The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Useful Information

A Holiday Gift Guide- Some Unusual Gifts

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Here at The Shack we are well aware that Chanukah is less than a month away and as a result we have done absolutely no shopping for those eight crazy nights.

After all, what fun would it be to do all of our shopping in advance. It would remove the sheer joy of fighting crowds for parking and being assaulted mentally, emotionally and verbally during those fabulous trips through the mall.

Besides we like sharing this experience with our Gentile friends who have to help out that joyful fat man with his adventures in chimney cleaning and present deliveries. So we are pleased to present to you the first post on potential gifts for the holidays with a post about unusual yet useful gifts for the holidays.

Today’s featured gift idea is one that I mused about inventing on Twitter.

I thought that it was a great idea. So did @JessicaGottlieb and @AintYoMamasBlog.  In fact following the Tweets we exchanged I contemplated trying to find a way to invent this product. But as it turns out someone already has and since old Jack is a good sport I am happy to give them a free plug here.

The Calmar Consulting Corporation offers AquaNotes which offers you the chance to write in the shower or the tub. And because Jack is a romantic old fool we’ll even share this next section with you:

The development of AquaNotes® made this Shower Thinker’s life more complete. But, in truth, he had only begun to understand the concept of “complete”.  After reuniting with a long-lost love, he married and a new necessity arose…the need to have a special water-proof notepad on which to leave love notes in the shower for his new, wonderful bride. That’s when Aqua LoveNotes® was created.

Those love notes would be very useful. It is a great way to leave your special someone a note reminding them that you are tired of finding their hair everywhere or that there are a number of special things that they can do to send you off to work with a smile in the morning.

Or even a simple, “I appreciate the way that you fold my napkin in my lunchbox. Thank you sweetheart.” Of course that assumes that you still carry a lunchbox. Some of us never outgrow those cool units from the ’70s.

Later on we’ll be glad to offer some standard gift selections for you. In the interim here is a list of some unique items that just might be of interest to someone you know.

It is A Bathroom Revolution
How to Make Hard Boiled Eggs
What Not to Do-Snakebites
The Cubicle Celebrates 40 Years
How Velcro Was Invented
My New Desk- I Have To Get One
London Restaurant Tries To Solve Gas Crisis
Who Wants To Buy An Artificial Foreskin
Untapped Sources of Energy
The Mangroomer
Business Cards That Will Get You Business
Medical Technology- The future is now
Inventions You have Got To Have (Includes the ladies urinal, toilet forehead support system and much more.)
The Nose Pouch
How Much Would it Cost To Build The Death Star
Lose Weight With The Greatest Exercise Ever
The Best Clothing You’ll Ever Own
When Disaster Strikes- Blow Up Your House
A free guide to the toilets of the world

Who Invented Balloons

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Here at The Shack we are constantly in search of useful information and answers to the questions you wish that you could ask. If we do our job properly you’ll dominate Trivial Pursuit and be a force to reckon with on Jeopardy. Can’t promise that you’ll be able to use this information to be Macgyver or Roy Hinckley, but who knows.

Today we decided to spend some time talking about balloons. No, not the hot air kind, but party balloons. So we searched high and low on the web and discovered that a number of sources say that Michael Faraday is responsible for the invention of the balloon. Yes, the same Faraday who discovered electromagnetic induction is the man to thank. (Editor’s Note: If you are doing a school report double check this information, the Shack isn’t really designed to be in your bibliography.)

However, there are other sources that say that there are challengers to Faraday. If you head over to Beermasters you’ll see that the Aztecs made good use of their cats:

“The first use of balloons at a festive event dates to the Aztecs, whose empire in central Mexico was from the 14th through 16th centuries. Their balloons were not the fun-colored latex or Mylar one sees today, however. Their balloons were made of cat guts. Feline intestines were sewn together, filled with air and then twisted into funky shapes–as if an inflated mass made from cat guts wasn’t funky enough.

Function

Aztecs placed their balloons at the altar during festivals and ceremonies as an offering for the gods. They may have wanted good luck, a victory in battle or any number of other wishes that the sacrificial balloons would help bring. They may have even asked for more guts to make more balloons. If a large batch of cats were diseased and dying, the Aztecs sacrificed humans and used their intestines as balloons to ask for more cat intestines.”

Balloon Headquarters has similar information as well as information on the art of Balloon Modeling, in fact if you go there you can find out about The National Association of Balloon Artists (NABA) and the International Balloon Association (IBA). In fact you can even read about T&JAM 1999 – The convention dedicated to balloon twisters.

Don’t forget to take a look at the photos.

Who says that we are full of hot air.

It is A Bathroom Revolution

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Friends you know that one of my goals here at the Shack is to provide you with information and resources that you can use to improve your life. Our team of experts is always hard at work sniffing out the best deals and products from around the globe.

Today I am pleased to inform you that we have discovered a device that will revolutionize your bathroom experience. Chances you have never thought about a good toilet accessory, but this is it.

In the video below you’ll learn about the first improvement to toilet paper as know it since the 1880s. For a mere pittance you can pick up the Comfort Wipe.


For those who have missed out on past reviews of useful products here is a list of links that you might find to be useful.

How to Make Hard Boiled Eggs
What Not to Do-Snakebites
The Cubicle Celebrates 40 Years
How Velcro Was Invented
My New Desk- I Have To Get One
London Restaurant Tries To Solve Gas Crisis
Who Wants To Buy An Artificial Foreskin
Untapped Sources of Energy
The Mangroomer
Business Cards That Will Get You Business
Medical Technology- The future is now
Inventions You have Got T0 Have (Includes the ladies urinal, toilet forehead support system and much more.)
The Nose Pouch How Much Would it Cost To Build The Death Star
Lose Weight With The Greatest Exercise Ever
The Best Clothing You’ll Ever Own
When Disaster Strikes- Blow Up Your House
A free guide to the toilets of the world

How to Block Facebook Photos of Yourself

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This really is useful information.

Facebook can’t stop people from posting your picture. But there’s a Facebook setting that prevents other users from tagging photos with your name. Choose that setting, and other users won’t be able to tag you or search for photos of you. Plus you get plausible deniability: Nope, that’s not me doing a keg stand at the company picnic.

As with many Facebook features, the no-tag setting is easy to use, hard to find.
If one of your so-called friends on Facebook has already tagged you in a photo, look beneath it for the label “In this photo.” Your own name will have an extra link next to it, “remove tag.”

Click it. The tag with your name goes away. Even better, no one else will be able to tag you in that shot again.

How to disable everyone on Facebook from being able to tag you in the first place? I had to email Facebook to tell me where the button is. Here’s the step-by-step:

Read the whole thing, you’ll thank me.

How to maximize frequent flier miles

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CNN has some useful advice for how to maximize frequent flier miles.

The key to redeeming miles lies in how the airlines value them. Since miles rewards programs were introduced, the industry rule of thumb has always been that a mile was worth about two cents. The underlying formula: 25,000 miles were required for one round-trip domestic coach ticket, which was estimated to have an average price of $500. (In other words, $500÷25,000=$0.02.)

But discount airlines and Internet fares have forced ticket prices down: the average domestic round-trip fare was $362 in the third quarter of 2008, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. One mile has depreciated to around 1.5 cents today.

To decide how much an award ticket is worth, make some calculations. If you find a particularly good airfare deal, snap it up in cash and reserve your miles for times when fewer deals are available. Taking award seats makes the most sense when the cash value of a ticket is roughly in line with its cost in miles (say, when you find a last-minute flight to a popular European city that costs $600, and you can put down 60,000 miles — or 1 cent per mile — to buy it).