Who Needs Diets When We Now Have Trick Photography?

I am contantly amazed at the ability of the human race to continue to invent new and innovative items each and every day.

Sure, some of them are way "out there" and serve no real purpose other than winning a Rube Goldberg contest - ie: a can opener with 128 moving parts including Legos, ball bearings, and a Barbie doll head.

And take last week's entrant into the Look What We Created Just Because We Can category: Play-Doh Perfume.

Yes, in honor of its 50th birthday, the makers of everyone's favorite childhood plaything, and every parent's worst carpet nightmare, have come out with a special, limited edition bottle capturing that heady, clay-like, artficially fragranced blob in the cardboard container, and to quote their marketing gurus, it is "Scent-Sational!"

According to the media release: "For the first time that fresh-out-of the can, eau-de-PLAY-DOH scent is available for fun, highly-creative people who seek a whimsical scent reminiscent of their childhood."

Um - yeah.

Methinks some marketing gurus spent a tad too much time sniffing that "whimsical scent" during their childhoods.

Or maybe they were all the weird kid in Kindergarten that ate his Play Doh with a Elmer's Glue gravy chaser while sticking his scissors up his nose and threatening to cut the area separating his nostrils...

Not that I knew anyone like that...

Anyway, it never ceases to amaze me what human beings can create - finding market niches, filling voids, creating whole market segments. But nothing takes the proverbial cake as much as this little invention from the geniuses at Hewlett Packard: the HP Photosmart R927 Digital Camera!

What's the big, you ask? It looks like a regular digital camera, right?

Right!

But the magic hidden beneath its silvery exterior is tailor made for a country like the United States in which we cover everything in real gravy and eat all-you-can, just because you can. A country which regularly releases studies detailing its fattest cities and states. A country in which we Supersize everything and then sue other people for making our seams split!

This wonder device says Hell, No! to fad diets. This camera opens its glass eye and screams Carbs Are Your Friend!  This wonder gadget proudly proclaims that Personal Responsibility Is A Joke!  And THIS CAMERA HAS A HUGE MARKET!!!!

All because this camera has a slimming device.

Yes, you read that right. This camera, with the push of a button, can digitally alter your heft, making you a tad more aesthetically pleasing (and insure you actually fit in the frame.)

See? Amazing, isn't it?

No. No, it's not.

Is this really what we have come to? Are we really that desperate and deluded that we would buy a camera and believe we look like the picture it produces? Are sit-ups and leg lifts truly that difficult? Is self control that hard to come by these days?

Don't answer. Those were all rhetorical questions. All with the answer of "YES".

Yes, we have really sunk this low. Yes, we are a nation of overweight, lazy people who obviously don't own mirrors. And yes, self control is harder to come by than the final clue in the Da Vinci Code.

So as people rush out to buy this camera, determined to snap svelte new pictures of their porcine old selves, I would caution them to remember this: A picture may indeed be worth a thousand words, especially when you're uploading your sleek "new" hotness to your MySpace page or eHarmony profile, but those thousand words will all be reduced to one when someone you hook up with online actually meets you in person...

F*CK.

Ah heck, maybe it won't be that bad. Just slap on some PlayDoh perfume and offer them a bottle of Elmer's and some scissors.  I bet they'll follow you anywhere.

My God, we're a stupid people.

Comments

[Lori in Texas]

So if I buy this camera and take a photo of my stick-thin 18 year old daughter, are you saying that she won't show up in the photo at all?

[serinity]

Is that a pic of Hurley from Lost? lol, who the hell would WANT to smell like play dough? It doesn't smell like Roses and Musk, you know.