#1058 S’cool Dude

As I was perusing this circular I got in the mail for young people headed back to college, I noticed a couple of interesting things. Our good old American inventiveness is still wasted on doodads.
Like there was this bed-desk you could get. In case you need to do a lot of studying when you’re suffering from that binge hangover. The ad blurb on it proclaimed “built in mouse pad!”
Really. Does anyone use mouse pads anymore? Didn’t they go the way of mouse balls? I haven’t seen any of those hanging around in a long time.
Another thing they had was a compact charging station, for all your different personal appliances, iPods, phones, laptop. Which I hope will be obsolete when they finally come up with a universal USB based charging device. Something we really need more inventiveness on soon.
Our landfills are bursting with old chargers.
Speaking of USB, the circular had this new weird peripheral. It’s a laptop cooler. I kid you not. It’s a flat device that fits under your laptop and is about as thin. It fits between your electronic laptop and your actual laptop. It contains little fans which blow and cool your laptop, either your electronic one, or possibly your biological one if you’re twittering with a hot Facebook poster.
The fans are powered by the USB from your laptop. Your laptop is being used to power an external fan to cool your laptop. But is your laptop getting hotter because it’s working harder to provide the power to send out the USB to power the fans to cool it?
Something for college students to discuss in their physics class no doubt.
This other device in the catalogue was even weirder. It was a “man groomer.” A device meant to shave body hair. The copy says “back and shoulder” and “chest and abs.” It also says it has a five level adjustable comb.
Why?
Do we want different levels of body hair? The “five-day all over stubble look” or “luxuriant but groomed” armpit hair? Either you shave your body hair or you don’t. Styling it just seems too strange even for Generation Tat.
Maybe it’s the inventors of our inventiveness that are wasted...
America, ya gotta love it.