HOME |
RSS | 
Everybody knows that Billy Mays is TV pitchman for OxiClean ("powered by the air we breathe!) and Kaboom ("tough on grime, easy on you") ... but wait, there's more! Did you know that the loud, bearded uber-salesman also pitched strange products like the Grater Plater and the Hercules Hook? (There's also the Green Now, a spray paint to paint your dead lawn green, but I couldn't find the video for it.)
In memory of Billy Mays, the king of infomercial, here are 5 of the strangest product he ever pitched:
What do you get when you combine a cheese grater and a plate? The plate that grates, of course, here's The Grater Plater. (The name alone is golden: Grater. Plater. Grater plater. Gotta love it!)
While my wife likes OxiClean, The Gopher is actually my favorite item Billy Mays had ever pitched (in the words of another late-night infomercial, "I'm not only a blogger, I'm also an infomercial customer!"). It just works well - many years later, I still use mine to grab things too high to reach (saves me from getting the step stool out).
The Tool Band-It is another in Billy May's long line of making a product out of two existing ones. This time, it's magnet + armband, to give you a magnetic arm band. Genius!
I distrust a $20 drill, but the idea behind the AwesomeAuger is pretty solid (I have a similar device - the drill bit alone cost me $20. It works well for boring holes in hard ground for small plants). The only thing that works better is The Garden Weasel's Garden Claw.
The Hercules Hook is in a class by itself: here, Billy Mays used his infomercial prowess to sell you a bent pin for hanging stuff on your wall. I myself am a nail-and-hammer kind of guy, but the Hercules Hook does work well (if you don't damage the drywall while you're pushing it in) though I wouldn't use it to hang shelves or anything like that ...
Billy Mays, RIP.
I have always had a fascination with planes and fighter jets ever since my Dad used to take the family and I to the Dubai Airshow when I was really young where we got to watch some of the craziest and most talented pilots showing off their stuff. I remember once seeing the Blue Angels on display and they blew me away! Still to this day their stuff is top notch and gives me thrills to see them fly.
Lucky for us we get to see the view from one of their cockpits as they perform some hair raising maneuvers. I trust I won’t be the only one who gets goosebumps and a few butterflies in their stomachs as you get to see how amazingly close they get to each other and how in tune they are to each others positions. Mind you it’s almost 10 minutes of video!
* Also, if you are prone to motion sickness be careful watching this! Thank you SydneyClaire for reminding me to put a motion sickness warning!
** This is raw footage so the sound will be a little loud so please take care to drop the level just a bit after hitting play! Don’t want to hurt your ears! 
First it was David Carradine, then Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. Now, infomercial king Billy Mays is dead. Celebrities are dying left and right!
The 50-year-old known for his shouting OxiClean ads was pronounced dead at 7:45 a.m. The Hillborough County medical examiner will perform an autopsy, Tampa police Lt. Brian Dugan said.
Mays was on the US Airways flight from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Tampa on Saturday that had a hard landing at Tampa International Airport when the plane’s front tire blew out. There were no reported injuries on Flight 1241, US Airways told CNN.
According to a local Tampa TV station, Mays said: "All of a sudden as we hit you know it was just the hardest hit, all the things from the ceiling started dropping. It hit me on the head, but I got a hard head."
No words whether the a bump in the head, which caused the death of actress Natasha Richardson a couple of months ago, is also responsible for Billy May’s death. CNN has the news: Link
Previously on Neatorama: 5 Shocking Celebrity Deaths
All of you Neatoramanauts know that we love tpyos here at Neatorama, but even we know how to spell Susan Boyle, MySpace and Swine Flu – those are just three of the most commonly misspelled (or perhaps mistyped) searches in Yahoo!
Vera H-C Chan of Yahoo! Buzz’ The Buzz Log has the list:
Recent Orthographic Abuses of the English Language on Yahoo!, Past 30 Days
* Swan Flu (for Swine Flu)
* Susan Boil (for "Britain’s Got Talent" contender Susan Boyle)
* Brack Obama (for U.S. President Barack Obama)
* Sonia Sotomeyer (for Supreme Court justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor)
* Rachel Ray (for Food Network host Rachael Ray)
* Paperview boxing (for cable programming pay-per-view boxing)
* Amtrack (for train system Amtrak)
* Wallmart (for retailer Wal-Mart)
* Farrah Faucet (for actress Farrah Fawcett)
* Rod Steward (for singer Rod Stewart)
* Arlene Specter (for Senator Arlen Specter)
* “Dancing With the Starts” (for ABC reality competition Dancing With the Stars)
* Bea Author” (for the late comedian Bea Arthur)
* Brittany Spears (for singer Britney Spears)
* Chris Allen (for “American Idol” winner Kris Allen)
* Configure worm (for computer virus Conficker worm)
* Mysapce (for MySpace)
Previously on Neatorama: Swine Flu: Bacon’s Revenge
The economy is so bad that even prostitutes are desperate! Oklahoma City resident Lahuma Sue Smith, 36, pled no contest to prostitution charges that she traded sex for … a box of Frito-Lay chips:
According to the police report, undercover officers noticed Smith "trying to catch a date” by flashing her headlights at SE 33 and Robinson. Officers said they followed Smith’s car and found her with her blouse open and found a man in the passenger seat pulling his pants up.
The man told police he was having marital problems and knew he could pick up a prostitute there.
Smith told police the man told her he was looking for company but he didn’t have any money, so she agreed to be paid with a $30 case of Frito-Lay chips he had in the back of his car.
The World’s Ugliest dog contest has been decided … and the result ain’t pretty! Congrats to Pabst, a boxer-mix shelter dog who won the 21st annual World’s Ugliest Dog Contest at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in Petaluma, California.
From the official website:
As the crowd chanted “Pabst, Pabst,” the celebrity judges deliberated between the so-named boxer-mix shelter dog and Rascal, a former world champion Chinese Crested to determine who would be the 2009 World’s Ugliest Dog Champion tonight at the Sonoma-Marin Fair. First timer Miles Egstad from Citrus Heights, California was stunned at Pabst’s win. “ I don’t think he’s that ugly!” he said of his boxer mix whose under bite was his most compelling physical feature. His sweet personality made him an audience favorite.
The Chinese Crested breed has dominated the contest for more than seven years and in this year’s contest represented more than 50% of the 2009 entries in the pedigree class. But Pabst, who was given his name because he had a “ bitter beer face”, according to his owner quickly won the crowd and the judges soon followed. Egstad, 25, first saw the contest on television and his friends urged him to enter his dog.
Link (Photo: Grace Chon / Shine Pet Photos)
Video clip of the event:
You don’t want to be around when a high-rise apartment building falls over! The unfinished 13-story building in Shanghai toppled Saturday morning and killed a 28-year-old worker.
“It was just like an earthquake,” witness Zhang Supong told China Daily.
Construction of the building has been halted pending an investigation of the collapse, including reports that cracks had appeared Friday on a flood prevention bank near the apartment building, Xinhua reported.
Link to story. Link to pictures. -via J-Walk Blog
This chef’s knife is so awesome it’s criminal! Behold the Evidence Chef’s Knife, complete with fired-on, food-safe "blood" design and evidence tag! At just $14.95, it’s a steal (though we definitely don’t recommend that you use it to commit any crime): Link
Also check out these other fun kitchen stuff at the Neatorama Online Store:
|
|
 |
 |
Your purchase helps support the blog! Thank you!
Yummy, classy and fat free. These Jell-o jewels have real gold powder in them. They’re part of a Jell-o mold competition in Brooklyn. The cheeseburger and shishkabob ones are fantastic, along with the oyster pearls. It’s all worth a look.
Bandai toy company from Japan has finally realized that bottles of water just aren’t cute. As Japan is the cute capital of the world, this just wouldn’t do. To fix the problem, they developed these adorable floating squids that can be added to any bottle of water. Thank god for Japanese innovation. Of course, they’re only available in Japan, but at least they’re affordable at only $6 each.
An intrepid Nintendo fan hacked a wireless doorbell together with a NES controller. It looks really cool, I just wonder which button actually makes the door ring.
Here’s another case of science proving what we all knew in the back of our minds. Men pretty much agree on what makes a woman attractive, while women have their own ideas about what is attractive in men. A survey led by Wake Forest University psychologist Dustin Wood showed pictures of people to 4,000 adults of all ages, and had them rate the photographs for attractiveness on a scale of one to ten.
Men’s judgments of women’s attractiveness were based primarily around physical features and they rated highly those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.
As a group, the women rating men showed some preference for thin, muscular subjects, but disagreed on how attractive many men in the study were. Some women gave high attractiveness ratings to the men other women said were not attractive at all.
(image credit: Flickr user mod as hell)
A survey of women by hair color products maker Clairol has pinpointed the age of maximum happiness for women:
A spokesman for home hair colour brand Clairol Perfect 10, which carried out the study of 4,000 women, said: "Everything in life hits its peak at some point, and nearly reaching your thirties isn’t so bad now.
"The age of 28 has been pinpointed as the time in a woman’s life their hair looks the best, body shape is at its peak and confidence is at an all-time high.
"The security of your job, having a steady income, being in a relationship and having strong friendships all help create the perfect point in our lives when everything comes together. Reaching and surpassing your twenties no longer triggers the downward spiral of your looks and self-confidence.
[Skip the intro to mark 1:00 for the good stuff!]
Being paralyzed shouldn’t stop someone from engaging in a sport lovingly described by Mark Twain as "a good walk, ruined," thanks to the Paragolfer machine by Parabasetec.
Check out the paragolfer in action (yes, it’s a promo video, but it’s amazing nonetheless): Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]. If you want one, be prepared to shell out upwards of $26K.
Psst, want a £119,000 job? (That’s US$197,000 for us Yanks) The job of "Director of Organisation Development" in Yorkshire can be yours … if only you can decipher the want ad:
Huddersfield-based Kirklees Council’s job description mangled the language with phrases like "cross functional experience" and "people effective".
The council advertised the position as "a key leadership role that will help make a complex organisation increasingly confident, energetic and focused as it delivers the outcomes that the Kirklees communities require".
It said the successful candidate would be "a leader with presence, passion and panache" who would "play a key role in ensuring the effective integration of national, regional and local drivers".
Another impenetrable passage warns that the new director will face the challenge of making sure "that the diversity of Kirklees is understood by all in the organisation; is valued as a strength but a strength that challenges us to respond to its complex implications; and is reflected in the career structures within the organisation".
If you think having to "share" your bed with your pet cat is bad, that’s nothing compared to what Riana Van Nieuwenhuizen has to do: the sanctuary worker shares her South African home with really, really big cats: four cheetahs, five lions, and two tigers!
Riana bought her first cheetah, Fiela in 2006, after realising the big cats were in trouble and heading for extinction with only 1000 left in Africa.
She left her full time job working for the department of justice – a position she had held for 22 years – and found temporary employment on a game ranch where she could raise her beloved big cat. [...]
The cats in Riana’s own home are truly part of the family and are allowed to roam freely.
Imagine the size of their litterbox! Amy Oliver of the Daily Mail has more: Link (Photo: John Lienbenberg/Barcroft Media)
Tattoo artist Yann Travaille has made a name for himself in the over populated
field of tattoo design with his astonishingly refreshing designs normally done with crayons, not tattoo ink.
Check out more of his crayon-like tattoos on his website YOUR MEAT IS MINE (Some images NSFW):
Link – via cakeheadlovesevil
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by cakehead loves evil.
The concept behind the cute Monkey Kick Off Flash game from Miniclip is maddeningly simple: just press a key or click your mouse button to get the monkey to kick the ball. Sounds simple, right? Well, it is … except when you’re trying to beat someone else’s score.
See if you can beat my top score (4194, which is woefully low as compared to the top players of Monkey Kick Off): Link
These are not only unique and cute, but they’d make a great gift for Halloween parties…of course, if you’re like me, it may take until Halloween to actually figure out how finish a few of them.
Junkyard workers in Japan noticed this seedling sprouting up under a car over 25 years ago. They let it grow and now it’s lifted the whole car up in the air. Now they’ve created a shrine around it. Check out the video here.
Link via Boing Boing
The Monterey Bay Aquarium has trained this cute little guy to play piano. Of course, he’s not the next Beethoven, but it’s still too cute to look away.
Link Via Cute Overload
canopy rafts are extraordinary things. they’re basically enormous nets attached to an inflatable frame and are dropped onto trees from airships, resulting in a viewing platform like no other which can also be used as a base from which to hang using climbing gear. the raft above is the solvin bretzel, a new design by gilles ebersolt which due to its pretzel-inspired shape is both safer to use and more effective than older versions. researchers can spend days at a time on the raft (hence the tent) and due to its extremely light weight the trees are left unharmed.
deputy dog shows us several other ways scientists can get to the tops of forests to study the ecosystems that sustain the majority of our planet’s species. Link
(image credit: Pyot Laurent/Ocean Vert)
Peter Cook and Becky Northey started making what they call Pooktre, the shaped plum trees into art and furniture. They started by making trees into a coffee table and a mirror frame. The chair above is one of the greatest. They harvest the trees in the fall and make new art from the stumps, which make new growth.
Comments Off
Environmental Graffiti has a fun post right about fighting kangaroos. It has some interesting information, but more than anything else, it’s all about the great photos. If you ever want to see a professional fighter go down, just put them up against an amateur kangaroo. It may seem cruel, but in olden times, animals didn’t really have rights.
Love or hate Michael Jackson, the entire world was stunned by his death yesterday. Although there have been plenty of celebrity deaths, there aren’t that many that have sent shockwaves of this magnitude across the globe. The deaths of Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix were all tragic, but with their heavy drug use and hard-living lifestyles, they maybe weren’t so shocking. And we’ve lost a lot of wonderful people to cancer, but since we have generally been aware that those people had potentially terminal illnesses, they weren’t so surprising either. The five deaths below were totally unexpected (to most, anyway) and surprised the world much like Michael Jackson’s death has.
Grace Kelly’s death in 1982 was a big surprise. The Princess of Monaco, who was only 52 and seemingly in perfect health, suffered a stroke while driving with her daughter Princess Stephanie. The timing couldn’t have been worse – it was just as she was driving on the edge of a mountainside, and the stroke left her incapacitated and unable to control the car. It careened off the edge of the mountain and rolled down, flipping over multiple times. Stephanie suffered a cervical fracture and some bruising, but Princess Grace didn’t recover from her injuries. The world was stunned because the reports from Monaco originally said that she had broken her collarbone, a leg and some ribs, but was in stable condition.
Photo from CoverBrowser.com.
We know now that Elvis was on more drugs than Anna Nicole Smith, but at the time, it wasn’t widely known that he had a veritable pharmacy in his system. In fact, he had gone to Richard Nixon to complain about the prevalence of drugs in the entertainment industry. Despite a series of kind of crappy concerts – he was out of shape and self-conscious about his appearance, and it showed – he was getting ready to embark on a new tour on August 17, 1977. He didn’t make it. The day before, his fiancee Ginger Alden found him dead on the floor of his bathroom at Graceland.
At first the public was told his death was due to cardiac arrhythmia, which wouldn’t have been too unbelievable giving the amount of weight he had gained; he had also been having some obvious breathing troubles onstage. But it didn’t take long before the truth emerged: his very own Dr. Feelgood, Dr. Nick, had been prescribing massive amounts of pills for a very long time. His autopsy revealed that he had 14 drugs in his system when he died; 10 were in large quantities. They included Morphine, Demerol, the antihistamine Chloropheniramine, Valium, Placidyl, Codeine, Ethinamate, Quaaludes and an unidentified barbituate. It’s rumored that he also had Diazepam, Amytal, Nembutal, Carbrital, Sinutab, Elavil, Avental, and Valmid in his system. It’s a wonder that he didn’t die sooner, really.
Photo from FrancesEllenSpeaks.
When Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon by shooting him four times at close range, the entire world immediately went into mourning. On December 8, 1980, John and Yoko were coming back to their apartment at the Dakota in New York after an evening recording session. Waiting in the shadows of the building’s archway was Chapman, an obsessed fan who had approached Lennon earlier in the day for an autograph and a photo. Of the five hollow-point bullets Chapman fired, four of them hit Lennon and inflicted severe injuries. At least one of them punctured his aorta.
Lennon managed to get six stairs up to the doorman before he collapsed; the doorman took the gun from Chapman’s hand and covered Lennon with his jacket. Police loaded Lennon in the backseat of the police car and drove him to the hospital immediately and said that acknowledged that he knew who he was and fell unconscious shortly after. He was pronounced dead upon arrival at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center where the cause was determined to be hypovolemic shock caused by more then 80 percent blood loss.
Crowds gathered in Central Park outside of the Dakota singing and chanting and apparently keeping Yoko Ono awake. She asked them to give her a little peace, but please come back the following Sunday to help her observe 10 minutes of silence for her slain husband. Not only did they come back, the whole world decided to get in on the tribute. More than 100,000 people gathered in Central Park on Sunday, December 14, and 30,000 people in Liverpool followed suit.
Photo from the BBC.
Princess Diana is the first shocking death I really remember. On August 31, 1997, the Princess and her boyfriend Dodi Al Fayed were being driven in Paris just after midnight. Their driver was trying to evade paparazzi and was driving at speeds much higher than the recommended 30 mph – some reports estimate that he was going at least 65 and others say 90. He lost control of the car in the tunnel and plunged into a support pillar. Al Fayed died at the scene, as did the driver. The other passenger survived.
Diana died of her internal injuries a few hours later at the hospital – the crash had jolted her body so severely that her heart reportedly was displaced to the right side of her chest. Her death was announced at 5:30 a.m. People worldwide were horrified and saddened and more than three million people showed up to mourn her during her Westminster Abbey funeral on September 6. So many flowers and gifts were left outside of Kensington Palace that the public was asked to refrain from bringing any more items because they were becoming safety hazards.
Photo from BiographyAndBiographies.
While not exactly in the same vein as Princess Diana or Elvis, Dale Earnhardt’s death certainly stunned the sports world. He was just completing the last lap of the Daytona 500 on February 18, 2001, when the left rear corner of his car hit driver Sterling Marlin’s front bumper. This made Earnhardt veer sharply left, then sharply right toward the concrete retaining wall. Just as his car was hitting the wall, Ken Schrader’s car ran into the #3 black Goodwrench car.
To most people, this didn’t seem like such a huge deal – for NASCAR, this was a relatively common accident and they had seen Dale come out unscathed after much worse crashes. The two cars slid down toward the infield grass and Schrader got out of his car, appearing to be completely fine. He walked to the #3 car and looked inside to check on Dale, then immediately signaled for help.
It turned out that Earnhardt died instantly, but wasn’t officially pronounced dead until he was examined at Halifax Medical Center. His injuries included a fatal skull fracture, eight broken ribs, a broken ankle, a fractured breast bone, and collarbone and hip injuries that indicated his seat belts did not fail. Sterling Marlin started receiving hate mail and death threats, Earnhardt’s #3 car was retired, and fans paid tribute to Earnhardt by holding up three fingers for the third lap of every Winston Cup race for the next year (I’m sure some people still do it). Even television announcers stopped commentating for the third lap.
Photo from USA Today.
What celebrity deaths totally floored you? Share your reactions in the comments.
Koichi Wakata, a Japanese Astronaut who is working aboard the International Space Station was given the task to perform a few silly experiments in Zero-G requested by the Earth People of Japan. They consist of the mundane such as performing push-ups, squirting water from a tube, backflips and so forth but then some of them are bizarre like the “flying magic carpet” request! Oh, how I wish I were in space like Koichi and the other fine men and women of the ISS crew! I would see to it if I could perform the moonwalk in Zero-G!
The 16 space experiments in a nifty list – Link (also from Pink Tentacle)
Via – Pink Tentacle
| FEATURED ITEMS FROM THE NEATOSHOP | |
 |
Mustache Bottle Opener |
 |
My Cryptozoological Family - Family Car Stickers |
 |
Zombie Hand Bottle Opener |
View more: New Items &
Best Sellers |
|
