I was pointed a the customer reviews of this product on Amazon last week by a friend of mine (Richard Hill), and they are well worth spending a couple of minutes browsing, some of them are genius.

According to the New Tork Times it all started like this:

- ’ “We don’t hate Amazon; we just thought it was funny,” said Jeffrey Gates, 21, of Hopatcong, N.J., who along with a 27-year-old friend, Neal Strassner of Daytona Beach, Fla., kicked things off on July 20 by posting their own reviews.

They then posted images of their comments, along with a call for followers and a pulsating back beat, at ytmnd.com, a site that breeds send-ups of pop culture. (The pair’s page is at awesomemilk.ytmnd.com.)

The response was good, but a link from the blog Boing Boing on Friday blew the lid off. ‘

Here are a few the grabbed my attention:

- “If god spit in my mouth, I assume this is what it would taste like. It’s that good.”

- “I give it only 3 stars because it only comes in one color. White just dosen’t work for everybody. Even underwear comes in a choice of colors. Sheesh, you’d think the vendor would’ve figured that out.”

- “I have been mainlining Tuscan Whole Milk for a few days now, and while it has been effective at beating my addiction to the methadone I appear to be hooked on calcium. I don’t feel at all well, I’ve been passing out more and more often and my skin has taken on a waxy yellow color. It’s really starting to have a negative effect on my job interviewing skills and family tends to point and hiss the word “UNCLEEEEEAN!” at me with greater frequency than normal.

On the other hand, it has made my teeth and bones inhumanly strong, as I have been able to chew my way through metal bars and survive being run over by freight trains. I fear that I won’t be able to beat my calcium addiction and/or find the sweet repose of death, and that the true horror of Tuscan Whole Milk lies not in its nutritive value but rather in its ability to bestow unholy immortality on its hapless victims.”

-“Shipping was fine, and the product was not damaged in any way, but my husband and I (both of us have college degrees, mind you, his in Engineering) could not figure out how to assemble this. No instructions, no diagrams, not even a lousy cheap allen wrench. So basically, weeks after purchase, we’re using it as a one gallon paper weight. I haven’t gotten any response from Tuscan. It earns two stars simply because it is heavy and does do a fair job of holding down the stack of newspapers awaiting recycling.”

-“This was by far the freshest milk I have ever tasted. It still had that ‘new milk smell’.”

-“The picture makes it look pretty small, but this thing is BIG. Like almost a foot tall. Even if you click to enlarge the picture, it doesn’t get as big as the actual jug. Of the three pictures they provide, the middle picture is the least accurate. The left one is a little better but still not realistic. Make sure you have space in your fridge!”

-“I am a big man. I drive a bus for a living. But the first time I drank this milk, I wept like a baby.”

-“Timeless works often suffer at the hands of translators. One thinks of the numerous and continuing attempts to render Dante’s “Divina Commedia” (another early vernacular Italian masterpiece and contemporary to the justifiably obscure Tuscana Latte series) and the struggle with both terza rima and meaning. No so for Tuscan Whole Milk (“La tutta latte”). Few works are better left where they were found, their authors condemned and eventually flogged. This translation of the redredged third valume of the series was committed by Sir John Stilton, the inebriated English librettist for two of the earliest publicly-immolated operas by P.D.Q Bach, themselves loosely based, in part, on the Tuscan series and “Mechanicae Popularum”: “Die Fliegende Kuhe” and “Das Zaubereuter”, both banned before their opening nights sometime in the early 1760s.

That Stilton translated the Tuscan series at all was no mere stroke of misfortune. He was a cousin of Leopold von Emmenthaler, present at the Great Flushing of the Florentine sewers in 1755. As recounted in his memoir “Besottene Reisen”, returning to his rooms late one night from a drinking binge, Leopold fell into an open ditch which drained into the Arno, but had been clogged. He was saved from drowning in the filth by the floating obstruction created by a massive snarl of wig hair and old used manuscripts—part of which would later be tragically identified as the only complete copy of “Tuscan.” Inspired to further drink by the experience, Leopold vowed to champion the mysterious work. He passed it to Stilton in a stupor sometime in 1759. Though arrested, Leopold was never proscuted for the act and he fled to his native Limburg.

Rarely misunderstood and best left un-retold, “Whole Milk” is the culminating volume of the Tuscan series, but can be read (if necessary) as a standalone work, as both Skim (“Scremato” or “Senza Grassi”) and Two-Percent (“Cauto”) are diatribes on celibacy and vegetables respectively. A tale of love, betrayal, and gastrointestinal distress, it is in this infamous portion of the “work” that Contessa Bessi meets the cowherd Giovanni de Sargento (the cloaked “Count Grasso”) and confronts him with the immortal question “Gotta de latte?” This dubiuosly romantic passage is considered by some scholars as the inspiration for later poetry (e.g. Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cow” (1804); Dickinson’s ”#255”, (””Cow” is the thing with horns.” (1867)), books (“Care of Dairy Cattle in Central Peru” (1843); Proust’s “Du Cafe chez Vache” (1914)), and even movies (among them “Cud” (1963) with Paul Newman and Patricia Neal; “El Cud,” (1961) with Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren; and “The Guns of Navorone” (1961) with Gregorgy Peck and Anthony Quinn).

This Stilton translation of Tuscan Whole Milk remains one of the more curdling, if only because he manages to improve the flavor of the work to the point that more innocent readers might be unwittingly exposed to it. It is clear that Stilton spoke little Italian, certainly not the 14th century vernacular of the region, and had no concept of style and structure. It is not certain that he was even completely literate in English.

One star for calcium.”