That’s why yachters are dumb. I raced for a season and you know what I wore? When it was cold, I wore whatever I wore on the way to the yacht club. When it was warm, I went barefoot. $100 for “yachting shoes” my ass, creepytoes or not. There were no girls to impress out on the water.
The industrial solvent DMSO has been long used as a topical medication for, I think, arthritis and related inflammatory conditions. I don’t know if it has ever been approved for medical use, but it may have been since I first heard of it.
Recently there were reports of a particular brand of Korean snack sausage having sales increase because people were using them as an iPhone stylus. The capacitive screen on an iPhone won’t work with gloves on and the sausages must be close enough to a real finger to be a usable substitute!
Also, way back when the first iPod model was released with a 1GB hard drive, professional photographers found that it was less expensive to disassemble an iPod to extract the compact flash compatible hard drive and discard the rest than to purchase a 1GB microdrive intended for specifically for cameras. This was short-lived though as the price of these micro hard drives went way down probably due to the fact that so many were required for mp3 players.
In my recent experience, I don’t quite agree with you. When we closed up our new house for winter last fall, we discovered that it has a terrible smell (we suspect the house that was sold to us as non-smoking actually had a smoker in it). I tried all the commercial odour eaters, but what has worked here is broad, open dishes of baking soda in every room. I’m not disagreeing with your conditions, but the results have been nothing short of spectacular.
Here’s another off-label use - newspaper to clean glass. It works very nicely - spray on your cleaner, and scrub it off with balled-up newspaper. I especially like this for car windows, where you always seem to have a film.
When I worked at a summer day care we had deodorant in our first aid kit for bee stings. I think it helped ease the pain but not sure how it did it.
I’ve heard of models using hemorrhoid cream under their eyes to reduce the look of bags. Personally, I think I’d rather have the baggy eyes.
OUCH!!!
Um, I realize i am probably being dense, but I do not get this…?
I don’t know if this counts, since it is not a legal use of the product, but I remember hearing that the plastic cylindrical part of a regular Bic ballpoint pen could be used to pick kryptonite U-shaped bike locks, back when U-locks had those types of keys.
Oh, and I had lots of friends who knew how to use Bic lighters to open beer bottles. Personally I could seldom get it to work.
astro said:
It’s effectiveness is debated.
Underlining added for emphasis.
And
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-03-19-duct-tape_N.htm
However, the second study used clear duck tape, which is actually different in that it has no rubber in the adhesive, so it may be different than standard gray tape.
billfish678 said:
False. Not the sucking at it part, but the original function.
bolding added
GreasyJack said:
We had one when I was growing up and we used it for backs and legs. YMMV.
Since we seem to be listing minor uses, using denture cleaning tablets to clean hydration systems (those plastic bags with hoses on them that people use hiking and biking). Camelbak, and probably the other manufacturers, sell “cleaning tablets” for the things. The tablets appear to be very overpriced denture tablets, so they figure among the many methods people use to clean their Camelbaks, Platyuses, et al.
Similarly, although not really common, denture tablets can be used to clean toilets too.
The Eiffel Tower was intended to stand for 5 years, and then be dismantled. It survived because they realized it could be used as a very effective Radio mast.
Close. The actual figure was 20 years. (It was constructed for a World’s Fair, and almost all World’s Fair buildings are designed to be dismantled at the end of the Fair. Twenty years was an unusually long time.) If it had been five years, it would have been gone since no radio existed in 1894.
And its “rescue” in 1909 (alluded to on almost every web site about the Tower’s history) is another simplified myth, like the others I’ve been debunking. People love stories about history and hate complicated realities. But the reality is that Eiffel had been fighting for keeping his Tower for more than a decade before 1909. He’d been arguing for its scientific importance even before financing a radio transmitter in the tower in 1903. A French committee studied the issue of its demolition and in the usual way of committees, decided in 1906 to postpone the showdown, by extending its life to 1915. France was already at war by then, the Tower made a good radio base and observation platform, and nobody was gong to discuss taking it down in the middle of the war. After that it wasn’t an issue.
Source: Eiffel’s Tower by Jill Jonnes.
DMSO is extremely effective at penetrating the skin, it’s been knocked around for ages as a possible drug delivery vehicle, but nothing substantial has emerged AFAIK. I have heard that there were concerns about long term use causing cataracts, but a google search indicates that this is an area of dispute.
As an aside - DMSO is not especially toxic in its own right, but you need to be careful when using it. It’s such a superb solvent that it can dissolve a huge range of compounds that it might have come into contact with. Given its penetrating qualities, if you spill any on your skin it will go straight into your system taking anything that’s dissolved along for the ride.
There is the old sexist saying that where women belong is in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. Well, if you use foot “protection” that won’t happen right? 
I actually saw/heard a professor seriously tell a female student that once, and not just a female student, but a GOOD one. Its a wonder he escaped unharmed…
McDonald’s coffee stirrers / coke spoons.
Perhaps not quite what the OP was asking for (though hopefully not too far off, either), but Play-Doh was originally designed and marketed as a wallpaper cleaner.
Aren’t Q*Tips not to be used in the ear for the danger of damaging the inner ear? I understood the message to mean that you should use them to clean the outer ear/ridges only.
I was thinking of how cyanoacrylate adhesives have found uses in medicine, to replace sutures. But really that’s the same purpose (bonding two surfaces). So even better, though, in reading the Wikipedia article about them, I learned that cyanoacrylates were originally developed when Kodak scientists were looking for a material suitable for gun sights. And when these adhesives are heated, the fumes are used to pick up latent fingerprints on non-porous surfaces.
Selsun Blue is sold as a medicated shampoo. It contains selenium sulfide, which is good for dandruff, and I use it for the occasional tinea versicolor outbreak when back in Michigan, where for some reason one would otherwise have to go to the doctor and get a prescription and wait at the pharmacy for such a simple, non-dangerous medicine. (When here, I proudly self-medicate because there’s no nanny-state, but only for non-dangerous conditions.)
Thanks for all the great answers guys. I personally think Kleenex has to be winning thus far. Thanks, Exapno Mapcase.