Florida has a lot of elderly golfers with weak bladders. To help these folks, Florida urologist Floyd Seskin created the
UroClub. It is:
A camouflaged portable urinal, designed to be discrete, sanitary and create an air of privacy! It looks like an ordinary golf club and comes equipped with a unique removable golf towel clipped to the shaft that functions as a privacy shield!
I've got to admit, it is practical. But a bit pricey at almost $50.
The Grass Scanner is a product (hypothetical, I believe) dreamed up by designer Alice Wang. She offers this description:
In wealthier neighbourhoods, the size of the house and how well maintained the garden is, often represents status. The Grass Scanner is a device designed to measure how green the grass is. It takes reading from 3 random patches of the grass and outputs a Pantone* colour code for one to reference and compare. With the codes, one can then refer to the PARKTONE** cards which contains true grass colours of Royal Parks and other green areas in the UK for people to match up with their own garden.
Where it might fail is on fake lawns, which are becoming increasingly popular here in Southern California. Though fake lawns aren't cheap, so having one might indicate a moderate level of status. (via
We Make Money Not Art)
If only you had been reading
Popular Mechanics magazine for February 1929! Then you could have purchased the same
Purple Ray healing device that Wonder Woman uses! Okay, so it was a "Violet Ray." Same difference, right?
Celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the invention of the
Hula Hoop!
Synchronicity in the creative arts is pretty weird. The independent invention of very similar things.
Charles Fort, one of the masters of all things weird, even had a term for it: "steam engine time." Fort's notion was that when an era was ripe, it called forth certain creations multiple times, without coordination among mere humans.
I was reminded of this recently in a small way while watching the 1942 film
TO BE OR NOT TO BE. In this film, Robert Stack plays a dashing Polish aviator named Lieut. Stanislav Sobinski.
What other fictional dashing Polish aviator premiered right at this time? None other than
Blackhawk, who debuted in August of 1941.
Could it be a simple case of the
Blackhawk comic influencing the scripter of
To Be or Not to Be? Unlikely, given the short span between the debut of Blackhawk and the release of the Robert Stack film, which had to be in production for some time prior.
It's more likely that the plight of Poland under Hitler's invasion called forth the notion of a national hero. But why aviator? Just the romance of aerial combat, I suppose.
Here're pictures of Blackhawk and Stack in his role (leftmost figure, below) to compare. Stack is out of uniform in this shot, but when he's wearing his flying outfit, the resemblance to Blackhawk is uncanny.
Crude oil heading toward $200.00 a barrel? Trivial! More important here at WU Central is the upcoming dearth of avian lawn ornaments as the company that makes them goes bankrupt!
Read the whole sad story
here.
How will extortionate charities get their money now, if the practice of "flamingoing" is doomed?
Alex's Jesus Toilet post reminded me of this great
WIRED article from a few years ago, about toilet technology.
It so happens that toilet engineers need to simulate excrement for testing purposes. Here's just a couple of the things they use:
When I first saw the ad for this device in the pages of
Scientific American, I thought it was a joke. But it's true. For only 1.5 times the price of a 2008 Hyundai Accent--a whopping $14,615--you can buy a machine that does everything you can do with a jump rope, two cinder blocks, the branch of a tree and a bicycle tire inner tube.
If you can't wait to purchase it, visit
Fast Exercise now.