This Week’s Weirdest Technology: SquidSoap, Listerine Agent Cool Blue, & Garage Butler
Technically, electronics don’t equal technology alone. The “Technological Age” has involved much more than electronic devices – machines are, after all, technology. So here’s the definition of technology that I found to be most useful: Technology is the things people create to use to alter their lifestyle, their surroundings, or to make living easier.
Definitions like that are wonderful – they put things into perspective in a delightful new way. If you wanted to get really technical with that definition of technology, things like vitamins could be considered technology because they are used to better one’s lifestyle. A simple definition, and it could be a lesson in semantics … but I’m not going to push it that far.
The reason that I started wondering about all this was that I found several new products that are undoubtedly strange, but definitely have something to offer. They make our lives easier, or better, or generally more entertaining. And while they’re not electronic, they do qualify as technology in the broad sense of the term.
Up first on my list this week is all about getting dirty to get clean. Really. After all, we want kids to have good cleaning habits, right? So why not stain their hands with black ink in the process of cleaning them, forcing them to keep on cleaning until the black ink is gone? Sure, this might sound like some sort of torture inline with the toilet that runs all night or the faucet that refuses to quit dripping.
The idea behind “SquidSoap” is that kids will have to spend the 15 to 20 seconds getting a small amount of black ink off, which gets them in the habit of washing their hands thoroughly. And it’s got a funky orange-colored squid hanging off the bottle, which the Texas creators of SquidSoap claim makes it a toy … soap that provides kids hours of fun.
Who knows? They might really have something here – they’re not the only ones trying the stain-it-to-clean-it approach. Listerine recently launched a new product: Listerine Agent Cool Blue. It’s a kid’s mouthwash that children use before they brush their teeth … to turn all the plaque in their mouth bright blue. It’s freaky. Imagine your six-year-old daughter rushing out of the bathroom with a horror-movie grin laughing, “Mommy look!” and you see this really brilliant blue glare coming from her mouth. (Feel free to insert shocked shudders here, I definitely did them!)
So Agent Cool Blue is a bit startling, but it gets the job done. Since it colors all the plaque blue, and a bright blue at that, kids can easily see where they’ve brushed and where they haven’t, which means a much better visit the next time they go to the dentist. My daughter is so hooked on the stuff that she brushes her teeth – willingly – several times a day just to see how much blue comes back. If it teaches her good habits, though, who am I to complain? They even have a cool, kid-friendly website called the Agent Cool Blue Command Center that you might want to check out.
Want some weird toothpaste for yourself? Try the chocolate toothpaste (seriously) at toothpasteworld.com.
How did we ever develop good habits when we didn’t have such cool technology as kids? Apparently, we didn’t. Everyone’s well-aware of the cliche` about living in a barn and leaving doors open … and if weird technology holds any clue, we haven’t learned our lesson from the cliche`. A new device called the “Garage Butler” will not only do the work of closing doors for you, but it will send off a siren that alerts your neighbors that you’re a lazy mannerless person who can’t remember to close doors.
Actually, despite my cynicism, this is a rather cool device. Set the Garage Butler to automatically close your garage door after 3, 10, 20, 30, 45, or 60 minutes after you opened it, and you don’t have to worry about whether or not you did it yourself. It also has a light sensor that detects sunlight. By sensing when the sunlight is gone, the Garage Butler can tell when it’s night … and closes the garage up for you.
Good habits, habit building, and those of us who never really got the hang of keeping our good habits working … there’s some kind of strange technology out there for all of us. Maybe we can get our kids in some better habits than we have, though. I’d like to see a siren that goes off when my daughter sneaks an extra sweet and causes cavity-building plaque to build. It might work like aversion therapy. The alarm could be startling enough to make the poor kid never want sweets again.
Or maybe we could find a jaw closer, that would activate every time we opened our mouths to eat that second helping of delicious-but-fattening cherry cheesecake ..
