On the first day of every month, the best mass e-mail ever arrives in my in-box. It’s from this guy named Eric, the co-owner of San Francisco’s Nancy Boy, a retailer of organic bath and body products. Yawn, right? My thoughts exactly, until I found myself in stitches reading advertising copy about body spray (“If you like body sprays that are gay-friendly but contain toxic waste dump ingredients, Axe has a newish scent called Instinct that was designed to smell like leather and does evoke the piquant aroma of a bar after a drunken brawl between some bikers and a few dozen queens in bad drag”).
Here’s a taste of the circuitous copy that graced my in-box yesterday:
The latin name for tea is Camellia Sinensis. Astonishingly similar-sounding Cannabis Sinsemillia is the latin name for a plant variety that also provides its users with feelings of relaxation and contentment or so I have heard. The best grades of both plants are grown only in discrete geographical regions like India, Sri Lanka and global dorm room closets.
Further similarities abound. At harvest, skilled workers search out the prized leaf buds and tips that will be dried, packaged, and marked up so stratospherically the skilled worker would just want to barf if she knew. California residents able to sign your name and pick an ailment, any ailment but most importantly have $150 IN CASH can get a card to buy marijuana rice krispie treats at a nice store. You can also use that card to go to Safeway and buy tea. Make sure to show it to the checkout person they will be interested.
If you are unsophisticated you will end up with pot that is more dust than bud this is what people smoked in Santa Clara county from 1975-1979 coincidentally my high school years much of which so difficult to recall. This dusty pot is called “shake” and it is crap.
Keep reading below the jump to see what the hell this has to do with the new product they are offering (and check out the footnote about Justice Scalia). The products are nice and all, but it’s the queeny, clever run-on sentences that really make my day.
Tea that is also more dust than bud is called “tea bags.” 95% of the tea drunk in this country is truly heinous because it’s pretty much impossible to fit whole leaf tea, the only kind worth drinking, into bags. So after sending the good stuff to Europe manufacturers put the dust left behind into bags and that’s what we Americans drink.
OK so tea-drinking isn’t extra-manly, neither are clothes that match, bar soap as bar soap not shampoo and paying attention to whether the lady is mentally doing her shopping list or actually participating in the sexual act not that I’m an expert but watch Oprah once or twice and you’ll know from lady orgasms. From where I sit extra-manly isn’t getting us anywhere except tearing each other limb from limb so let’s sit right down and have a big pinkie-extended tea party.
Start with our new organic loose leaf teas in three varieties: Reserve Black, a robust blend of Assam and Ceylon that’s perfect for breakfast; True Earl Grey, traditional China tea delicately flavored with organic Italian bergamot, and Darjeeling FTGFOP, the very finest grade of India tea from one of the top Darjeeling estates. Many of us have self-esteem issues that make us whip our backs with nettles and use nasty tea bags when we could be enjoying what real tea is meant to taste like, if you do the whipping thing for fun we are not here to judge. But we found a way that loose tea can be made just as easy as I-don’t-deserve-true-happiness-because-I-self-pleasured-too-much tea bag tea.* See it all here: http://www.nancyboy.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=56_63*Justice Scalia belongs to one of those secret societies that whip themselves into a frenzy but he doesn’t seem to be getting any happier so we sent him some Fem parfum we’ll let you know what his thank you note says.
Excellent.
He has a twitter thingy too!
I don’t know how many times I had to move away in line from a bunch of noisome Metrosexuals wafting some obnoxious scent into the store.
Is Parfum the next Tobacco? As in, I don’t want to breathe your side-stream scent?
This doesn’t even hold a candle to the spam I’ve received about a secret government plot holding unborn army soldiers against their will.
I’ve been receiving Nancy Boy emails for a couple of years now. They’re consistently hilarious. I’ve never bought anything from them, but it is the only spam that I eagerly await every month. Love it.
I have been a customer for two years. The monthly email is always fun and amazingly tied into the newest offerings. The product descriptions on the site are more of the same fun. Their stuff is (mostly) great. I’m a proud Nancy Boy.
“queeny, clever, run-on sentences”
No there is a writing job Adrian Ryan could handle!
uh, a “good” copywriter would know that the species in a latin name for an organism is not capitalized. the whole name should be italicized as well.
“a bunch of noisome Metrosexuals wafting some obnoxious scent into the store.”
People who overdo it are kind of like the nouveau riche of the scent set.
Oh that’s nothing. I was on the Linky the other day when a peculiar woman gassed out half the car with her overly-generous application of hairspray.
When she was done, she took off the little clamp thing that was holding it all together, which made her previously unified hairdo into several independent hairdos. I don’t know what look she was going for, but I don’t think she achieved it.
My tea motto: “Garbage comes in bags”
Thank you, Jared Axelrod