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Technorati Tags: science

I ran across this site today, infomercialscams.com. It’s a place where you can rant and rave about the crap products that you got suckered into ordering while you were drunk on Sunday at 3am Sunday. I love to see people rip apart junk that thats Broken As Designed. Most of the stuff there is just the usual “didn’t get my product” and the endless billing scams.

But as I was reading I came to a different conclusion.

Lots of the people buying this crap are complete morons, and it’s more fun to read about their stupidity than about the products themselves.

Like this gem, from Catherine who purchased a “Velform Sauna Belt” which is basically a heating pad with velcro you wear around your waist:

I bought the Velform Sauna Belt and once it, finally, got to me, I tried it and it didn’t work! It just heats up and makes my skin red but it doesn’t make me sweat at all. No calories are burned, nothing! You’re better off working out than buying this product.

What? You mean that $19.95 piece of crap doesn’t just melt away the pounds like magic? Just imagine the thought process that these people are going through - it makes me sweat, therefore I will lose weight. Yeah, so will dehydration. “You’re better off working out!” No shit. And here I thought that sitting on the couch eating Ruffles with an electrical deathtrap around my waist was the way to health and happiness.

In fact, there are piles of people who seem to think that sweating is the magic weight loss formula and are complaining that it didn’t make them sweat at all. Freaking sad. To top it off, lots of the complaints about the product says that it caused burns with blistering. Yikes.

Or take this single complaint about the “Q-Ray Ionized Bracelet”:

I purchased a q-ray ionized bracelet off the TV. When I recieved it I used it. It seemed to relieve the pain of my muscles after some time of using it I started getting high blood pressure when I would wear this product. I am trying to find some information on what rights I have, and what I can possibly do in regaurds to my discomfort.

Not only does she think that the Q-Ray is some magical healing device, she now believes it’s a scam because it supposedly caused her blood pressure to rise.

And the Carleton Sheets pages just go on and on. Who woulda’ thunk that getting rich in real estate wasn’t as easy as a 30 minute commercial says it is.

Read these pages to reinforce your already jaded view of humanity. You won’t be disappointed.

Technorati Tags: scam

The bane of the willfully ignorant, defender of the cephalopod, and all-around nice guy P.Z. Myers is turning 50! Hell, it’s not everyone that gets a birthday poem from Richard Dawkins.

Keep on keeping on, PZ.

And just who approved this image for the new dollar coins?

… this slight mod of the Zune’s logo. Found here.

Today is the day for mail strangeness. First the destroyed UPS package, and now a USPS package that took over a year to arrive.

Sitting on our porch a couple of days ago was a USPS Express envelope with some pictures of my nephews and other relatives. My SO and I remarked at how they must have been from last year, as everyone looked a little younger. When talking to her sister, we discovered that this was a package that was lost in December 2005.

This was mailed on December 21, 2005. It arrived on January 15, 2007. No note of what happened in the meantime, all the contents appear to be there, and it was in remarkably good shape. Certainly better than the UPS envelope.

Bizarre.

Check out the picture below. This is (was?) a UPS overnight envelope that was nearly destroyed by some handling monkeys. Keep in mind, this thing was not torn during opening - it arrived like this, complete with packing tape holding the ripped open top semi-closed, but not the giant gash across the front.

I’ve never received something from them in such bad shape - especially something that had only been in their possession for less than 12 hours. The topper is that the thing held blank checks fresh from the printer. Fortunately they were shrink-wrapped in opaque plastic, so there was some reassurance that some just didn’t “go missing.”

R.A. Wilson has died.

Fnord.

Here we go again! Nutcase Pat has new predictions for 2007! This year, we have a mass killing sometime in 2007. “The Lord didn’t say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that.” Yeah, whatever. He always seems to glow when he drools this stuff out.

He also claimed that a tsunami would hit the US in 2006 … He now claims that the flooding and heavy rains in New England fulfilled this prediction. ‘Cause that make sense.

And just to be snarky, he so freaking looks like Alfred E. Neuman in this picture

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Happy New Years! Enjoy the nightmares!