True horror...

Here's another transplant from my old blog:

The other day, while enjoying a DVR-ed episode of Reaper, I was treated to a particularly horrific commercial break. I was just about to fast forward, but this dreaded harpy sunk its claws into my brain before my thumb could act, and just as in the case of the fabled car wreck I could not avert my eyes.

I know the face of terror and it is Ped Egg. The first image that stopped me was that of a young woman's horned and jagged footskin tearing through her delicate hose as she tried to put them on. I was then treated to another young lady journaling in her teenage bedroom, but once the camera caught her hobbit-feet in its frame she became mortified and covered the lens with a pink bunny pillow. The final horror (so I thought) was that of a woman not unlike my grandmother sitting on a closed toilet attempting to shave the death from her soles with an array of surgical tools, but alas her Parkinsons/Alzheimer's/SARS prevented her from maintaining the steady hand she needed.

Then I was shown the solution to these indelible nightmares: the Ped Egg. A small egg-shaped (surprise) piece of plastic with a cheese grater on the bottom. A cheese grater. For your feet.

My shrieking brain was briefly calmed by shots of women (and one dude) gently caressing their feet with this miraculous product, lovingly flaying the hard dead skin cells off their toes, heels, eyelids, you name it. Just as I had relaxed and was once again prepared to fast forward to see how Sam finally nailed the soul of the week, Ped Egg delivered its deathblow.

With all this skin sanding, one might expect a small amount of debris to accumulate. Ped Egg has the answer. Ped Egg has all the answers. Behind Ped Egg's innocent cheese-grater-for-your-foot face lies its terrible secret, its black hole, its annex to one of Dante's circles of the netherworld. Simply crack open the egg and dump all your footshame into the nearest trash receptacle. Of course they show this. Twice. Twice I bore witness to the same shot of a model's hand dumping into an open can enough shredded skin to cover the spaghetti tray at Mr. Gatti's. I retch to this day at recalling the image.

How does one explain this can full of foot remains to company? "Oh, that's just filth I scraped from the bottom of my feet with this instrument of evil. I got two for the price of one, would you like to try it?"

And what are these people doing to accumulate so much foulness on their heels? I took karate for three years, which involved a lot of barefoot scooting-about on hard-nap carpet. I've also been running for at least ten years. Not once have I have had need for a piece of unholy metal to lay waste to the evil collected on my walking surfaces. Maybe they're all professional fire walkers. Or they work in industrial waste dumps in third-world countries. Or they're double-arm-amputees and have become accustomed to opening cans with their feet. God himself does not know.



And now you know what you're getting for Christmas.