The Six Best Things I Didn't Know I Wanted Until I Saw Them On TV, #6.

I'm a little reluctant to actually finish a MiniBest, as I traditionally like to cut these things off before the end, but I take some solace in the fact that I'm no longer limiting this MiniBest to things I've actually seen on TV, and I blame that, actually on TV.

Or, rather, on TV's lack of creativity when it comes to ads -- because if ads were better, I wouldn't be so inclined to skip past them and continue watching whatever show it is I'm currently fixated on watching (The Big Bang Theory) but would watch the ads.

But ads are pretty lame, and TV continues to not make interesting or funny ads, and continues to also not take my innovative solutions for how to get people to actually watch ads, which include:

1. Creating ads that can only be viewed when you're fast-forwarding, so that when you hit FF to skip past an ad, the Inter-ad appears and plays in, say, three seconds. Decide to skip that Burger King ad because the King is kind of creepy, and end up with a McDonald's ad exhorting you to go buy a baked apple pie.*

*McDonald's has probably trademarked Baked Apple Pie, given that they've trademarked just about everything else, including the prefix "Mc," which McDonald's once successfully pointed out in court was it's to use exclusively. So I'm using this at my own risk.

2. Putting little moving ads from corporate sponsors down in the corner of the TV screen, where they currently put tiny ads for their own shows, and allowing viewers to click on those ads to have them play; they could roll through little text/promotional spots that might catch your eye as you watch the show.

Both of those are genius ideas that someday will be adopted but will still not lead to more interesting commercials, so I'll probably still tune them out and not be introduced to exciting new products that I've seen on TV, and will have to continue using the better part of my "work" day to seek out new things to want to buy.

Which is why the Internet exists. That, and, of course, porn. But I never look at that.**

**Honestly, Sweetie, I don't. It was probably a virus.

Today, I looked up, because I was curious, clocks. I wanted to see what kind of innovations there'd been in clocks, because I think sometimes humanity has a tendency to leave well enough alone and not improve things because we think they're good already -- but if everyone thought that way, we'd still be driving around in buggies led by horses, albeit buggies led by horses that are guided by GPS and have MP3 players in them, because even if cars hadn't been invented I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs would have still come up with the iPod, since he did that purely out of spite, the way he does everything.

I went looking for clocks to see how clocks had developed because clocks have been around a long time and are simple enough devices that uneducated carpenters can build them and then get rooked out of the prize money by the elitists who dislike him, so I assumed that our society would have come up with something better or more original or ... something. I assumed our society would have come up with something that was something-er about clocks.

What I found was actually somewhat depressing: most innovations in clockery over the course the centuries have involved new and kind of creative ways to make sure we actually get up when the alarm goes off. Some of those are clever, like the Sfera Hanging Alarm Clock, which hangs on a cord above your bed, and raises a little each time you hit "snooze" so that eventually you have to sit, then stand, up.

Some of them are even more clever, like Clocky, an alarm clock that wanders away before you can turn it off:



But all of them are just clocks, albeit clocks that move. They don't change the way we look at or think about clocks at all.

Then I found a list of the "10 Coolest Clocks," which amounted to clocks that were shaped like things, or which ran on unusual sources of power like oranges or water.

These clocks, too, which I found by searching for "most inventive clocks," were just clocks in different shapes.

It's not just me that wanted to see something more than just a clock, who wanted to see a different way of looking at time. Stephen Hawking (who steals material from Dane Cook) unveiled a clock called the "Time Eater" back in September 2008. Created by a horologist, the clock is described like this:

the unique clock, which has no hands or numbers, was revealed at Corpus Christi College. Dubbed the strangest clock in the world, it features a giant grasshopper and has 60 slits cut into its face which light up to show the time. Its creator John Taylor said he "wanted to make timekeeping interesting".

But looks like this:





So it looks, more or less, like a regular old clock, with a grasshopper sitting on it. And before you get all excited about the hyperbolic description of the clock as demonstrating that "time is relative," consider that the "Time Eater" clock is only accurate once every five minutes.

It took five years to make and is less accurate that simply estimating the time.

Again, I'm not sure what I was looking for -- but none of those things were it. None of them really made me think about something in a different way, which all of the inventions on this list (silly as some were) did: say what you want about rolling ice cream around the backyard, but it does show you that making ice cream isn't that difficult, and PajamaJeans raise the important philosophical question "Why don't we make clothing more comfortable?"

The thing is, it seems like we should have newer, or weirder, or different, clocks. Our world isn't the same world that James Harrison's world was, but we're using the same clocks. He had to invent a clock that would let people know when ships were going to run aground. Nowadays, we can get information around the world in a millisecond and can use GPS satellites to tell us exactly where our horses and buggies are, so clocks don't necessarily serve the same purpose.

(I note, too, that clocks don't necessarily work. I have five clocks in my office, and as I write this, they read: 10:02, 9:59, 9:58, 9:58, and 9:52 a.m.)

(That, more than a solid gold grasshopper, proves that time is relative.)

So I was looking for clocks that demonstrated how they fit into this world, rather than the world of my grandparents or their grandparents, and so on. Clocks that demonstrated a newer understanding of time, or provided a way of looking at time differently.

Which we do, now, you know, even if you don't realize it. Moe, on The Simpsons, once commented that his deep fryer could "flash fry a buffalo in forty seconds," to which Homer responded "Forty seconds... but I wanted it now."

That's part of how we look at time now -- forty seconds is an eternity, and if you don't think so, go watch a video that's forty seconds long. (I bet you, like me, didn't even watch the full videos above.) When I make microwave popcorn, it takes 3 minutes -- and I think that's pretty long, so long that I considered buying pre-popped popcorn. I almost never pop my own corn on the stove, even though I like that better, because it takes too long.

Other things seem like an eternity -- like driving to work, which takes 30 minutes but seems far longer when there's traffic, because if I'm in traffic I feel like I'm being impeded, and remember, studies have shown that elapsed time is largely perception based.)

So while our perceptions of time have passed -- we have 15-minute long TV shows now -- the way we measure time has stayed the same: We still have clocks with circular hands going around in a 12-hour measure.

Is that the best way to measure time? Are digital clocks the best we can do to show the passage of time and measure its impact on our life?

Imagine, if you will, a few simple changes to clocks. Say, a clock that shows not just hours and minutes, or hours, minutes, and seconds, but milliseconds.

Or a clock that only measures hours.

Which of those would you choose to use? The first would give you a sense of urgency, the second a sense of leisure.

Expand beyond that completely, to remove hands and numbers from clocks, and that doesn't measure time based on celestial motions at all... like a water clock:



Or a clock that doesn't measure time in hours and seconds, but in longer terms, like the 10,000 year clock:




That's a prototype from The Long Now Foundation, which wants to build a 10,000 year clock as a monument to long-term thinking.

A lot of innovation and invention comes from looking at something and saying That doesn't seem to be quite what I need, or I can think of a better way to do that.

Can it really be that we can't look at clocks and think of a way to improve them so that they're more useful to the way we live or want to live? That the only thing we can think of to do is to make clocks force us to get out of bed in the morning?

I've never yet found an area of human life that can't stand to be improved somehow, from dishwashing to space travel. I don't believe that clocks or timekeeping is that area, the one area where (ironically?) time stands still and we have to do things the same way we ever did.

It's not as though a new clock would have to be a quantum leap forward into something that we don't recognize as a clock; PajamaJeans, after all, aren't a new kind of clothing so much as they are simply an advance into a better society.

It just seems to me that there should be newer, better, more creative clocks out there: clocks that are particular to certain occupations, or clocks that are embeddable in our contact lenses or earrings (where you could press it and the sound would travel through your ear, telling you what time it is but being inaudible to the world) or clocks that ...

... I don't know. That do something different. I'm a little disappointed that we don't have that, and a little letdown that I can't think of something that would represent a clock breakthrough. I've come up with tons of other ideas, but I can't come up with something I think is truly new now, and that's depressing me.

On the other hand, I do kind of want to go buy a Clocky. That might cheer me up.




Previous entries on the list:

1. The Incredible Gyro Bowl.

2. Pajama jeans.

3. The Play & Freeze Ice Cream Ball.

4. Quirky.com

5. Joulies.

Click here for more MiniBests.

The Six Best Things I Didn't Know I Wanted Until I Saw Them On TV, #5

Like number 4, I didn't see this one on TV, either, but dammit people, we're talking about inventions that save lives here, so I can't be bogged down in technicalities.

Technicalities like "technically, this invention does not save lives but I still want it."

Thing-I-Didn't-Know-I-Wanted Number 5 is:

Joulies.

Joulies, which I read about on a science-blog app that I have on my phone -- I read it over breakfast in the morning -- are like high-tech ice cubes, only they do the exact opposite of ice cubes. Which makes them not like ice cubes at all, I suppose, only it seems to me that they really are like ice cubes, only in reverse. I'll let you decide; here's how their website describes them:

Coffee Joulies are miniature thermodynamic heat storage devices. They cool your coffee by absorbing excess thermal energy when it is too hot. This energy is stored inside the Joulies. When your coffee reaches the right temperature, the Joulies slowly release this stored energy, keeping your coffee at the right temperature

You had me at miniature thermodynamic heat storage device. But for those of you who need convincing via video, they've got that, too:





Not convinced by diagrams and chamber music? PopSci has more information:

Each Joulie is a small metal shell filled with a phase-change material that melts at 140º Fahrenheit... So the Joulies absorb heat from the coffee till they reach 140º, and then start emitting heat. The effect (if you put in enough Joulies for your volume of beverage) is to maintain the coffee at the desired temperature for long enough to savor it.

Finally, science is doing something for me. I mean, what has science been up to, other than inventing velociraptors? Not a whole lot. It's about time, science. I was about to tell you that we should start seeing other disciplines. Sociology's been looking pretty hot lately.



Previous entries on the list:

1. The Incredible Gyro Bowl.

2. Pajama jeans.

3. The Play & Freeze Ice Cream Ball.

4. Quirky.com

Click here for more MiniBests.

The Six Best Things I Didn't Know I Wanted Until I Saw Them On TV.

Get suckered in by TV ads... and stay for the philosophy of it all...

1. The Incredible Gyro Bowl.

2. Pajama jeans.

3. The Play & Freeze Ice Cream Ball.

4. Quirky.com

5. Joulies.

6. It's about clocks, or something. I don't know.

The Six Best Things I Didn't Know I Wanted Until I Saw Them On TV, #4

Technically, I did not see this thing on TV. That's my disclaimer. But it's not like there are very rigorous rules here on The Best Of Everything, other than the rule that we never, ever make fun of Paris Hilton, again. One nearly-causing-an-apocalypse is enough for any blogger.

By all rights, I should be as famous as Thomas Edison, who, I think we can all agree, was (is?) pretty famous. (I'm not sure how to refer to someone who is famous but who no longer exists because he's dead. Should I use the present tense? The past participle? What is the past participle? And why did we have to learn how to diagram sentences? What was that supposed to teach us? Because I remember how to diagram sentences but not what I was supposed to learn by doing so, which makes that exercise kind of pointless.)

(Also, I'm not so sure I remember how to diagram sentences, either, now that I think about it.)

I should be famous, like Thomas Edison someday might be, because I, like Thomas Edison and Charles Jenkins, am an inventor.

Charles Jenkins, you don't know but probably should, claims to have been the inventor of the television, only he didn't call it TV; he called it radiovision and using his "mechanical radiovision" claims to have transmitted the earliest television program, in 1923. The program was a series of moving silhouette images which didn't say or do much while on screen. MTV later adapted this idea for The Hills.

Thomas Edison, meanwhile, invented the Electric Death Ray Pistol, but you don't know about that because the U.S. Government bought every copy of it and the patent, and then had Edison shipped to an internment camp to silence him. There are still 73 working models of the original Electric Death Ray Pistol, all of them in the possession of the Department of the Interior, which is why every year when Congress does the budget nobody ever suggests cutting the funding for that Department even though nobody knows what it does.

I'm an inventor, too, in the grand tradition of Charles Jenkins, in that my inventions, too, have received absolutely no notice or attention and also have not made me rich, even though they should have because they are genius. I have come up with many inventions which share the common characteristics of being brilliant and also of having never been produced, because while I have many great ideas, I have zero technical knowledge and so I also have zero capacity to take a brilliant idea from the "brilliant idea" stage to the "thing you can buy at Wal-Mart" stage, which is why the world has not yet benefitted from the luxury of using these many great ideas, such as my idea for the "In-The-Cupboard Dishwasher."

The "In-The-Cupboard Dishwasher" is, like many inventions, a simple idea: It's a dishwasher that's also a kitchen cabinet, or many cabinets if you have many dishes. The idea is to eliminate that portion of cleaning up the kitchen in which you must move the dishes from the dishwasher all the way to the cabinet. If you have the "In-The-Cupboard Dishwasher," then, after dinner, you simply take your dirty dishes, put them back in the cabinet, close the door, throw a switch, and voila, the dishes will be clean the next time you want them.

Assuming, arguendo, that it takes 3 minutes to unload the dishwasher every day, and assuming, too, that there are 270,000,000 people in the United States, half of whom are husbands who won't willingly unload the dishwasher because it takes 3 minutes, and in that 3 minutes they might miss an important second down play where the running back gains 2 yards, then, by simple math, my invention will end divorce entirely and result in families being happy, and productive, unless they really wanted the coach to call a pass play on that down.

The problem with the "In-The-Cupboard Dishwasher" is that I had the idea, but no way to go ahead and make them because the only thing I've ever actually made in my life was a loft for my dorm room bed when I was in college in 1987, and that didn't turn out so well in that (a) I built it in my parent's basement and (b) I used nails, not screws, so I couldn't take it apart and it also wasn't sturdy, and (c) I dropped out of college before actually going back to the dorms, so I didn't need it anyway.

With that as my background, you can see where I've really got no idea how to start building the "In-The-Cupboard Dishwasher" which is why it's lucky for me that I found today's thing, entry number 4 on this Minibest, which is:

Quirky.com.

Quirky.com is not, technically, one thing. And, like I said, I didn't see it on TV, but instead heard about it on a podcast. But Quirky.com is definitely something I didn't know I wanted until I heard about it, and it's also full of things that I didn't know I wanted until I heard about them.

Here's what Quirky.com does -- and I should point out that this is not a paid advertisement or solicitation in any way. I'm not a member of Quirky.com and I only just looked at it for the first time today but I love it anyway, because that's the way these things work: you see something that you didn't even know could exist and then suddenly you love it.

Quirky.com makes inventions real.

They really do, or so it would seem from the story I heard and the website I read. They let any old person just go there and for a small fee submit and idea that gets voted up or voted down and if it gets voted up, then Quirky.com might just take your idea and make it a reality and they'll share the profits with you.

You don't have to have drawings or technical knowledge or even much more than a bare concept to get your idea onto Quirky.com. One idea that's up for voting right now goes like this:

We want to create a coaster that's beautiful and really works. No moisture build up and no sticking glasses that can lead to spills.

That idea goes on to have some specifics -- a "levered base" and LED lighting (for that futuristic feel, I assume) but nothing beyond that.

Other ideas up right now include a way to have beginner guitar players get calluses and finger strength and muscle memory without practicing, which, as a longtime guitarist who only plays about once a year now sounds excellent to me because when I do get the guitar out to play a round of Me & Julio Down By The Schoolyard, my fingers hurt for days afterwards and I have to reteach the chords to myself everytime, and a transparent sign that had digital capacity and can be programmed with a smart phone to change -- so that you can have store window (or bumper or other) stickers that change graphics easily.

Think about that last one for a bit. At first, I was, like "Well, that's nothing" but now I really like the idea of a bumper sticker that I can reprogram, and I just went and voted for that guy.

They've already invented stuff on there, too, stuff you can buy including the "Wrapster", something to help manage the cords for your earbuds, which is something I need and want and I practically ordered them immediately until I remembered that Sweetie keeps my credit card in a secure undisclosed location (probably the Department of the Interior.)

The more I looked around there, the more I got excited that something like this even exists, and the more I thought we should've had something like this long ago, a place where people like me and Charles Jenkins can go and share our ideas and maybe get them made, because it lets us be creative but not quit our jobs and pour our life savings into creating something while worrying our wives and making our children feel like outcasts at school -- we can continue being productive members of society (or, in my case, continue the ruse that we are that) while contributing even more to society.

So really, today's thing is a metathing: It's not only something that I didn't know I wanted until I saw it on TV, but it's a thing that helps people create even more things we didn't know we wanted until we saw that they existed, and encourages people to create things that only we know we wanted but we're pretty sure other people would want, too, if we could only figure out how to get them built and marketed -- and now we don't need to do that second part, we just need to do the first part.

It's genius, is what it is. Quirky.com deserves a spot high up on the ladder of society's esteem.

Let's put it one rung below the "In-The-Cupboard Dishwasher."

Previous entries on the list:

1. The Incredible Gyro Bowl.

2. Pajama jeans.

3. The Play & Freeze Ice Cream Ball.


Click here for more MiniBests.



Want to know how making fun of Paris Hilton almost brought about the end of the world? Read the hilarious book "Do Pizza Samples Really Exist?", available by clicking this link.

The 6 Best Things I Didn't Know I Wanted Until I Saw Them On TV, #3 (MiniBest)

When I am rich -- that's a when, not an if-- I will not only follow through on my longstanding but rarely discussed plan to teach myself the Weapon of Choice dance and then recreate it, but also I will have even more gadgets than I do already in my kitchen, and I might even use them.

In our kitchen, somewhere, we have (I'm going off memory here and might miss some) numerous gadgets, like the toaster, which is a kitchen gadget but nobody thinks of it as such. We just take for granted that a toaster is a regular ol' kitchen tool that everybody has and not some unique kitchen-y thing that nobody really needs but which we find useful, but a toaster is a kitchen gadget, and if toast, itself, didn't date back to Roman times -- if not farther back -- and if toasters, themselves, hadn't been first invented in maybe 1893, according to The Toaster Museum, which used to be a real place but now, sadly, exists only in cyberspace at least until the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, gets the permanent (500+ toasters) collection ready for display.

Everything I said in that last sentence is absolutely true.

Where was I? Oh, yeah: If toast wasn't 6,000+ years old, and if toasters weren't older than your grandma, we'd not accept them as regular appliances in our kitchens, but instead would think of them as some wacky, late-night TV gimmickry:

"Tired of eating floppy soft bread? Does this [picture of person struggling to spread butter but the bread is tearing badly] happen to you? Maybe you need the Electro-Matic Bread Browning Toaster! Turn your saggy old slices of boring bread into stand-alone solid wedges of delicious golden-brown toast! Spread jelly, peanut butter, even cheese, onto your bread without worrying about tearing a hole in the slice. No more of this: [Scene: Kids picking up sandwiches only to have fixing slide out the back because the lower slice of bread is sagging]: Save those sandwiches by firming up the bread! The Electro-Matic Bread Browning Toaster can fit any size slice of bread and can even brown two slices at the same time! Set it darker for a more bold flavor, or just lightly heat your bread to keep it looking like bread but tasting like toast. [SCENE: Two women in a bright kitchen. One woman says "Oh, no, Shelly, I can't eat a sandwich -- this is my new dress." But Shelly hands over the toasted sandwich, which holds up firm, and New Dress Lady bites it and says "This bread is kind of crunchy," as Shelly smiles towards her Electro-Matic Bread Browning Toaster.] You can put bagels and English muffins in there, and they'll come out perfect every time...

You get the point. So don't laugh at me for my love of kitchen gadgets. Your microwave, toaster, coffee maker and mixer were once "gimmicky gadgets" that people thought other people were suckers for buying, which is why I proudly own (and sometimes use) all those things plus my George Foreman grill, my supergriddle, my food processor, my Crock Pot, my coffee grinder, my deep fryer, and my Rachael Ray (TM) Food Processor.

Yet even with all those gadgets I'm not complete, and it was my desire for the newest entry on this list that got me thinking about how I would defend, to Sweetie, my purchase of the Play & Freeze Ice Cream Ball:



Do you think Sweetie'll buy the "Hey, people once thought toasters were crazy, too?" argument? Because I really want this.

I don't often talk about this, but there was a time when I set out to make ice cream, and that time was 1994, when I lived in Shorewood, Wisconsin, on my own, and I didn't have a TV because I had only recently returned from Morocco and the TV that I'd had before going to Morocco was lost after I'd let my brother store my stuff. (He had also forgotten to return my rented guitar to the music store, which is how I came to own a guitar and also how I first began to have bad credit.)

Not having a TV left me with only limited entertainment options at home, but an abundance of free time while I finished up my senior year of college, and I opted to fill some of that free time by taking back the ice cream maker I'd given my brother (not that brother, a different brother. Stay with me, here. Focus!) and learn to make ice cream. I came up with a peppermint ice cream, and a chocolate-banana ice cream and some others before getting a TV and consequently giving up on some of my more interesting hobbies.

The lesson is: If you want to accomplish anything in life, turn off the TV. But if you want to find something that'll let you make ice cream while (sort of) playing soccer:




and if you're not turned off by the idea of first kicking your dessert around the backyard before eating it (I'm not.) Then watch TV long enough to find the Play & Freeze Ice Cream Ball, which you can then buy, and send to me, so that I don't have to worry about whether Sweetie will buy my excuses, and I will then use to make new, fantastic brands of ice cream that will make the world a better place and me a richer man, which will then allow me to go back and learn that Christopher Walken dance, so you can see how there's a clear benefit to humanity here.



1. The Incredible Gyro Bowl.

2. Pajama jeans.

The 6 Best Things I Didn't Know I Wanted Until I Saw Them On TV, #2 (MiniBest)

I think it's time to set the record straight a bit on just who is being discriminated against and who is not being discriminated against in the workplace, ladies.

Sure, you only make seventy cents for every dollar a man makes, and, sure, as soon as you get close to becoming a president we'll start making fun of your pantsuits, and, yeah, Kirstie Alley is a sex predator who's only days away from a sit-down with Chris Hansen...

... that doesn't really have anything to do with this post, but I thought it bore repeating...

... but have you ever stopped to consider the benefits that you have that men don't get, like the fact that Pajama Jeans are only made for women?

It's true.

And it's probably a violation of some amendment or Constitutional right or something, but are we going to hear from Michele Bachmann about how our Founding Fathers gave their blood, sweat, and tears to defend this country from invading Mexicans in the Battle of New Orleans all so that Lewis & Clark could finish building the space shuttle in order to be the first to circumnavigate the globe under water?

Probably, given Bachmann's muddled understanding of history. But that's besides the point. What is not besides the point -- what is the point -- is that it's totally unfair that Pajama Jeans are made for women only, and that men, like me, if we want to wear pajamas in public the way I accidentally did last week when Sweetie and I decided to take the Babies! for a ride and I was wearing pajamas and we had to stop for gas and Sweetie made me go inside to buy her a cookie so that I, a respected former judicial candidate, was seen in public buying a cookie while wearing plaid pajama pants, men like me have to be seen obviously wearing pajamas, whereas women get to pretend to be wearing jeans and still have the comfort of pajamas.

The allure of the pajama jeans is obvious, isn't it? What's more comfortable than a good pair of pajamas? Why shouldn't people get to wear pajamas everywhere we go? With robots taking over almost every societal function for us, we're all about three years away from being those people on the cruise ship in Wall-E, anyway, so why delay that?

In short, why shouldn't I get to wear pajamas to work? Life is unfair. I would gladly make 70% of what I earn now if I could make that 70% while wearing pajamas to work, provided that first you give me a raise to about 130% of what I make now, and then let me make that choice.

Prior entries in this category:

1. The Incredible Gyro Bowl.

gyro

The 6 Best Things I Didn't Know I Wanted Until I Saw Them On TV, #1. (MiniBest!)

MiniBests, remember, are thematically-linked posts... sounds important, doesn't it... that explore a topic over the course of a month. See more of them here.

I have invented lots of things in my life. Now, by "invented," I don't mean "actually created the thing and now you can use it." I'm using "invented" more loosely, in the sense of "I had the idea but since I have no practical skills whatsoever I am completely incapable of making that idea into a reality."

The fact that I have no practical skills, therefore, puts more than me at risk -- I've noted in the past that my lack of skills will mean that after the Apocalypse occurs [in December 2012, according to George Lucas] my role in society will be reduced to monster bait -- but it's not just me that's losing out, it's you, too, because I can't put all my great ideas into action, great ideas like the one I had for the "In The Cupboard Dishwasher," or the dating website "Go Fish," in which members would be allowed to contact other members at first by asking them a question: They could, for example, message another member by asking "Do you like pina coladas?" and if the recipient says "No," the question is randomly sent to another profile on the site, who then must answer that question before he/she can ask their own... so you're sent to Go Fish and you randomly meet people who might share your interests.

See? It's genius. But because you're going to make me be monster bait, dating opportunities will be severely limited in the post-Apocalyptic world, which we can only hope will be more David Byrne-Nothing-But-Flowers-y than most popular books and movies think it will be. (Someday, I'll probably explore the question of why people think that a post-apocalyptic world would be unpleasant. It doesn't seem to me that would be a guarantee, but, then, I'm different than other people. And better looking.)

But for today, I'm thinking about things that have been invented and that I didn't know that I wanted until I saw them on TV; we hear a lot about advertising creating a need that it is ready to fill with a product that was created before anyone really knew that need was there -- like "ring around the collar," an example I've heard before of Madison Avenue making something up to get people to buy a product. But is that really true, either? We take things for granted, believing that the post-apocalyptic world would be unpleasant as opposed to a jaunty life filled with a complete lack of Tea Partiers, or falling for the idea that there was no "ring around the collar" until after Wisk was invented and Madison Avenue created "ring around the collar" to sell it.

But were people -- are people that dumb? Would we simply buy something because we were told there was a need for it, without ever actually looking at our collars to see if such a thing exists?

Possibly. I have to be honest: my endless optimism and faith in humanity is challenged on a daily basis. So, possibly.

But, in the case of the things I didn't know I wanted until I saw them on TV, I don't think that's what's going on. Take the first item in this series of MiniBests:

The Incredible Gyro Bowl.



I kept waiting, at the end, for a disclaimer that said something like "Note: Gyro Bowl does not actually fly." But I didn't see that, so I believe that it can really fly and now I want it more than ever, because either I'll get a flying bowl or I'll have the greatest consumer lawsuit ever.

I saw that ad while I was working out at the health club, taking a break one day from jogging to ride a stationary bike and watch TV; I kind of like watching 3 or 4 TVs at the same time, especially when the club isn't really full so I don't have to deal with all the people who turn the TVs to that financial information channel, putting five TVs in a row on the same channel so they can pretend to be the kind of person who can't miss any financial news while also not turning their heads even slightly to see the TV just to the left.

And the moment I saw the ad, I thought I've got to have that, first so that I can put a Gyro Bowl on my office desk to get people to say "What's that?" and I can explain "It's a Gyro Bowl" and we could spend a good ten minutes trying to get it to spill, and, second, because when you say 100% kid proof, I immediately think You don't know Mr F and Mr Bunches, who have mauled and destroyed their way through a lot of things, and who I would really like to turn loose on the Gyro Bowl to see what they could do to it: I'm betting that they would not only get it to spill, but they'd end up getting it lodged in my car's carburetor, assuming cars still have carburetors, which I'm not at all sure they do, but, then, knowing Mr F and Mr Bunches, I'm pretty sure they could install a carburetor, and then lodge the Gyro Bowl in it to get it to spill chocolate chip cookies into the engine block, something I'm also not sure engines have any more.

The Gyro Bowl doesn't create a need, though: kids do spill, all the time, even when they're nearly 24 years' old, as Oldest is. The Gyro Bowl does create questions in my mind, like what is that paramilitary organization that is training kids to slide down zip lines with a bowl of cereal, just barely glimpsed between 0:35 and 0:40? Is that to help us infiltrate the growing threat posed by the new international youth terrorist organization, Al Kidda?

Sorry, I couldn't resist.



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