Five Hundred Channels, but Nothing’s On

I was scrolling through the program guide on our television recently, looking for something that I’d actually be interested in wasting a few minutes on until it was time for the baseball game, when I noticed an infomercial channel with an unusual program offering listed on it. There, on the “Mall” channel, just between the Night Court re-runs and the Secrets to a Better Golf Game was the interrogatory tittle: “Are You Pooping Enough?” Now, I’ve been watching cable television for a long time, and at odd times of the night on obscure channels I’ve seen the so-called “Sponsored Programming” selling everything from the legendary Bamboo Steamer to what is essentially hair-colored spray-on Christmas tree flocking to cover your bald spot. But this was the first time I’ve ever seen a group of otherwise functioning adults asking the world about a possible deficiency in their bowel movements…

Intrigued by this strange offering, I wandered out onto the Internet and ran a couple of searches looking for other oddball infomercial products. Within moments, however, I realized that the problem wasn’t going to be finding enough information here to write a 600-word blog post; the problem was going to be which of the completely insane offerings available to include. Because lurking out there among the perfectly normal “as-seen-on-TV” products were a few items so bizarre that even after finding their company’s home page I’m still not sure if these are real offerings or some elaborate online hoax…

Consider, for example, the Potty Putter ™ - not a golf club that you can use as a chamber pot (that’s the UroClub, which is from a different infomercial altogether), but rather a practice putting green and putter designed to use while sitting on the toilet. The question of why you couldn’t make such a thing yourself out of a dollar’s worth of outdoor carpeting pales before the question of why on Earth you would want one in the first place. Or if that’s not strange enough, how about the Better Marriage Blanket – basically a cotton blanket on one side and an activated-charcoal filter on the other side, which the inventor claims will eliminate the effects of flatulence in the bedroom…

Now, we should probably acknowledge right at the top that not all late-night infomercial products are sleazy or fraudulent. The oft-parodied “Ginsu” knives work exactly as advertised, and the ones we can still find around the house are as functional as ever after three decades or so. I also have it on good authority that the bamboo steamers actually worked like a charm, and the handy device that can scramble an egg while it’s still inside its shell operates perfectly, assuming that you can think of a use for one in the first place. And while the various dial-a-psychic services may be complete nonsense, there’s a limit to both their humor potential and how much harm they can actually do to the unwary. Gastrointestinal Quackery, on the other hand, has its own page on the Quackwatch website…

“Why does he tell us this?” I hear some of you asking. After all, infomercials and “sponsored programs” were a fact of life long before the dawn of the Internet age, and it is far easier to debunk the value of any of these products today than it has ever been before. The thing is, people are just as likely to use Internet research to confirm a mistaken belief as they are to debunk one; the need to do your homework and remain skeptical of any information source is getting larger, not smaller, as we plummet further and further into the new century. And with well over 500 cable channels already, and more coming all the time, not to mention an almost unlimited volume of snake oil ™ vendors on line, I don’t see the situation getting better any time soon…