Regruntled.com

Didn’t anyone take Chemistry in high school?  K₂O is potassium oxide.  You do not want to drink the stuff.

Of course, K₂O is a play on H₂O.  It’s like water, but New!  Improved!  More expensive!  The marketing is interesting.  The product is not aimed at the organic, natural demographic.  It’s aimed at people who are impressed by something that sounds kinda sciencey, but who don’t know that K₂O is poison.  In a more scientifically literate society, selling K₂O Protein Water would be like selling Arsenic Brand Animal Crackers.  Hopefully none of the K₂O customers will find a jar of potassium oxide in the chem lab supply closet and try to mix it with water.

I wonder… if someone unsuccessfully tries to commit suicide by drinking K₂O, can they sue Kellogg for false advertising?

The Last Appetite has the recipe and complete instructions for this monstrosity, a hot dog, covered with French fries, on a stick.  My first impression was that this is not all that much more disgusting than a corndog, but on closer inspection, I found that the French fries are glued to the hot dog with what is essentially corndog batter.

Then there is the matter of condimentary dissonance.  I put mustard on hot dogs, and I put ketchup on French fries.  Doing it the other way around is just wrong.  Whatever I put on this is unnatural, and eating it without condiments is unthinkable.  I went through the comments at The Last Appetite and someone suggested dipping it in chili and cheese.

I thought this was a spoof at first, but apparently not.  This is wrong on several levels.  From the New Age, pop psych point of view, affirmations are supposed to be  first-person.  This is second-person.  From the behaviorist point of view, the reward is not connected to behavior, so it has no effect on behavior.  It’s just a reward.  And from the marketing point of view, what did you think about the actors?  I wasn’t thinking “Yes!  I want to be that person!”  I was thinking “Jeez, what a loser.”

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.

Hats made out of meat at…  where else?  Hats of Meat .com.

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?

Where is PETA when we really need them?  CNN Money has the story.