watching her life pass her by...

*squee*

less than 24 hours from now, i'm going to be seeing madina lake at the creepy crawl!

i would say that's full of win, but that's the understatement of the decade. when i saw them over the summer, it was just gripping. their song "adalia" has been my law school theme. it's creepy because even though the people who wrote it have only met me for the briefest times [when they have been in other Chicago bands i've enjoyed], they managed to write a song that painted an immaculate picture of my recent life.

*more squee*

tv troubles

i woke up this morning and my TV set had frozen.

it was weird. i keep my television on overnight. when i woke up the sound was just fine...the sound was the show that's actually on, the show about the football games today. i was following it for a while when i stayed in bed with my eyes shut. but, when i actually put in my contacts and looked at the television, an image was frozen on the screen. it was from SportsCenter, and the time said 5:30 am. i assumed that it was the station's problem...but as it stayed on for several minutes, i thought maybe it was my TV's problem.

turns out, it was. that image had probably been frozen on my television for five hours.

luckily, when i turned my television off and on again, there didn't seem to be a problem. the image is right, the images correspond with the show i'm watching, and nothing is to be burned permanently onto the screen of my television.

still, i'm a little worried that my TV did that. it's still pretty much new--i've only had it since august.

...in which Judge Easterbrook benchslaps a modern-day snake oil salesman

i found this story on dreadnaught, and had to mention it here because the court opinion is hilarious.

i'm sure anyone who watched bad daytime or late-night television a few years ago remembers seeing ads for Q-Ray bracelets. the ads had all these happy people wearing this dorky little "ionized" bracelet, claiming how great the bracelets had made their lives. still...they never quite explained how to the satisfaction of anyone who possessed basic capacities of logic.

they claimed that the bracelets were ionized. they weren't. they claimed that the bracelets relieved pain. they didn't. they claimed that the therapeutic effects of the bracelet were tailored to the individual wearer, and faded after a year or two. [after which time, you of course had to buy a new Q-Ray bracelet...]

and, now? the most they claim on their website is that the bracelet has a "design patent." oh boy! special! a patent? really? that's enough to make me want to drop two hundred bucks on one of those ugly things!

*rolls eyes*

i've got a sneaking suspicion that the shrinking of the website's claims had something to do with legal action by the FTC. back in September of 2006, a magistrate judge in the Northern District of Illinois handed down an opinion holding that the claims of the bracelet's power were fraudulent. (this event i remember, as it was the subject of my first Fark.com greenlight, an event that produced much squee in the world of the persecuted crack smoker.)

Q-Ray appealed...and in what may only be described as a brilliant benchslap, Judge Easterbrook of the Seventh Circuit affirmed the magistrate judge in the snarkiest way possible. the entire [rather short] opinion is worth reading, but here are some of the highlights:

• "WIRED magazine recently put the Q-Ray Ionized Bracelet on its list of the top ten Snake-Oil Gadgets. The Federal Trade Commission has an even less honourable title for the bracelet's promotional campaign: fraud."
• "The Magistrate judge did not commit a clear error, or abuse his discretion, in concluding that the defendants set out to bilk unsophisticated persons who found themselves in pain from arthritis and other chronic conditions."
• "For the Q-Ray Ionized Bracelet, by contrast, all statements about how the product works—Q-Rays, ionization, enhancing the flow of bio-energy, and the like—are blather. Defendants might as well have said: 'Beneficent creatures from the 17th Dimension use this bracelet as a beacon to locate people who need pain relief, and whisk them off to their homeworld every night to provide help in ways unknown to our science.'"
• "They made statements about Q-Rays, ionization, and energy that they knew to be poppycock."
• "Physicians know how to treat pain. Why pay $200 for a Q-Ray Ionized Bracelet when you can get relief from an aspirin tablet that costs 1¢?"

the maker of the bracelets is required to give $16 million worth of his profits, plus interest, back to customers who bought the bracelets. i love it when a charlatan gets his comeuppance...because as silly as it was for so many consumers to fall for the scam, it's better that the duped members of the public have their money back than for the scammer to keep his ill-gotten gains.