May 10, 2017
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XLO TPC, Part 1
During my first three years of college, within deodorants, it seemed that stick/gel became the dominant format. Roll-ons and sprays were a very distant also-ran.
During the Memorial Day weekend 1992, I met Patricia, who had just completed her freshman year at S.F. State. Physically, she was your typical slender, 5'3", 110-pound Asian girl. As I got to know her, she explained that she didn't like bra straps and underwires. Thus, her preferred everyday casual dress was a tube top bra [my other friend at the time, ACS, would work for Victoria's Secret. ACS used the term "bandeau" instead] under a tank top. Regardless of what she wore, and even when not playing sports, Patricia frequently sniffed her armpits.When Ken, Roy, and I went on our road trip down the Central CA coast, Patricia was fighting her period. That still did not prevent her from sniffing her armpits, especially when we were at beaches. In her soft knit bag, Patricia had a few moist towelettes, which were supposed to be for cleaning your hands. But the four of us just used water fountains and bathroom sinks, to wash our hands.
Oh ho ho. Nowadays, we have deodorant wipes. If these had existed during that summer of '92, Patricia probably would have used and loved them.In 1992, in order to clean metal contacts, I was still using Monster Cable's 2-bottle Cramolin set. One liquid was red, the other blue. I forget which was which, but one was to clean metal. You then had to use a lint-free cloth or swab, and remove said cleaner. Then you used the other liquid, as a "contact enhancer." Shut up. When my friend Kim was over at my college apartment, she laughed, "Contact enhancer? Sounds like something you put on your dick!"
I pressed on, and continued applying the Cramolin set, to the jacks on my Sony CDP-520ESII, and Adcom GTP-400 & GFA-535. Kim joked, "Why don't you use my nail polish, instead? They're prettier."
1992 was when XLO truly entered the high-end audio cable market. Back then, they had not yet come out with their so-called TPC individually-wrapped wipe, which cleaned metal contacts. But had the $0.99 TPC "moist towelette" existed then, I would have preferred it over the Cramolin set.Oh no. When I did get the TPC in the mid-90s, ACS, who was then my gf, joked that TPC stood for Tiny Pink Clitoris. No, TPC stood for The Perfect Connection.
Oh no. When ACS read the back of the TPC packet, she crossed out "Things," and substituted "Dicks."Then we actually opened and used a TPC. Though you had to figure out how to get the moist towelette into nooks and crannies, it did a decent job of cleaning metals. The wipe also did not dry out as quickly as you'd think. Thus, if you had all of your electronics out, you could clean quite a number of jacks, connectors, and plugs.
Oh no. When ACS noticed that using a TPC caused our hands to get greasy, she called it The Penis Cleaner. Though I had no sense of smell, ACS and others stated that, at most, the TPC had only a mild scent.
One mild day in June 1992, a whole bunch of us had spent a few hours at West Sunset Playground. While taking a break from basketball, Patricia wiped the sweat from her brow, pulled her athletic shorts from her crotch, flapped her t-shirt, sniffed both armpits, and shivered, "My whole body stinks." She then went on to curse her Secret stick deodorant, "Strong enough for a man, my ass." She also shook her head about the deodorant not offering "all-day protection." She said it wore off after 20 minutes of basketball.
In those days, maybe the Secret stick was available in just scented and unscented [presently, it is available in a cornucopia of fragrances]. Because she was fine with the fragrance, Patricia did use whatever the sceneted one was. She then mattter-of-factly explained that, the Unscented did have an olfactory signature of its own; it wasn't completely odorless. It did have faint traces of being a material, similar to glue. She said that other brands' "unscented" deodorants may have been more transparent and odorless than Secret's. However, since they didn't completely mask, alter, or eliminate body odors, she ended up smelling her body's own odors, just at lower levels.
Still, as I hold these now 20-year-old packets of TPC (in pricier cables, XLO sometimes would throw in a TPC), they make me think, by a 2:1 ratio, about the benign Patricia, rather than the crude and sexual ACS. While working up a sweat in sports, Patricia claimed that, after her armpits, her stinkiest body parts were her scalp (because her hair trapped in the heat, salt, and sweat), feet, and back. As much as Patricia got all self-conscious about her armpits (more so than other parts of her body), no, she wasn't anywhere near as stinky as us guys.
