Most Ridiculous Infomercials Ever

I've spent a significant amount of time wondering why these items exist and who buys them. Here are some of the funniest ones that come to mind:

   

1. Perfect Polly: 

Notable quotation: "All the joy and none of the mess!" 

2. WaxVac

Wow! Color-coded silicon tips for every member of the family. I call the green one!

3. Zoomies: 

I don't have anything good to say about this one. These things are just really messed up.

4. Rollie Eggmaster: 

There's just something weird about watching a cooked egg being extruded from this thing. I've suddenly lost my appetite. Visit the YouTube page if you want to read all of the obscene comments people left about this video.

Carrots

Someone once told me that baby carrots are really just normal carrots chopped into smaller pieces. I thought that was a lie until now. I was eating some baby carrots when I came across this one:

Apparently, this chunk of carrot escaped the machine that forms baby carrots from larger ones. Now I have proof that baby carrots don't exist naturally. Anyways, this reminds me of something interesting:

Why are carrots orange?

I'm sure everyone has asked this question at some point, but the answer is always indirect. You'll probably hear something like, "They're orange because they have a lot of beta-carotene in them." Well, if anyone has ever wondered why beta-carotene is orange, I can answer that. Here's the chemical structure of beta-carotene: 

beta-Carotene

One of the most obvious characteristics of beta-carotene is its conjugation. Generally, this means that the molecule has alternating single and double bonds. Furthermore, it means that the p-orbitals are overlapping, and electron delocalization is occurring. In other words, the electrons in beta-carotene (and other conjugated systems) are special. These special, delocalized electrons are capable of absorbing photons with wavelengths that correspond to visible light. The reason why carrots are orange is because beta-carotene is capable of absorbing photons with a certain wavelength; this causes humans to perceive them as orange. 

FYI: You might have noticed the structure of beta-carotene closely resembles that of vitamin A. This is because beta-carotene can be a metabolic precursor to vitamin A (aka retinol).   

Upsetting News Articles Involving Birds

Here's a couple of news stories that got my attention. This first one is kind of funny:

Click here if you want to read the whole article, but the title pretty much says it all.

Here's another unfortunate news story involving birds. This one's a little more macabre:

 Read the whole article here.

The Vernacular of Today's Youth

Here's something I found in an old textbook meant of education majors. I guess this class was supposed to teach people how to communicate with high school kids. It's probably from the 1990s, so it's a little out dated now. Even so, I had a "crunk time" reading this.

My Favorite TV Commercials

Here are two hilarious commercials you may have seen on TV. Now that I think about it, they're getting kind of old. This first one was popular back in 2010, I think. It's for Sonic, the fast-food restaurant.

  

Everything about this commercial is disturbingly funny. It's a shame that not many people will ever know about it. This was for some holiday lottery drawing back in 2009. (Please watch this in full-screen mode to fully appreciate the huge gap between the carpet cleaner's teeth.)

Things I Thought Were Extinct 

Did you ever see a commercial for something and think, "I can't believe they still make those." Well here's a list of things I thought you couldn't buy anymore/companies that went out of business/organisms that were extinct: 

1. Mitsubishi Galant 

This car has looked exactly the same since the 2004 model year. It's shocking that you can buy a brand new car in 2013 that looks just like something from 2004.

One of these cars is a 2004, the other can be purchased brand new right now. Can you tell the difference? The grill is the only significant change. The headlights and everything else pretty much look the same. In case you're still wondering, the red one is almost ten years old, and the silver one is the current model.

2. Blockbuster Stores

I saw one not too long ago, so that dispels any myth that they're completely gone.

3. Kmart (aka Lame Mart or K-Fart)

I just saw a commercial for their new layaway program. 

4. Mavis Beacon Typing Program

I'm sure most people remember being forced to use this software at some point in their life. The rule was you have to play Mavis Beacon for 20 minutes before playing Oregon Trail. Anyways, you can still buy the software on Amazon.com.

I'm just curious as to why there are three different actresses portraying Mavis. What happens to them? 

5. The Coelacanth

I can't begin to tell you how relieved I was to hear that some scientists found one of these things swimming around Indonesia in the late 1990s. I thought they were gone forever.

According to Wikipedia, the Coelacanth cannot be eaten because its flesh exudes an oil that makes it taste foul. How would anyone ever know that if only one or two have been seen in the last hundred years? 

6. Pepsi Blue

This stuff actually is extinct. You'll never, ever have another taste of it in your life. 

Funny Grammar Error 

I was at the grocery store a few months back and saw this on the shelf:

Apparently, this is the generic brand of "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter." It must have taken a clever mind to come up with the store brand title, "This is not Butter, it's Butteriffic." Unfortunately, it's a prime example of a comma splice. The person who wrote this tried to join two independent clauses with a mere comma. Here's a few suggestions to remedy the problem:

-This is not butter. It's butteriffic!

-This is not butter; it's butteriffic!

I'm no grammar expert, but I know a run-on sentence when I see one. Anyways, I've tried this stuff; it's not so bad. (Observe the correct usage of the semicolon.)      

On My Bookshelf

I'll introduce myself by listing whatever's on the bookshelf closest to me. This should give some insight into my mind and ultimately what this blog will be about.

Starting from right to left:

-Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World, Sherman

-The Pathological Protein, Yam 

-The Short Guide to Writing about Biology, Pechenik

-Othello, Shakespeare 

-Five Great Short Stories, Chekhov

-The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy

-Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky

-Chekhov: The Essential Plays

-The Stranger, Camus

-A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce

-The Bluest Eye, Morrison

-Macbeth, Shakespeare 

-Hiroshima, Hersey

-Siddhartha, Hesse

-The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger 

-Frankenstein, Shelley

-The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald

-1984, Orwell

-The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck

-On the Road, Kerouac

-Bantam New College Italian and English Dictionary 

-Essential Italian Grammar, Ragusa

-TI-84 Instruction Booklet

-Typee, Melville

-The Invisible Man, Wells

-Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury

-Dracula, Stoker

-Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury

-One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey

-Heart of Darkness, Conrad

-The World According to Clarkson, Clarkson

-Motorworld, Clarkson

-Packrat: A Tale of Compulsive Hoarding, Hixson

-Phantoms in the Brain, Ramachandran and Blakeslee

-Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

-Bhagavadgita

I was forced to read most of these books for school, or I added them to my cart on Amazon.com just to reach $25 and get free shipping. I am by no means a literature freak. By the way, I never actually read the Bhagavadgita; I don't know why I have that on my shelf. 

I know, the titles should be italicized, but I don't have time for that.