstahl’s name was the biggest word in the cloud. If you want to find something, just search under the “Find something!” box and you’ll find it.
• The tag cloud and category list have been replaced by the most recent reader comments. Much prettier.
• And perhaps the sexiest update, when you click on a post you’ll find at the bottom there are now a few options for you to share the post a bit easier. You can email it, tweet it, facebook it, or click the green Share This button and choose your poison. Woy is working to have those options available to you straight from the main page.
• Widget.