Keyboard for Blondes will sell you a pink keyboard for $49.95. This is one of those silly products that people never buy for themselves, but buy as gifts for others. One has to suspect that it is the buyer who is having the “blonde moment”, not the recipient.
Reader jde sends a note about a new Asus laptop. From the manufacturer’s announcement:
The organic tactility, refreshing scent and minimalist aesthetics of bamboo lend the ASUS Bamboo Series notebook an arresting aura of spirituality, warmth and old world charm that synthetic materials and cold, impersonal metals will struggle to replicate.
I like the bamboo. I like the juxtaposition of nature and technology. But really, the BS is piled high and deep here. An “arresting aura of spirituality”? In a laptop?
Asus is careful to say “bamboo-clad” and “bamboo paneling”, rather than saying the case is made out of bamboo.
And of course, by “bamboo”, they don’t mean actual bamboo, they mean something that was originally bamboo, before it was sliced, laminated, glued, processed and machined.
The genuine bamboo fiber patterns on the touch pad create the sensation of touching live bamboo.
Did you catch that? The patterns are genuine and create a sensation of bamboo… the touch pad is not made out of bamboo.
Conceptis is launching a new puzzle. A sample puzzle is on the left, the solution on the right. The numbers obey the same row and column restrictions as sudoku. The blocks have to satisfy the math clues in the upper left. For example, 20X means that the three numbers have to satisfy A * B * C = 20. Might be 1, 4 and 5 or 2, 2 and 5. The interesting thing about these puzzles is that they start out with no digits filled in.
I’ve been solving Conceptis sudokus in the newspaper for some time now. My only complaint is that they’re too easy. The KenDokus look pretty easy too. The 3X block has to be 1, 1 and 3 with the 3 in the corner to prevent the 1s from being in the same row or column. The same is true of the 5X block since 5 is also prime. So we already have four of the 1s filled in, and the row and column constraints leave only one spot for the fifth 1. And so forth. Too easy. Maybe a 9-by-9 KenDoku would be more challenging.
I’m usually skeptical of attempts to market variations of a classic puzzle. These things seem like solutions in search of a problem, or products in search of a market. I don’t want something similar to a sudoku, but different. I don’t want:
New! Improved! Now with baking soda!
I want something exactly like a sudoku, but harder.
Hammacher Schlemmer’s personalized Whac-A-Mole game: $35K.
This is the Whac-A-Mole game that can be personalized to replace the standard mole heads with molded caricatures using pictures of members of your family, past managers, boyfriends/girlfriends, or any desired combination of personalities.
Letting off steam: priceless.
Pizza dough, tomato sauce, two cheeseburgers, fries, McNuggets, topped with mozzarella. More pics here. It seems that there is a general category of recursive junk food, that is junk food used as ingredients for junk food. Another example is Deep fried hamburger. Do people think that the two levels of junkification cancel each other out, leaving a healthy meal? Is it like -1 times -1 equals +1?
If you look very carefully, there are tiny green faces in the broccoli! I suppose that makes it off-limits for vegetarians who “won’t eat anything with a face.” From the bread & honey blog.
If you liked Cool Surge, the overpriced swamp cooler, you’ll love Heat Surge, the overpriced space heater:
It uses about the same energy as it takes to run a coffee maker. Yet, it produces an amazing 5,119 BTU’s.
Nothing amazing about it. It’s a 1500-watt electric space heater, and if you do the math, 1500 Watts is 5119 BTUs per hour. If you run a 1500-watt coffee maker for an hour, it will also produce 5119 BTUs of heat, most of which goes into the coffee.
The Heat Surge is yours free if you buy an Amish-made “solid wood” box ($338 for cherry, $298 for oak) plus $49 shipping. Note that the boxes are “solid wood”, not “solid cherry” or “solid oak”. From the BBB report:
The company’s position is that according to the standards of the furniture industry, a product that uses veneers over real wood qualifies as being made of solid wood. BBB staff have since examined the mantle units and determined that the mantle is comprised of several layers of wood with veneer finishing.
Meanwhile, I did some googling and found a 1500-watt space heater at Lowe’s for $15. That’s less than one-third the cost of shipping the Heat Surge. But, hey, you can’t put a price on Amish craftsmanship.
I find this stuff very entertaining. I sit down with the Sunday paper and there’s a fake article about a fake bargain on a fake fireplace inside a box of fake wood. What a country!
Two high school students ran DNA tests on fish purchased in New York City:
They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were mislabeled. A piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper fish that is often raised by farming. Roe supposedly from flying fish was actually from smelt. Seven of nine samples that were called red snapper were mislabeled, and they turned out to be anything from Atlantic cod to Acadian redfish, an endangered species.
Fraud is not so surprising. The deeper message is that the customers can’t tell the difference. They are willing to pay up, not for the fish, not for the species of the fish, but for the name of the species. The species becomes a symbolic product, much like a brand.
I am reminded of the Jack in the Box ad campaign claiming that sirloin was better than Angus. The ad conflated sirloin, a cut of beef, with Angus, a breed of cattle, reducing both to meaningless symbols.
We have the products themselves (fish and hamburger), and we have symbols attached to the products (tuna, Angus). Advertising, and consequently consumer behavior, are largely focused on the symbols, not the products.
