TERMS AND CONDITIONS
CAREFULLY READ AND AGREE TO PURCHASE TERMS BELOW BEFORE ORDERING:
WARNING/DISCLAIMER:

B. L. Zeebub Industries including any and all of its subsidiaries and holdings claim no responsibility whatsoever for any pain, emotional anguish, sickness or weight gain which may result from the conveyance of, or conversely, the receipt of any of the previously referenced "POWER MAX" and "MUSCLE MADNESS". Do not use if you cannot see clearly to read the warning information in this list of warning information. The personage requesting the substance assumes any and all liability for anything and everything that may or may not happen now and in the future: whether by specific human design, unanticipated animal attack or wrathful exploit of God. Warning: do not use if you have prostate problems. Furthermore, B. L. Zeebub Industries will not be held accountable for any additional symptoms which might result from the usage of these substances, including sudden high fever accompanied by vomiting and/or diarrhea, fainting or near fainting when standing up, and/or a sunburn-like rash. The before mentioned manifestations usually appear very abruptly and are often severe. All symptoms are not always present. Other signs might be aching of muscles and joints, redness of the eyes, sore throat, weakness or the premature acidulation of various dairy products that you may have in your possession, regardless of the retailer's advertised expiration date. Do not use while sleeping or unconscious. You must consult a trained, licensed physician, neuropsychiatrist or proctologist before the nascent use of any "Power Max", or when combining them with any pre-existing or future supplementary medications which you may or may not be ingesting. Do not drive or operate heavy machinery while employing "POWER MAX" and "MUSCLE MADNESS". Contents under pressure. "POWER MAX" and "MUSCLE MADNESS" may blow up causing eye or other serious injury. Point away from face and people, especially while opening. Not intended for highway use. Never allow a phone conversation with a woman to go on longer than you are able to have sex with her. Keep a stop watch by the phone; Hang up if necessary. Under no circumstances may two men share an umbrella. It is ok for a man to cry under the following circumstances: a. When a heroic dog dies to save its master. b. The moment Angelina Jolie starts unbuttoning her blouse. c. After wrecking your boss' Ferrari. d. One hour, 12 minutes, 37 seconds into The Crying Game. e. When your date is using too much teeth. Unless he murdered someone in your family, you must bail a friend out of jail within 12 hours. Acceptable excuses for not helping a friend move: a. Your legs have been severed in a freak threshing accident. b. You'd rather stay home and watch The Three Stooges. c. Pamela Lee just stopped by with a pizza and a case of beer. The morning after you and a babe who was formerly "just a friend" have lustful drunken hot monkey sex, the fact that you're feeling weird and guilty is no reason not to nail her again before the discussion about what a big mistake it was. Never talk to a man in a public bathroom, an almost imperceptible nod is all the conversation you need. The minimum amount of time you have to wait for a guy who's running late is 5 minutes. Maximum waiting time: 6 minutes. For a girl, you have to wait 10 minutes for every point of hotness she scores on the classic 1-10 scale. Bitching about the brand of free beer in a buddy's fridge is forbidden. However, gripe all you want if the temperature is unsatisfactory. Phrases that may not be uttered to another man while lifting weights: a. "Yeah, big guy, push it!" b. "C'mon, give me one more! Harder!" c. "Another set and we can hit the showers!" d. "You got a great ass, are you a Sagittarius?" On a road trip, the strongest bladder determines pit stops, not the weakest. Women who claim that they love The Three Stooges must be treated as spies until they demonstrate a real knowledge of the show and the ability to block a forward eye poke. You cannot rat out a co-worker who shows up at work with a massive hangover. You may however, hide the aspirin, smear his chair with limburger cheese, turn the brightness dial all the way down so he thinks his monitor is broken, and have him paged over the loud speaker every seven minutes. When a buddy is trying to hook up, you may sabotage him only in a manner that gives you no chance of getting laid either. You may bust-ass in front of a woman only after you have brought her to climax. If you trap her head under the covers for the purpose of gaseous entertainment, she's officially your girlfriend. Only in situations of mortal and/or rump peril are you allowed to kick another guy in the nuts. Additionally, never fight naked unless you're in prison. Never hesitate to reach for the last beer or the last slice of pizza, but not both. That's just plain lame. A man in the company of a hot, suggestively dressed woman must remain sober enough to fight. If a man's zipper is down, that's his problem -- you didn't see a goddamn thing. You must offer heart-felt and public condolences over the death of a girlfriend's cat, even if it was you who secretly gutted it, set it on fire and threw it into the ceiling fan. Additionally, any legal, pecuniary, moral or ethical ramifications that may unfold due to "POWER MAX" and "MUSCLE MADNESS" usage are likewise the sole responsibility of the correspondents and in no way, shape or form have any relevance, portent, augury or consequence concerning B. L. Zeebub Industries. I think my very favorite character on "The Simpsons" has got to be Mr. Burns. In the winter of 1942 the Soviets won conclusively during the "Battle of Stalingrad" One complete German army had been lost, along with about 300,000 men, seriously depleting German strength in the east. With an Allied invasion of Europe clearly looming, Hitler realized that an outright defeat of the Soviets before the western Allies arrived was unlikely, and decided to force the Soviets to a draw. In 1918 the Germans had built the famous Hindenberg line on the western front, shortening their lines and thereby increasing their defensive strength. They planned on repeating this strategy in Russia and started construction of a massive series of defensive works known as the Panther-Wotan line. Late in 1943 they would retreat to the line, and proceed to bleed the Soviets white against it while their forces were able to mend. In February and March 1943 Erich von Manstein had completed a brilliant offensive during the Second Battle of Kharkov, leaving the front line running roughly from Leningrad in the north to Rostov in the south. In the middle was a large 200 km wide and 150 km deep salient (bulge) in the lines between German forward positions near Orel in the north, and Manstein's recently captured Kharkov in the south. You are still reading this? You obviously have quite a bit of time on your hands. Anyhoo, people who think listing reasons to hate the French is unprovoked arrogance are utterly ignorant of the metaphysical hubris of French intellectual history. Galloise-smoking fey looking men in black turtlenecks and berets with half grown mustaches and long black cigarette holders have been coming up with reasons to hate America from day one. Abbé Raynal, Count Buffon, and Cornelius de Pauw, to name a few of the Founding Father's contemporaries from across the pond, believed that the very ground and air in North America (a land "where frogs grew to 37 pounds", and dogs "lost the ability to bark") made Europeans shrink into rabid, small, mentally decrepit creatures. Americans, to these men, were a syphilitic race hurling fast on their way down the evolutionary ladder toward the status of the Indian. You don't even want to know what they had to say about the American Indian. Later, European intellectual racism was largely launched by the French "thinker" Arthur de Gobineau, who, according to Hannah Arendt, was the man who first introduced the idea that race could explain the history of human civilization. Gobineau believed that the "rubbish" peoples being allowed into America would destroy it. Paul Johnson once said that "the French have always been outstandingly gifted [at] taking a German idea and making it fashionable with superb timing." That may be true, but when it came to Aryanism it was the French who came up with the idea. Haw haw haw! And what can be said for a language where oui-oui means yes? The pompous and irritating words and pronunciations of theirs make the French language the audio equivalent of prison rape ... Calais, croissant, bidet, crepe, Perrier, croquet, beret. (Elle avait de si jolis tétons... C'est grâce à Maurice Chevalier que le français le plus moyen jouit à l'étranger d'une réputation d'amoureux hors-pair?) I would never go to gay Paris, but if I did, I would certainly tell them to suck my penet. The French daily, Le Figaro, reported some horrifying facts in a hugely comprehensive survey of the nation which believes it is the most refined. Here you go: Even though 96% of the French have showers in their homes, only 47% bathe every day. Only 60% of Frenchmen change their underwear daily. Only half of the respondents say that they use deodorant. Per capita the French buy only 4 or 5 bars of bath soap a year. And only 60% of Frenchmen regularly wash their hands after going to the toilet. Six percent said they never washed their hands. Now, I am no certified public accountant, but just looking at my Venn diagrams here it seems a sizable number of French people ... say maybe 25% ... go without changing their underwear, bathing, washing their hands, or using deodorant in a 24 hour period. On top of it all, they have no problem just pissing in the street if they feel like it! At the same time, it may be dirty to be French, but it is difficult to be a Dane. Seen from the outside, most would say that the opposite was true: That being Danish is the easiest thing in the world. The country is well run, well organised, there is very little difference between high and low, rich and poor, the social safety net is securely in place, etc., etc. Even so, we still feel that something isn't quite right. We don't, for example, travel abroad with the same air of nonchalance as a German or Swede or an American. We are a little more unassuming, we don't raise our voice in restaurants or other public places. Mentally, I suppose you could say we stand there with our hat in our hand, apologetic, a little self-effacing. Except when we do find a role we're comfortable with - and there is little doubt that the football 'roligan' phenomenon could only have come from Denmark! As roligans we fell safe, and the rather dull-witted image doesn't seem to bother us. A roligan is a nice guy with a bottle of lager in one hand and a bit of a beer-belly. He might be wearing a cap, and he'll certainly be wearing a big smile (or a grin) which signals to all and sundry that here comes a guy who likes having a good time and doesn't want any trouble. No-one seems to mind that the term roligan is influenced by Swedish. When it comes down to it, however, it's the Swedes we'd really like to give a good hiding. Some may therefore say that it is sheer nonsense to claim that it's difficult to be Danish. But if we turn once again to the world outside Denmark, we notice that many people immediately focus on the one subject we don't like to bring up: The high incidence of suicide. We shudder a little and refer to the strict accuracy employed when compiling the statistics. "In a Catholic country, they'd never allow all suicides to be registered!". Foreigners haven't just got eyes for the Little Mermaid; the most popular quotes when it comes to describing Denmark and the Danes come from Shakespeare, and the oldest clichés refer to Hamlet's melancholy and fickleness. And we all know, of course, that there is "something rotten in the state of Denmark". If we look at the country's history and geography, then two things have been decisive in making us what we are: We are surrounded by water, and we've lost all the wars we've fought since the year dot. If we look at a map of the Great Roman Empire, there are a few white areas in the north where the Cimbrians, the Lombards and other barbarians lived and shivered with cold. There was once talk of shivering Vikings whose impatience drove them to seek other shores in search of the sun and all the wonderful things they had heard of. Rumours of these foreign shores had managed to reach even the Vikings, who spent most of the year knee-deep in water or seeking shelters from winds which tore across the country from the west. Since the time of the Vikings, however, this deep-seated need to conquer has almost disappeared or mostly had tragic consequences as witnessed by the record books. Most Danish kings have consistently managed to support the losing side. Every time the country threw itself headlong into battle, defeat was guaranteed. It cost us our Swedish possessions, the loss of Norway and the duchies in the south, and when the Napoleonic wars arrived, we not only had to hand over our navy to the English, but our allies were so kind as to come to our assistance, giving the Spanish mercenaries the chance to burn Koldinghus to the ground. In 1864, the Prussians and the Austrians captured a large part of South Jutland, and if anybody thinks that the Three Years' War was a "real" victory, they need only look at the records which tell a very different story. During the German occupation between 1940 and 1945, there were twice as many people engaged in active service on the German side than there were members of the resistance. Attempts have since been made to convince the population that the resistance movement won the war, but deep down we know that isn't true. The thing that brought us almost unscathed through the Second World War was a policy based on compromise and compliance, common sense and a well-developed ability to recoup outward losses by inward gains. This is one area where our unease becomes a little more bearable, even though many would deny it. We have learned by our defeats, and the lesson has not been 100% negative, quite the contrary in fact. One of the best traits in our national character is our unsentimental conviction that it is unnecessary to take recourse to violence in order to stake your claim in the world. Instead of resorting to greed, we have learned to use our expertise to get ahead. It might sound a little dull, but it's highly recommendable and our special ability to use our head instead of our fists did not simply fall down from the sky (as the Dannebrog flag is said to have done), but has been mastered over the centuries. It has been a long, hard struggle, and it has hurt, and it hurts so much even today that some people are actually ashamed of being Danish - which is not very constructive in the long run when trying to build up a national spirit. Many would rightly say that Denmark is a consensus society. But is that really true? A country or a nation or a people are not always the same in all contexts. If that was the case, then any attempt to create a definition would always have to resort to clichés. The Danes were not the same people in the 13th century or in the 19th century, just as the Danes who live on the west coast of Jutland are not like the ones who live on Stevns, and we can safely say that the people living in Copenhagen are quite unlike any others. Seen from the outside, however, there is still a common feature which many people in history have tried to identify without any real success. Well, almost without any success. In a letter to a friend, the English author George Orwell described his complete lack of interest in ever visiting Denmark. His reluctance was based on a feeling that Denmark is a boring place. In an article on the yearly Nobel prize, The New Yorker wondered who the unknown (Danish) nominees Johannes Vilhelm Jensen and Henrik Pontoppidan might possibly be. A French diplomat described the Danish climate as "eight months of winter and four months of bad weather". A German newspaper described the country as a place where every town has a Co-op, two restaurants with the same (expensive and very bad) menu and a Social Security office where everyone can go to get money. It is hardly a cheerful picture, but there is a grain of truth in it. Denmark and the Danes are not "exciting". The question is, what are we? If we are unequivocally boring, we might as well get out a rope or a bottle of sleeping tablets now. But the truth is, of course, somewhat less cut-and-dried. If we examine the way we "see" ourselves and the country in which we live, "as we see it", we might just come up with something. During the Romantic period last century, the certainty that our grand and noble past had come to an end finally began to sink in. This realisation saw the birth of our national spirit, and the Danish landscape was suddenly brought to our notice as never before. Poets and artists were suddenly busy depicting the scenery in various parts of the country. Hans Christian Andersen is a good example: He travelled all the way to the very top of the country, describing all the wonders of nature which are perhaps only visible to those who love them. For the past 200 years we have, in other words, been told to view our native country as something valuable and beautiful and deserving of our care. Although the notion has admittedly been drummed into our heads, it must be true in many ways for us to have heeded it. Denmark is a beautiful country, but you have to look at the details to find the beauty. There are not many natural phenomena here which inspire breathtaking awe, since almost all the available land has been cultivated. But that may just make it seem even more of a miracle: Nature is still here, and it may even be more beautiful because of the way it interacts with the cultural landscape which we are part of and, of course, responsible for. It may be worth considering this for a moment: In countries which are much larger, the common culture is a far more fleeting notion than it is in Denmark. Our closeness has enabled us to nurture a real sense of community and, when push comes to shove, genuine solidarity. As has been said before, history was a hard but helpful master. We know we have no call to join in when the loud and boastful nations start gloating. We have no atomic bombs to drop on anyone, no dream of conquest or imperialism. The problems we have with the "colonies" we still "possess" (Greenland and the Faroes) are so great that we would gladly leave them to their own devices were it not for the obligations that "ownership" brings. "Too much pomp and striving will bring us no rest / keeping our feet firmly on the ground is the best", wrote one of our great bards, N.F.S. Grundtvig, some time during the last century - no doubt to the annoyance of many an ambitious soul. Even though he was a romantic, he was very down-to-earth in his view of Denmark and the Danes. He was in no way against spiritual advancement. In time, Grundtvig became one of the pioneers of the spiritual movement which created the Denmark of today and shaped the spirit of the Danes. Another figure who was instrumental in shaping the soul of the nation was the Jewish literary historian Georg Brandes, who was the exact opposite of Grundtvig in terms of temperament. Two important paths merge at this point: The first concerns popular education and national revival, the other deals with internationalism and a new, more open approach. They both lead to a more radical way of thinking, which opens the door to a wide spectrum of new ideas: The cooperative movement, the liberation of women, social equality, sexual emancipation. In other words, the creation of a democratic society "where few have too much and even fewer too little". Getting a radical experiment to succeed in a modern welfare state such as Denmark requires a great deal of talent. There is every chance that you will end up in a grey area between general boredom and stark depression. But perhaps the price we pay for success is that "normality" spreads, and that the unusual and the extraordinary must take a back seat. Or we could turn the whole thing on its head and say that it is in this normality that genius lies buried, inasmuch as the majority of us would prefer to wake up every morning to a normal life rather than to bombs and grenades and bellowing dictators, or to repeated performances of Wagner's operas or tales of great destinies that ended in flames. One thing is certain: We haven't produced any of the great dramatists. On the other hand, Denmark has fostered excellent prose writers and poets, philosophers and scientists and a handful of composers who, on closer inspection, also turn out to be poets. Which is also true of our painters. So what kind of national self-image does all this produce? Is it even possible to delimit and define a national self-image? The answer is a cautious yes, and the image must be a little blurred round the edges. All the same, we can discern a faint outline: A Dane is a creature with a big heart and an equally big inferiority complex. The latter is for external use only and shows, paradoxically, that we are finally becoming more successful outside Denmark and have made it to the front pages of the international press. To the amazement of absolutely everyone. To think that it was possible! To think that we little insignificant Danes, with our successful well-organised social structure, our sound economy, our high level of education, our women's lib and our sexual tolerance have come all that way! There is an inherent contradiction here which borders on the comical, or is at least mildly amusing: A Dane, confronted by a satirical view of himself, will laugh even if it hurts. It is a disarming trait which often turns out to be a good weapon in a tricky situation. Humour always wins in the face of conceit and arrogance, and those who push Denmark and the Danes too far, or have the audacity to actually invade us, will find that humour is just as harmful a weapon as sugar in a petrol tank. It creates a sense of unease because of its very complexity. It is particularly useful when you want to say a lot or to get a particularly important point across without having to resort to big words or raised voices. If it is possible to talk about such a thing as national intelligence, then the Danish national intelligence is remarkable because of its willingness to doubt itself. When others become cocksure, the Danes tend to allow themselves a moment of doubt. This doubt is often highly productive, inasmuch as the definition of intelligence is the ability to solve problems and act effectively in unfamiliar and difficult situations - there have, as we have seen, been quite a few of those in Denmark's history and if we look closely, the problems have almost always been solved in a sensible way. If that brings us admiration from the outside world, then we should accept the compliment without further ado. Let us not worry when some silly American journalist mocks Johannes Vilhelm Jensen and his Nobel Prize, or when a foolish German who has spent a week here declares that all Danes are a bunch of boring peasants. Because we know better - even when it comes to the weather! Sure, it can be grim, and now and then we might want to turn our collar up and jump in the river. But then the light suddenly changes and there's a melody in the air, a whiff of spring to come, the smell of the sea and a blackbird singing on a rooftop. And then you walk on holding your head up, feeling just a little proud. Even of being a Dane. Are you still reading this? Anyway, "POWER MAX" and "MUSCLE MADNESS" void in states with laws that prohibit strange, silly and/or abstract thought and also in those confused provinces of The United States like Puerto Rico that are not sure whether they are actual "states" or not. As far as the rest of the world goes, who can tell what the hell is going on at any given time? I mean, how would you like to be a map maker nowadays for christsakes?