Science! Does putting APC Jeans in the Freezer Make them Smell Better?

If you know about the whole raw denim thing, just skip down to the spot that says $$$.

I've got this pair of APC jeans that you can't wash.


I mean, like, not "it will break the washer" but "you're not supposed to wash them." They're raw denim, meaning they were never washed after being dyed. They look damn good in part because they're really dark and not that lame light blue dad-jeans color:


*shudder*

Anyway, the idea is that as you wear them, they will naturally wear in a more intense way than normal jeans will. Washing them removes a lot of dye and softens the jeans, making them less prone to creasing and fading. And you want that creasing and fading it you're a weird jeans fetishizer person like me. So...you don't wash them.

Of course, this means they smell a bit eventually. I'm at about 3 months of steady, at-least-five-days-a-week wear, and they have a smell. Sometimes they feel funny too. Let's not get into it.

$$$

So people have all these ways of dealing with the smell--hanging them out, Febreeze, and the freezer trick. The idea is you put them in a ziplock bag in the freezer and leave them there for a night or something, and the smell is somehow magically reduced. I did it--I didn't think my jeans would fold up to fit into a gallon ziplock, but they did. I folded and had to shove them in to fit, though.

Well, it works! The jeans now have a substantially reduced smell and they haven't felt weird in the past two days of wearing. Also, when you first pull them out, they're awesome to touch. Cold, cold denim is cooler to feel than I expected. So I recommend the method...in some circumstances.

My jeans didn't smell that bad anyway--no one was complaining but me. So for more serious cases, I don't know how the freezer trick will go. Also, I think it softened the jeans some, and as explained above, you don't want that. However, if you already have washed them, or if you have gone through your 6 or 12 months or whatever of breaking them in and you think the changes made by wearing them longer are going to be pretty minimal, then you don't have to worry about the softening thing.

Science! Do Plates of Pine Sol Cut Weird Odors?

I had read that just leaving plates with Pine Sol poured onto them in a smelly room will cause the odors in the room to be removed by some magic smell-absorbing property of the Pine Sol. Well, don't bother...maybe.

Well, as I now possess one extra-smelly room, I figured I'd give it a go. Previously, I vacuumed; I Febreezed; I lit candles and burned incense. None of these things made much difference except maybe the Febreeze. It's hard to tell, really, since the source of the odors--a roommate--had been removed, so the place naturally should start smelling better as it airs out.

But I wanted to beat the crap out of the smell in this room, so I threw all the Pine Sol I could onto plates and left them out in the room for about 24 hours. I had about 3 plates and 3 bowls of Pine Sol laying around the room in a spread-out pattern. Afterwards, I removed them and sniffed away.

Well, it doesn't seem to work. I still smelled all the roommate funk, but now I smelled Pine Sol too. As the Pine Sol smell faded, I still smelled funk. However, a fresh nose came over and told me that the place didn't smell that much anyway, and that it was my room that actually smelled. So maybe I'm crazy. And smelly.

DOOM pt. 2

I realized I wasn't done. I forgot the worst song ("Supervillainz") and some various other bits.

The end of the album is a disaster, with the worst song on the album, "Supervillainz," as the last real song, which is followed by a phone-message skit and an outro interlude type deal. Could all three of these things been on the album? Sure, but when your album goes "terrible song you want to skip-->skippable skit-->outro that's the same as the intro," it sounds a lot like you ran out of ideas right before you started the terrible song.

That terrible song, "Supervillainz." The song, along with radio hit "Pop Champagne" by Ron Browz, proves that autotune cannot fix everything--autotune cannot fix an inability to set up autotune properly. Someone should have probably told DOOM, historically earless, that his singing track was out of key--I assume he did not set autotune to tune to the same key as the beat. Also, there should probably be a melody...or lyrics...before you start mumbling words that rhyme with "villain" into the mic because, well, "schmillin" is not a word at all.

Upon revisiting, I realize that the people yelling "villain!" that I complained about last time and the amateur comic book voice stuff are closely related, and that the voice stuff, particularly "TIME TO GET THE FETA" or whatever that is, is way worse than all the "villain!" yelling. It's like the "hydroponic" guy from Vaudville Villain's "Open Mic Night" skit, except it wasn't intended to be mockable, unless I'm missing something.

Now, where I did miss something, I now realize, is "Batty Boys." I had noticed the song was full of superhero references, but I did not realize that the point of the song is the superheroes and how they look, well, gay. Leave it to DOOM to flip hip hop's standard homophobia to point toward "underwear perverts," who, in hip hop, only DOOM cares about anyway. It's homophobia, but it's homophobia with a concept.

Yeah, when the album is just DOOM or his fellow MCs rapping, the album is great. Most everything else...

Why MF Doom's New Album Needs Fixing

The people yelling "Villain." No, stop it.

The sound effects pastiche parts. Last time, on "Mmm Food," he compressed all the obnoxious sound effects tracks into one three track string you could skip so easily. This time they're all over, and they're on the same tracks as songs. Songs I care about.

Except "Batty Boys." This is 2009. I didn't know anybody in the world except dance hall reggae singers were still making songs with such strong anti-gay sentiment. In fact, I thought they were busy making songs about wild, penis-shattering sex. "Batty Boys" is surprising, too, seeing as this gay hate seems to come out of the blue for DOOM.

DOOM, which is my next point. Mr. DOOM, with his recent "all caps, no metal face" rename effectively makes it so that I forget the album exists by forcing it into the DOOM section of my ipod, not in the MF Doom section. Though I'm sure Dan Dumile wouldn't mind being between Donny Hathaway and Dr. Dooom. Of course, I bet Kool Keith is off somewhere being angry at yet another person biting his shit.

Oh yeah, and that girl he had rapping on Vaudville Villain? She still sucks, except now she sucks more.

The superhero voiceovers, unlike back on Operation: Doomsday, sound like in-studio amateur fakeries. No, stop it.

I find all this disappointing because underneath all this is a nice album that I do like. But I guess we're supposed to be happy he's alive and releasing anything at all. Or something.