To be fair, they have sold "over 20" as I'm writing this, so there's clearly an audience for these Justin Bieber singing toothbrushes that's unwilling to wait a month for them to be sold in the clearance section at CVS.

Also possibly worth noting, Groupon misspells the name of our city in their URLs.

There's not really been much to look at when driving the lonely stretch of Interstate 10 between Tucson and Phoenix, unless you're like me and your eyes are always drawn to the LED screens that show the difference in price between paying cash and credit for diesel gas at truck stops.

But then came the M Passion Adult Boutique, the best reason to slide off I-10 at Picacho Peak since ... well, ever!

Housed in a renovated store front and tucked between the abandoned Nickerson Farms Restaurant and — I can't make this stuff up — the Arizona Nut House on the west side of the interchange, M Passion opened on Dec. 15, according to the store employee who anxiously greeted my wife and I when we visited on a recent drive home.

The store itself is similar to pretty much any standard adult boutique with its array of clothing, lubes, lotions, appendages, orifices and a video library for all manner of fetishes. Only its location makes it stand out, that and the bright pink exterior of the building, not to mention the billboard that first drew our attention a few miles to the north on I-10.

According to its Web site, M Passion is mostly an online retailer, though it boasts a "showroom" in a mall on Toledo, Ohio.

There's no mention of the Picacho store on its Web site, which includes the statement that it is "MPowering Romance and Sexual Well-Being."

Needless to say, for this store to survive it's going to have to hope it can somehow turn novelty drive-up traffic into repeat customers. After all, isn't a waterproof Vibrating Jackrabbit and some delay creme just as alluring a road trip purchase as a Blizzard or some scratch-off tickets?

So, lately, i've been asked where I've gotten these rope and hook bracelets I've been wearing for the past several months.

• Miansai.com
• Miansai's Michael Saiger.

This is what's trendy, men. Miansai's bracelets have been a constant on pages of several style magazines like GQ and, ladies, you can see Rihana sporting a cuff in her recent video.

They recently relaunched their website to be more functional and to give it an aesthetic that does better justice to the chic designs Saiger creates.

Miansai was featured on People.com as a Hollywood-inspired gift idea.

The secret of the cloak is the magical fabric, an ancient Mayan rite handed down through the centuries. Deep in the rainforests of what is now called Guatemala, a small, colorful, yet invisible to the naked-eye of most unenlightened people... lives an ancient bird called the Xylxacyxjan. Don't bother trying to pronounce it, it is a word inaudible to the human ear, though worth a ton of points in Scrabble™.

My goal in life was to get enough wealth stacked up to buy myself a Maybach and roll around Tucson like the blogging Diddy Dirty Money of the Old Pueblo, but I guess that's not going to happen now. I really just weep for the rappers who have to try to figure out how to work Lamborghini in to their raps as a brand replacement (at least two tracks on Jay Z's Black Album reference the brand, for example). Rick Ross has to rename his label, for pete's sake. Times really are tough:

Ending almost a decade of losses, Daimler is shutting down its super-luxury Maybach brand. It would not make sense to develop a successor model," chairman Dieter Zetsche said to the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "The coming S-Class is in such a way a superior vehicle that it can replace the Maybach."

Zetsche will be glad to wipe his hands of Maybach (pronounced MY-bock). It was one more embarrassment — like the money-losing Smart car and the failed Chrysler merger — left over from the reign of his grandiose predecessor, Juergen Schrempp. Maybach has been hanging around for years while Zetsche, who clearly had little respect for the brand and dismissed it as financially inconsequential, dealt with more pressing problems.

The Maybach epitaph will not be a not pretty one. It was a remarkably cynical effort by Daimler to use the halo of its Mercedes-Benz brand to justify prices of $350,000 to $1.4 million for an inferior automobile wrapped in a glitzy package. Maybach strived for a prestige that it tried to ground on price alone. The wealthy figured it out in a hurry and stayed away in droves. Appearances to the contrary sometimes notwithstanding, the top 0.0001% didn't accumulate all that money by being stupid.

A blog at Discover Magazine's site has a summary of John Trinkaus' limited observational research about the behavior of supermarket shoppers, who apparently can't be bothered to throw away garbage, put their carts where they belong, or care about item limits in express lanes:

An informal enquiry of the behavior of 500 supermarket shoppers clearing carts of litter prior to entering the store showed that 69% dumped the rubbish into another cart, 26% dropped it on the sidewalk, and 5% deposited it in a trash container.

An informal enquiry suggested that only about one out of five shoppers, when finished using shopping carts, returned them to a designated depository.

A total of 68 15-min. observations of customers’ behavior at a food supermarket suggests that only about 7% of shoppers observe the item limit of the express lane. The averages tended to be about four pieces.

Clearly, the general strategy for any retailer is to give potential shoppers some sort of positive feeling about their establishment, whether that's the feeling of getting a bargain, that making a purchases conveys some sort of cool factor, or general convenience. However, that-store-that-reminds-me-of-Mervyn's Kohl's seems to be going a different route: running an ad using an incredibly annoying song that everyone hates at this point and showing somewhat despicable behavior by an actress pretending to be one of their customers. Interesting concept, Kohl's, completely ignoring everything anyone ever learned about marketing.

I love the idea of shopping local but sometimes during the mad-rush of the Holidays getting sucked into buying corporate, lets be honest, is easier and less time consuming. But this holiday season Yelp.com is asking Tucsonans to take a pledge to shop locally and they're making it easy.

From Nov. 25 through Dec. 24, follow Tucson's Yelp.com and Twitter, #yelpshopstucson, for daily updates and recommendations of where to find interesting and unique gifts.

In addition to helping you, Yelp is also helping the community through several benefit events hosted throughout the month. Coming up Dec. 1 is their first dinner and drink soiree at MAST, 299 S Park Ave, which will benefit Local First Arizona .
Overall I think what Yelp is doing is a thoughtful way to celebrate the season and is very helpful, especially for people like me who wait till the last minute. This way you can find cool local merchants while also buying awesome gifts for friends and family.

The shopping season is upon us people...

• Nina

It's shopping —er holiday season again. With all the stuff you can buy, why not help animals at the same time? There are plenty of local rescues that need your support. But if you want your gift to have an international flair, check out www.animalsasia.org. Gift giving for a good cause.

Animals Asia Foundation is devoted to the welfare of wild and urban animals in Asia. Their three main programs are End Bear Farming, Cat and Dog Welfare and Action Against Cruelty. The foundation has gifts for sale to help endangered moon bears. Here's more info from a press release:

As many as 15,000 bears, mostly endangered moon bears, are farmed for their bile in Asia. The bile is used in traditional Chinese medicine despite the availability of over 54 inexpensive herbal and synthetic alternatives. In China, the bears can spend more than 30 years in tiny cages and are milked regularly for their bile through crude catheters or permanently open holes in their abdomens.

Animals Asia aims to bring the barbaric practice of bear farming and the bile trade to an end and rescues bears from bile farms through agreements with both the Chinese and Vietnamese governments. The bears are brought to Animals Asia’s Moon Bear Rescue Centers—placid sanctuaries where they may live out the rest of their lives in peace and safety.

Animals Asia is pleased to present a bounty of gift items to help make the world a better place for these sweet and sensitive endangered animals.

Those who purchase holiday gifts that benefit the bears will receive a special card with a picture and information about how their generosity has enriched the lives of the bears—cards may be gifted to others in place of a conventional present. For the shopper with something more traditional in mind for their human companions—Animals Asia offers gifts including plush toys for little ones, clothing, jewelry, and a calendar featuring stunning photography of our resident bears, the proceeds of which benefit the organization’s work.

All items are available for purchase through the Animals Asia website: here.

Turns out when you buy expensive yoga clothing from Casas Adobes retailer Lululemon, you're also making a statement about those who rely on their own self-interests:

You might be wondering why a company that makes yoga clothing has chosen a legendary literary character’s name to adorn the side of our bags. lululemon’s founder, Chip Wilson, first read this book when he was eighteen years old working away from home. Only later, looking back, did he realize the impact the book’s ideology had on his quest to elevate the world from mediocrity to greatness (it is not coincidental that this is lululemon’s company vision).

In “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand describes a society where people work and reside in government-controlled environments that are tightly regimented. Without realizing it, this control created a society of mediocrity; propagating a cycle of listless, uninspired existing as opposed to living. The character John Galt encouraged all of the world’s innovators and intelligent minds to go on strike from the increasingly controlling government in order to create a vacuum of brilliance, proving that independent creativity and free-will is critical for quality of life.

[...]

Our bags are visual reminders for ourselves to live a life we love and conquer the epidemic of mediocrity. We all have a John Galt inside of us, cheering us on. How are we going to live lives we love?

This must totally be what Buddha had in mind.

[Time]