"Make The Great Cleanliness Function": Special Notes From The Crack Basin

Queens is known for it's glut of 99 cent stores and the absolutely overwhelming variety of crap products you can purchase from them. Items range from bedsheets to placemats to AM/FM radios to socks to an assortment of foreign food-type items. And the quality of all of them is exactly what you'd expect.

Though I rarely frequent any of these stores, I will occasionally stop in for fairly foolproof staples like paper towels or sponges. Last week, I stopped in to buy some toilet bowl cleaner. The kind you leave in the tank that turns the water blue. Reliably, I found one called - generically enough - "Blue-Touch".

Now, common sense tells you that these products are made in other parts of the world and then shipped here. But, upon reading the directions for this particular item I noticed just how foreign a product I was really dealing with.

Below are two sections from the back panel of the packaging for the "Blue-Touch Toilet Bowl Cleaner & Air Freshener". Pretty impressive that they could invent something that does both. And for 99 cents, no less.