Woot : One Day, One Deal (SM)

It’s spring. Things are warming up. People are wearing less and less everywhere you go. And your mind is firmly in the gutter.

All those leaves to clean, all that wet mulch and strange molds and maybe a venomous millipede with a rifle. You don’t want to go up there. You certainly don’t want to pay a stranger. And your kid’s been at a slumber party for a week. They always know, those kids.

But never you fear, because if your gutter fits well against this template, the iRobot Looj will be there to fulfill Issac Asimov’s dream. No, it doesn’t have breasts, that was Heinlein’s dream. Pick up a book, jerkface.

This recertified iRobot Looj is a little bot with only one prime directive: to clear your gutter. The Looj moves both forward and backward and has a three stage auger that spins in both directions. You keep the remote. Rebellion is impossible!

With the fury of a hundred toothbrushes the iRobot Looj gnaws through your forgotten gutter trash like Jack the Ripper, the auger spinning at a terrifying 500 RPM. Soon your Looj will be such a part of your life that you won’t even imagine how you managed to live without it. And it’s not just for gutters!

Take it to the pool and let it fight your Scooba, Prince Namor. Tie razor wire to the end and let it slowly lay your perimeter. Put it on a xylophone and drive out a scorching solo. Dress as Mon Mothma and send your Roombas in for lay cover support so Looj Skywalker can navigate the trench. What can’t you do with this exciting little friend?

Don’t let a crippling fear of aluminum and tin keep you from having a clean house this year. They won’t be calling you coward once you’ve got a robot to protect you! Your recertified iRobot Looj will be a mighty addition to the pride of technology that already prowls your abode. Entropy hasn’t got a chance.

Stop entering that data! Put down that Lean Cuisine frozen lasagna! Turn off the pesky higher functions of the brain! It's time to watch some TV!

• I'm always skeptical of any online video clip described to me as "amazing", but Muto does indeed amaze. Surreal animated paintings crawl, bounce, and slither across walls on two continents. I'll say it: amazing.
• On the other hand, "amazingly dumb" describes these L.A. freeway cyclists. I'm glad they do it so I don't have to.
• Floating Head is your typical boy-meets-terrifying-apparition story.
• Live by the teleprompter, die by the teleprompter: Charles Barkley learns that lesson well.
• A trained goldfish makes the case that even animals from lower orders might be smarter than cats.
• Since I stole their song title for this blog post, I may as well link to the amusing video for "TV Party" by Black Flag.

Four O'Clock Flash: an oldie today. There's nothing unique or special about Snake, except its quick-n-easy playability. Guide your little serpentine creature to food without touching the walls or your own tail. Best experienced on Python level, unless you're, like, 90 years old.

Lemme guess – you try to “keep in shape” by bicycling, right? Rollerblading? Maybe (snicker) jogging? Please. If that’s what you call a workout, you might as well climb onto a senior scooter before you fall and can’t get up. The way – the ONLY way – to true fitness is aboard the pogo stick. If you can master the stick, there’s no fat you can’t lose, no flab you can’t tone.

And when I need an extra boost to push my pogoing to new heights, to get that extra millimeter that makes the difference between champ and chump, I gotta have my tunes. That’s why I bolted a pair of RCA Lightweight Behind the Neck Headphones to my pogo helmet. The behind-the-neck Active Fit design doesn’t get in the way of my bouncing. And whether I’m kicking “Jump Around” by House of Pain, “Jump” by Van Halen, or my ultimate jam, “Pogo Dancing” by Chris Spedding & the Vibrators, they always sound great. Extreme, even.

Frankly, I wouldn’t trust any other headphones to keep up with my active, bouncing lifestyle. But I guess if your Great-Aunt Gladys needs some music while she’s speed-walking or playing canasta, they’d work for that, too. Now who’s ready to pogo their fat into submission?

The air is crisper today. Everything is bathed in warming sunlight. I breathe, think, speak, and act with a lightness and ease I thought I'd never feel again. There's nothing like the first workday after a Woot-Off.

• Once in a millennium rises a cupcake so evil, so pitiless, so profane that to eat it is to prostrate oneself before the forces of darkness. Behold the black metal cupcake. (As seen on BoingBoing.)
• It's a time-honored tradition not to tell your spouse about the money you won at the racetrack or at bingo. But not telling your wife about winning the lottery? That's some serious Lockhorns stuff right there.
• A Japanese company promises that their vending machines can determine a person's age by camera analysis of skin sags and wrinkles. Will we see a stampede of teenage Japanese smokers getting plastic surgery to help pass the age test?
• Just as every person is unique, each grain of sand is an amazing little work of art. Unlike people, most grains of sand don't use leafblowers at 7 a.m. on Sunday. I wish some nice grains of sand would move in next door to me...
• Aspiring moviemakers, hearken to the strange tale of a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark made by two Mississippi students during the 1980's.

Four O'Clock Flash: an old band of mine once played a club in Omaha called the Cog Factory. But this Cog Factory requires you to sort through some gears, put gears of similar color together, and...I can't figure out how to describe it in a way that doesn't make it sound boring. But trust me, it's a fun little distraction. (As seen on 10 Daily Things).

Show us the ravages that Woot addiction has inflicted on our customers.

Now, any number of X-rated scenarios suggest themselves immediately, so we're going to count on your maturity and judgment to stay on the safe side of tasteful. What fools we must be.

Post your entry here by 11:59 AM CST on Monday, May 19, 2008. Prizes are $20/$50/$100 for 3rd/2nd/1st. The rules and criteria for winning: our panel of volunteer judges can and will make stuff up as it goes along. Use Photoshop, linoleum blocks, pastels, MSPaint, cave painting, tattoos, tribal scarification, whatever, but it’ll only be judged if it’s visible in our forums as a jpg, gif, or png. As we are fond of saying, try to keep your maximum width to 450px. If you need a place to host your pictures, try www.imageshack.ws or www.photobucket.com. We have no connection to either, but they seem free and easy to use. And if you want us to be sure your entry was indeed your work, post links to your source images. The more sure we are that you did your own work, the more likely we are to consider it for a prize.

Listen, I’ve had it with certain people in cable news and talk radio disparaging my Digital Lifestyle. I’m an adult, aren’t I? Can’t I make my own decisions about what’s right for me? And who’m I supposed to be hurting?

I understand that a lot of these guys are misinformed about the Digital Lifestyle. They think it’s all about marathon sessions of wild, irresponsible media piracy. But for most of us, it’s not like that at all. And it’s these so-called pundits’ responsibility to get the facts before they go spouting off to a national audience with their slanderous hate speech.

So what if they think my HDTV’s thousand-to-one contrast ratio gives me an “unnaturally lifelike” picture? So what if they think a 3H anti-glare coating is “perverse?” So what they’re shocked that I swing with ATSC, NTSC and clear QAM tuners instead of tying myself down to just one kind of tuner for my whole life? They call that “commitment,” but I call it home-entertainment incarceration.

My Digital Lifestyle incorporates two HDMI inputs and a host of other connections including component, S-Video, PC and composite. That’s not promiscuity; it’s just being open to different types of media experiences.

We don’t all have to watch TV the same way. Maybe your parents did it for 30 minutes every night at 9:30 immediately before going to sleep. Well, if that’s what they wanted, good for them. But I’m not your parents. And you aren’t either. And I’ve got news for you. There are more people out there with Digital Lifestyles than you think. We’re your neighbors, your co-workers, your cub league baseball coaches and members of your church congregations. And we’re decent American citizens just like you.

And we’ve got a right to enjoy our Digital Lifestyles without being ashamed.

Maybe you like to do things just like everybody else. Maybe you’re afraid to step out of line, to break somebody’s kid-tested-mother-approved rulebook. Well, not me. I go my own way. It started when I was born. Let’s just say I didn’t exit the womb the usual way. I don’t just sit there and read a book; I tear all the pages out and shuffle them into a different order – a unique order. When I make a sandwich, I put the peanut butter and jelly on the outside of the bread. And I use petroleum jelly. Hey, don’t waste your breath telling me what’s “edible” and what’s not. Pigeonholes are for pigeons.

Same goes for when I roast or smoke meats. I fire up the logs in my walk-in oven, throw in a side of alpaca or a couple of alligator flanks, and let my Maverick Remote Oven Thermometer & Timer keep an eye on it. Then I’m free to go outside and water the crabgrass, or head into the bathroom to shave my eyebrows. The receiver comes along to let me know what the temperature of my meat is and when it’ll be done. For you snivelling Babbitts who need somebody to tell you how to live, it offers six meat pre-sets and four doneness settings. Or so it says. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never needed them, same as I’ve never felt the need for underwear.

It’s not always easy to live this maverick life. My first wife never understood why I bathed in mare’s milk, and neither did my second, third, or fifth wives. Over the years, I’ve been thrown out of more museums, bait shops, and mosques than you’ve ever seen. Unlike the first ten rounds of Who Wants To be A Millionaire?, life isn’t supposed to be easy. But the hard road gets a little easier when you walk it with the Maverick Remote Oven Thermometer & Timer.

Someone had written “DANGER!” in large black letters on the box of my HP Officejet 5610 All-in-One Printer, Fax, Scanner, Copier. I paid it no mind. I told myself that the worst the HP Officejet 5610 All-in-One Printer, Fax, Scanner, Copier could do is make me buy more paper. It printed up to 20 black and white pages a minute, and up to 13 color pages in a different minute that was just as long, but occurred much later. I was happy to put it on the shelf near my copy of Strunk and White and my bust of Clive Barker. The printer, that is. Not the minute. Minutes don’t go on the shelf.

Anway, that first week, it was nothing special. I drank my coffee and enjoyed the ease of the 25 sheet document feeder. My faxes were going at 33.6 kbps, with or without a PC connection. Imagine my thrill when I first sent a fax through a normal phone line! I called my wife in, and she rolled her eyes and walked out, telling me not to bother her with things like that again.

By the weekend I was comfortable with the One Touch buttons to fax, copy and scan. I even started enjoying the High Quality Document Scanning with the 1200×2400 dpi optical resolution and 48 bit color depth. I found how to automatically block junk fax numbers to save me on ink and paper. I began taking the manual to bed at night, even as my wife covered her head with a pillow and told me harshly to turn off the lamp.

The next week, though, I lost control. I began to scan all my old documents, my diplomas, even, briefly, our cat. My wife came in to find it pressed against the flatbed, meowing with wide, helpless eyes. She said there was a look on my face that she’d never seen before, and she rushed over to pull me away. The cat ran into the living room and I assured her it had just been a moment’s mistake. She told me that she’d had the cat since college, longer than I’d known her, and that I was to never do such a thing again. I told her I would make it up to her by making her a nightcap.

A few hours later I primed the scanner resolution, going from the Optical up to 1200 dpi to the Enhanced up to 19200 dpi. It was simple after studying the manual. My wife was fast asleep, thanks to the crushed pills I had slipped into her drink. I carried her from her bedroom to the computer room and undressed her, then, slowly, I dragged her limp body across the scanner. When I was done, I went to the bag I had filled that day at the computer store. A bag full of HP 22 Tri-color, HP 27 Black, HP 56 Black, and HP 58 Photo. They were not included, you see. And I would need them all.

By morning, I had printed her dopplegangers, one in color, one black and white, one photo quality. My old wife awoke and looked at the reams spread out before her and I could see in her eyes that she feared for her life. But why? For was I not granting her immortality? Was her memory not forever secure, like a Vulgate, or a copy of Truly Tasteless Jokes? I drew the letter opener from the empty tomato paste can in which it was usually kept and advanced toward where she lay. But then, I met her eyes.

You see, the woman I had just printed was limp and asleep and full of dreams and perfection. But the woman before me now had none of that. She called me names that would have made a sailor run for a dictionary and made it clear that I should kill her quickly because, if she lived, I would spend the rest of my life in an agony no human could truly comprehend. And suddenly my mind was cleared. This was the woman I had married. This was real life.

My wife helped me seal up the HP Officejet 5610 All-in-One Printer, Fax, Scanner, Copier and we took it out to the curb. Before we left, I took a black pen and wrote “DANGER!” in large letters. Maybe some single man would find use in its magic. For me, though, there was no hope. My soul was already lost.

Yessirreebobby, this is the end, beautiful friend. After two taxing days of letting the Woot-Off toss you about like a mini-kite in a sudden spring storm, you’re finally coming back down to earth. It was fun, though, right?

What you need now—if you don’t mind our saying so—is to stand up, rub the monitor glare from your eyes, stretch, step away from the computer, and maybe get some fresh air. Oh, you know what would be really relaxing? Some old-fashioned kite-flying. Just you and the wind, right? Man (or woman, whatever) and nature.

“But Woot!” we hear you plaintively cry. “I don’t have the kind of lavish storage space required to keep a kite. Don’t all the birds in the Accipitridae family need lots of room?”

What are you, slow? We’re talking about a kite. You know, kites? “Let’s go fly a kite / up to the highest height” and all that? And anyway, these are small. Pocket-sized, in fact. Anyone with pockets has space for a couple of these. (There goes our sale to Woot user slim_g00dbody.)

There’s no assembly required; these bad boys (or girls, whatever) are ready to fly. So get out there and feel the May breeze on your pallid skin, kids. At the end of another long, strenuous Woot-Off, it’ll be just the thing to help you unwind.

Well, unwind forty yards of line, anyway. Here endeth the Woot-Off.