Skip to main content
Kick it! Roll it! Play with it! It’s a ball!

This was the advertising on a… yeah, on a rubber ball. Were the manufacturers concerned that the buyers wouldn’t know how to use a rubber ball? Were these supposed to be selling points?

I dunno. Maybe plain rubber balls don’t sell well these days.

Comments

John said…
It's certainly funny, but it's more honest than:

'Superior kickability!* New, improved roll!** Nothing is better suited for playtime!*** Four out of five topologists agree: It's a ball!'****

*Foot not included.
**Tested in a vacuum at 2.1 gees. Your result may vary.
***4,319 toys tested equally; therefore none was better than any other.
****The fifth became distracted deriving its antipodal points according to The Borsuk-Ulam Theorem, unable to decide if it was a ball, or actually a sphere.
10:08 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This has been a very long week -- perhaps 16 or 17 days, at least. I have been offered -- and accepted -- my younger sister’s finished basement for the next year and a half. This will be a major cost-saver for me and a big help for her (she has two toddlers and is expecting a baby in August.) So that was a humongous start to the week. My other sister and her teenaged son have had to make some really hard decisions. She gave me permission to quote her: “spent yesterday at the hospital with my son. about eleven hours. sitting here writing and rewriting this entry trying to find just the right words. how to explain-- he is not healthy. he is mentally ill. he is not safe at home. none of this really covers it. so here's one image from the day. we walk into the east wing at maine med escorted by security. the very nice guard LOOKS like a skinhead but actually has incredible kindness and compassion for my snarly boy. he tells us gently that he has to check ian for weapons and sharp o...
3 comments
Read more
More lake news : they've installed microwaves in the cabins. Okay. This is deeply disturbing to me. First of all, let's be honest. The furniture is rickety at best. Harvest gold plaids went out of style with the Bradys. The easy chairs with no legs never were in style. The high chair is just plain dangerous. The pots and pans are not non-stick; that's baked-on grease. So bringing in cute little white microwaves seems like some perversion of priority. Not to mention! Microwaves introduce things like frozen dinners, oatmeal with dinosaurs, and something called EasyMac. This is just wrong. Sick and wrong. Why, when I was a kid we chipped ice away from the lake's edge just to get our drinking water and then lit a fire to melt it. And the microwaves are really tiny and inadequate. It took 14 minutes to defrost my chili.
Post a Comment
Read more
So I can finally talk about this without shuddering… much. There I was, innocently minding my own business, reading “Freakonomics” in the bathroom, and out of the corner of my eye I saw something run by. Curie and Sagan were both napping, so I was immediately alarmed. I thought maybe it was a mouse. (This should give you an idea of the size of the thing.) It was not a mouse. It was a centipede. It dashed into the laundry nook. “Aahh!” I said and looked around for help. No help was in sight. I believe in being prepared. I also believe in keeping an eye on my enemy. This presented a dilemma. I had to go find weapons without taking my eye off the creature. So I would run out of the bathroom, look around for something, anything -- where is a bazooka when I need one? -- and then race back in to see if he was still there. I did this several times. Finally, armed with a long piece of, well, bamboo (to poke with, of course), a bottle of bathroom cleaner, and a big cup, I advanced ...
4 comments
Read more