I present the Rapid Ramen Cooker, when any other microwave-safe bowl in your cabinet is just not good enough. This is the quintessential college dorm room product.
I have been tempted to purchase the atomic beam lantern, for emergency uses. Does anybody have one?
They work as advertised, but don’t last long. We went through several before going back to regular hoses. None of the pocket hoses even lasted a full summer.
A Lux measurement is meaningless without knowing the distance it was measured at.
Lux
Any flashlight/lantern advertising lux isn’t worth the money.
To me, the best example of this is an ad for an inflatable bed (I misremember which one). It showed a poor woman — so poor that she couldn’t afford to be filmed in color — wrestling with a rollaway bed in a closet. The poor dear apparently didn’t realize that you had to push the bed rather than merely rocking it back and forth in the hopes that doing so would activate some kind of autopropulsion device.
(For some reason this always brought to mind the scene in Bride of the Monster in which Bela Lugosi tries to create the effect that a rubber octopus is attacking him by grabbing its tentacles and flailing them around. But then I realized a long time ago that the associations I make are not exactly … normal.)
Dad got one from a store. It was quite useful when the power went out. We used it for a couple nights without running out of battery. And I liked being able stick it to a metal surface, like our door or the refrigerator.
I’ve messed with it since, and still hasn’t run out of power.
I also have two rice cookers for the microwave. Yeah, it’s just a microwave safe bowl with some lines to tell you how much to put in. But it was also rather cheap–at least, it was at the store. And not having to measure the water or rice is convenient.
I presume this is the same sort of product as the Ramen bowl. Though it seems more useful in a rice bowl. You don’t really need to measure Ramen, and since you want soup, the exact amount of water isn’t that important.
I didn’t find the Pocket Fisherman total garbage; close but not quite total. I had one for a while that lived in my saddlebags for those odd times when I came across an interesting piece of water and wondered if there were any fish in it. It got replaced with an equally cheap but much more effective Eagle Claw pack rod and a couple really cheap reels – one fly and one spin. Yeah, maybe it still has a place or use but like you say there are a lot of various options out there.
What annoys me about the As Seen on TV commercials is the crazy shipping charges. They’ll advertise something at twenty bucks or so, with a shipping and handling charge of ten bucks. And sometimes it’s something that looks like you could send for two bucks even if you sent it by first class mail.
And then they’ll advertise that you can get two for the price of one. “Just pay separate shipping and handling.” So they’re getting forty bucks for two things that cost them something like five bucks.
So if I’m ever tempted to buy something from one of these commercials, I’ll wait for it to be available in a store like Target, or at worst, buy it from Amazon (with the free shipping).
Well, my bowls aren’t. I like the noodles long, and the only way a block of ramen would fit in one of my bowls would be if I broke it into quarters. Not even sure it would fit then. Plus the water line inside is handy because you don’t have to measure the amount of water. It’s certainly not a necessity, but at $3 it’s proven to be quite convenient.
I think that’s mainly people finding a use for a dumb product rather than the dumb product being designed explicitly for those people.
The story that’s supposed to be the foundation of this theory, that Snuggies were invented for people in wheelchairs, is false. The Snuggie came from the Slanket which was invented by a college kid annoyed that his arms got cold working the remote when under a blanket.
TV Tropes:
Too incompetent to operate a blanket.
Crazy yes, but we found one at a dollar store. And altho sure, it is just a piece of aluminum, we dint have anything like it in the house. So, if you get one cheap enuf, it works.
This review is amusing:
I must admit the hose really does work as advertised.
I just remembered the dog biscuit maker I got. I made delicious biscuits from the accompanying recipe book but it literally took four hours to make 20 of 'em!
We have a couple of the cheaper, generic versions, and altho not as bright as they would have you believe, they are nice to have around.
I had no idea what an “atomic beam lantern” was until I just Googled it. That looks like the thing my brother bought me for Christmas. He also bought one for my parents. It’s not bad, although I took the batteries out and put it in the bin with the other emergency equipment. (I have plug-in flashlights for immediate use after an outage.)
There’s an ad for one now called Miracle Hair. Here’s a pretty funny review by MikeJ.
Huh.
I’ve had mine for a couple of years, with no signs of deterioration. Of course, after each use, I disconnect it from the faucet and store it in an enclosed bin, out of the elements.
I get confused when I see those commercials these days. Often, the announcer will say something along the lines of “Wait! There’s more! Order right now and we’ll DOUBLE the offer! That’s right, we’ll send you TWO [insert name of miracle product here], PLUS the [insert name of bullshit “accessory” here]! Just pay a separate fee.”
Is the “separate fee” just the same $19.99 they asked for the first item once again? They used to say to pay separate shipping and handling, but now it’s separate fee. WTF?
ETA: it’s particularly confusing when the same infomercial tells you that they’re including free S&H.
Are you still single? I can offer a dowry of one grungy Scrub Daddy and several regular dish towels.