Beauty squee.

Remember the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding? Remember the bit about Windex being the miracle cure for any and everything that wasn't nailed down?

Smith's Rosebud Salve is the "Windex" of 2007, except way safer, is not advised to clean windows, and has 115 years worth of history.

This is the one thing in your bag that you'll use more than your cell phone.

Chapped lips? Dry hands? Damaged cuticles? Bug bites? Blemishes?

I've tried to fix those with my Treo, and it's helped me only to complain about it to someone.

The best part? It's only $6 bucks, smells great, and will last you months.

Get yours here.

Ambiguous squee.

I'm still up in the air over this one:

http://www.lala.com/

I can't tell if it's squee or suck.

Isn't this the pseudo-premise of eBay, but with no import singles from Germany?

You decide.

Squee even I do not understand.

I thought I knew everything there was to squee over, but apparently my radar is off when it comes to the way young demo. (I can only be "so" awesome, people.)

2007, meet the revamped squeeworthy item of 1996: Webkinz.

Remember the "Nano Kitty" and "Tamagotchi" virtual pet craze circa 1996? Oh, right. You're 12. Dag.

Well, back in the early days of your existence, there was the Webkinz equivalent. Instead of living on the web, it lived in your pocket or keychain.

Created as a solution to the pervasive problem facing those marketers, kids like you would bring them to school and not pay attention in class. They'd feed their virtual pet instead, or get into fights with other students over "accidentally" killing it. (I still maintain my innocence, no matter what PETA says!)

Previously, the general operating principle for this scenario was: Feed and play with your virtual pet or the thing DIES and you have just wasted months of your life for nothing. Start over.

The rules have changed!

1. Once you adopt the Webkinz of your choice, and register it online, you can play with your pet much as you like, but only for a year.

I guess that means you shouldn't get too emotionally attached?

2. During your year or mother/fatherhood, you get rewarded by taking care of the Webkinz, and receive "Kinzcash" to buy items at the "W shop." (i.e. Food, clothing, toys, furniture, etc.) You can also earn cash by playing games and in contests!

3. Adopt 'til you drop! You can collect as many pets as you want, and each pet scores you a new "room" and 2,000 Kinzcash bucks to spoil your pet even more than you already have.

4. Last, but not least, they incorporate a Buddy List feature into the mix, called "Kinzchat." You can invite your friends to check out your pet and your rooms when they're online. Hopefully you didn't adopt the same pet, or that would be kinda...awkward.

The chat feature, although cool, is pretty limited for safety purposes. You create responses; you have to pick responses from different columns:

Column A
I AM
YOU ARE
WE ARE

Column B
COOL!
AWESOME!
NICE!

...or something.

Smelly squee.

Cruising around sephora.com, I spotted this new item - $300 perfume from Juicy Couture.

Still dizzy from the residual sticker shock, I naturally assumed that this price had to come with an explanation. Clearly something about it had to warrant that hefty price tag. Or...not.

Lots of designers make perfume. Vera Wang. Calvin Klein. Dior. But none of them charge anything close to that amount of ridiculousness. Not it.

It's not a life-sized bottle of perfume. In fact, it's 1 ounce. Not it again.

It's made out of some exotic plant! Yes. That must be it. The "Last of the Mohicans" of a rare flower, exported from a country on the verge of total plant life devastation. I've finally solved it. Really not it.

To the contrary, the explanation is this:

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there were two nice girls named Pam and Gela who discovered the Juicy Couture world of fashion, and fun, fun, fun. They took a deep breath and realized this is how The Juicy Girls smell the world! - Juicy Couture

I don't know about you, but it's gonna take a lot more than a lame story about two chicks finding fun, not once, but three times in a row and suddenly feel the insatiable need to encapsulate the moment in a scent...that costs three monthly installments of a car insurance bill.

Just because something's expensive and made by a designer does not mean it's squeeworthy. It just means it's not-so-affordable.

If you happen to think "fun cubed" smells that hot, by all means, go for it. If you're not impressed, don't waste your hard earned loot.

First squee!

2007 will surely bring us more squee than can be swallowed, so let's kick off the first squeeworthy moment of the year with my new favorite site.

We love YouTube. There's not a person out there that isn't fond of the slacking off at work and school possibilities it brings.

One can literally sit and waste an entire day by searching for various keywords...including ones that just don't make any darn sense, yet still are represented on the web. (Some are more successful than others, mind you.)

Need to find that old En Vogue video you haven't seen since 1995? Got it. Need to find that annoying Volkswagen commercial with the annoying song? Got it. Need the latest SNL episode? ...Don't got it.

Since Google, which er, owns Blogger, so I better mind my Ps and Qs, merged with YouTube, the climate of the site changed. People started caring about pesky little copyrights and ownership semantics. It was almost like the new Napster debate or something. However, let's all remember that we're dealing with viral STREAMING content. I can't save it to my desktop, old people. It's just helping you promote your stuff, so get over it.

In the spirit of...well, just not giving a crap, dailymotion.com works like YouTube, except with way more bizarre German videos of people in ill-fitting pants and full streaming episodes of your favorite TV shows. Yeah. The full 45 minutes. No 10-minute content caps!

Videos you can't normally locate on the web, you can find here, which is equally reminiscent of Napster's catalog back their prime.

So, give it a whirl, but be quick about it. Won't be around for long until THE MAN shuts it down!

The opposite of squee.

I have a tough time explaining the concept of "What is squee" unless I supply an analogy or provide a descriptive scenario involving actual squeeing. (I'm starting to believe that people do this solely for their own amusement and nothing else.)

To help further establish the depth and breadth of squee, I present you "The Opposite of Squee."

Take this article in Yahoo! News: Nintendo investigating Wii strap problem

Ah-hem:
[Nintendo] said . . . it is investigating reports of problems with a strap that secures the machines' wandlike remote-controller to the player's wrist.

My first thought? Wow. I hope there's nothing wrong with it so I can keep playing. That would majorly suck.

I kept reading.

At least two Web sites have been set up to collect photos that purportedly show damage — such as broken glass and TVs — resulting from the strap coming off players as they swung around the controller, at times causing the remote to fly out of their hands.

My new thought: Do you need schooling how to not be a spazoid freak? I think yes.

Wii is a game. It's fictional. You are not actually playing a sport. It is a mere mimicry of the event. LET'S ALL REMEMBER THAT. No doubt you were one of those people who jumped with Mario when you hopped atop mushrooms or drainpipes, too.

Hey, I've played. I didn't even use the strap, and did I break anything? No, cause I'm still alive. If I were dead, at my brother's hand, you'd know I threw the remote, launching it into a TV set or something equally expensive.

One of these such sites filled with remote-throwing morons is http://www.wiihaveaproblem.com/ (Ah, URL puns.)


"I have a 27 inch normal tv in my room. So on wensday after launch I asked my mom if i could use it on the 40 inch projection HDTV. She was like ok what ever. So i was playing tennis and the wiimote flew out of my hand with the wrist strap (yes i was wearing it and it flew off with the wiimote) and flew into the screen." - wiihaveaproblem.com

Did you ever see Andy Roddick throwing his tennis racket across the court in wild abandon during his return? No! (Okay, so maybe if you watched John McEnroe play, but the guy's got documented anger issues.)

Take the time and energy you kids are throwing (pun very intended) into this crazy remote-launching and dump it into things like spelling, proper capitalization of days of the week, and other worthwhile causes.

Dumb: The opposite of squee.

Awesome squee.

I haven't played Nintendo religiously since NES, but I have found a new reason to willingly reunite with the pains of "Nintendo thumb," and it's called Wii.

My brother has a problem, and it's called, "Buying every video game and console ever made." If he was old enough, I'm sure he would have been an early proponent of Atari. Through him, I've managed to sort of stay in touch with the latest video game nonsense, and sometimes* be cool enough to play a game or two.

Call it the hospitality of Thanksgiving, call it a momentary lack of sanity, but he recently purchased Wii and let me play.

Can I just tell you now that it is THE singlemost amazing thing of 2006, other than Timberlake locating and returning "sexy?" (Okay, fine. And Britney dumping K-Fed.)

Incase you've been living under a rock, or actually have a life, Wii oozes uber-coolness because of its wireless controller (that kinda, sorta looks like a sleek TV remote) that detects motions of the player.

Remember the old track games on NES? You had to run and jump on that ghetto version of a Dance Dance Revolution Pad? This smacks that in the face.

When you're playing a game like Wii Sports, you're actually going through the motions of playing the game in real life. You're throwing punches to get the TKO. You're swinging a baseball bat or the tennis racket to hit the ball. You're reaching out your arm to get that turkey in bowling.

Call me pathetic, dumb, or seriously challenged in the upper-body strength department, but I somehow managed to feel as if I went through sports bootcamp after a few hours of playing. ...For two days.

It made me wonder if Nintendo thought they were actually trying to motivate gamers to be active, and perhaps I'm not too far off considering there's a fitness test to monitor one's activities over time.

Yeah, I tried the fitness test. Yeah, it said I had the athleticism of a 58-year-old man, but I was robbed! How is not getting a strike and not being allowed to pick up the spare in bowling a sign of physical weakness? I protest.

And when I say I played, I really mean "I" did. Mii. On the "Mii Channel," every Wii user gets to create their own player to be designed in his or her very own likeness. These "characters" can interact on message boards and private messaging through Wii's wireless Internet capabilities.

I don't think I can handle the awesomeness.

What I really won't be able to deal with is the ability to play Sega Genesis games like Toe Jam & Earl.

Funkotron, here I come!

*Every five years.