Worst Ideas Ever Read online

  Both alcohol and energy drinks have their uses, but the real problems started occurring when people began combining the two products. This first happened at bars and in private homes where people began quaffing the popular combination of Red Bull and vodka. This led to companies beginning to market colorful cans of energy/alcoholic drinks which looked an awful lot like their non-alcoholic counterparts (which made it that much easier for the underage to buy these beverages which, of course, never occurred to any of the marketing people behind the products).

  And, while both alcohol and energy drinks can cause problems on their own, when joined together, the results can be truly horrible. Alcohol makes you sleepy and energy drinks keep you up. Combine the two and you get a drunk guy who has no idea he’s drunk. The caffeine and sugar in the energy drink masks the drowsying effect of the alcohol and though you’re getting drunker, you feel more awake then ever, making it possible to drink even more alcoholic energy drinks. As the drinker downs more and more of these adult beverages, he feels less drunk, which can lead to not doing the things drunks normally do like pass out or stop drinking. Instead, since he doesn’t feel drunk, the drinker thinks he’s okay to drive or that it’s a great idea to call up his ex-wife and tell her how he really feels about her.

  With alcoholic energy drinks you can stay up drinking all night long as the caffeine will keep you going while the booze tries to slow you down. This works out great if you’re an alcoholic musician or a stand-up comedian working the late show. For regular people, drinking endlessly and never feeling you’re all that drunk tends to sometimes lead to hilarious stories (and when I woke up, I had no idea what her name was) and, more often than not, really bad ones (no officer, I don’t remember strangling that hooker).

  As alcoholic energy drinks moved from the bar to the liquor store, even more problems arose as most of these upper/downer concoctions were packaged in cans. Generally, they looked like double-sized beers, leading the teenagers and college kids who gravitated towards these products to assume that the cans would be roughly the equivalent of drinking a beer. If the young boozehound could drink a 12-pack of beer on a normal friday night, he would, of course, assume he could down at least half a dozen of these alcoholic energy drinks.

  Unfortunately, most alcoholic energy drinks packaged to look like double-sized beers actually contain the alcohol content of four to five beers. That means that the kid who thinks he’s having four beers might actually be having ten. This has, of course, led to deaths (from alcohol poisoning) and murders (in Connecticut one guy stabbed his girlfriend to death after drinking just two of these).

  4

  Edible Underwear: Finally, Romance Gets Sticky?

  While one can see the romantic logic for edible undergarments, the actual execution pointed out some obvious flaws. In theory, one would wear these as a romantic gift for a significant other who would devour them in a fit of passion.

  The problems arose when one considered what it actually took to make edible underwear (which really should have been called edible panties because if a male version existed, it was not wellmarketed). The underwear was basically made of a thin version of the material that goes into a Fruit Roll-Up. This gelatinous sugary goo was shaped into underwear shapes in a variety of sizes and styles and, of course, flavors.

  Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever eaten a Fruit Roll-Up knows, that particular material does not respond well to handling or warmth. Sticky in the first place, a Fruit Roll-Up becomes quite horrible to handle when combined with any sort of warmth or moisture. That’s fine when it happens in a small, rolled-up fruit snack you handle with your hands. It becomes more of a problem when the “snack” is covering your nether regions.

  Unless you sat entirely still in a chilled room, the idea of putting on edible underwear as a surprise to your partner results in utter disaster as the candy quickly melts and sticks you to the unlucky lady’s body. And, of course, when this product had its heyday in the mid 1970s through the 1980s, women were, for the most part, hairier in their bikini zone (as the TV commercials for hair removal products refer to that area), resulting in not only a sticky mess, but a painful sticky mess as removing the underwear involved ripping out the hair to which it would become stuck.

  Even if the edible panties did not melt before a lady’s partner got the chance to devour them, the product was still a failure as eating a pair of sticky underwear off your partner’s nether regions was a better-sounding proposition than a reality. After a few bites, the saliva from the eater’s mouth eventually produced the same sticky effect, usually curtailing any romantic activity and instead leading to a frantic effort to remove the supposedly romantic edible underthings without hurting the person wearing them or soiling the bed sheets with melted candy underwear.

  Edible underwear exists to this day and can be purchased in novelty shops and sex stores, but the idea has dramatically faded in popularity moving the product more from “romantic idea” to “novelty gift” where people give them but nobody actually uses them.

  5

  Deep-Frying a Turkey: Bring a Bomb to Your House or Backyard

  Nearly anything can be deep-fried. You can put any manner of meat, fish, vegetable, and even candy bars into a deep fryer. At fairs and festivals around the country, people deep-fry Twinkies, pizza, and even Coke syrup. There are entire restaurants devoted to frying odd things, which people are more than willing to do. Some shops even let you bring in your own stuff to fry, so if you have allergies and want a deep-fried Claritin, well, they might do that for you.

  Frying at home, however, can be a dangerous proposition. Nearly everyone who has ever attempted to cook with oil—even if it’s just a small amount on a stovetop—has, at some point, burned themselves in the splatter. Deep fryers can be dangerous too, and anyone who has worked at a fast food place—even with their regimented safety measures—usually ends up with burns on his arms, fingers, and hands. Dipping uncooked food in burning oil is dangerous in a controlled situation (like a restaurant), but it can be downright deadly when people attempt to do it in their backyard or even inside their house.

  The perils of deep-frying a turkey begin with the fact that most things that go into a deep fryer or a Fryolator are relatively small. French fries, pieces of chicken (not whole chickens), and anything in nugget form work well in a deep fryer. Nobody tries to make a friend roast beef or a fried leg of lamb (or if they did, they did not survive the process). There’s a reason for that as deep fryers cook from the outside in, and they cook very quickly. Cook something big in a deep fryer and you run the risk of charring the outside while the inside remains raw.

  So the initial danger of cooking a turkey this way is that you will ruin the outer layers of meat while the inner ones remain underdone. This could lead to all sorts of types of food poisoning, which while probably very authentic on Thanksgiving, does not make for a pleasant family get-together.

  The second major danger of cooking a large bird in a deep fryer is that it will blow up, likely maiming the chef, anyone standing near the chef, and perhaps, burning the house down.

  This happens because you cannot deep-fry a turkey in a normal home deep fryer. To do that, you would have to cut the turkey up into smaller pieces, and nobody comes to Thanksgiving hoping for a chunk of turkey. Instead, turkeys must be deep fried in a dedicated turkey deep fryer. These are essentially electric barrels, which heat the oil to an unholy temperature, into which the cook must somehow figure out how to drop a turkey without splashing molten-lava-temperature oil on himself.

  In addition to the dangers of food poisoning and oil splashing, there is the imminent danger that the entire apparatus might catch fire and explode. This can happen in a number of fun and exciting ways. Turkey deep fryers are usually shaped like a canister trash can. That makes them relatively easy to tip over, which spills hot oil over your house, yard, or deck, likely causing a fire. Further compounding this problem is that turkey deep fryers are usually propane-powered. A fire near a
source of propane results in a fairly powerful bomb that can take out a pretty big section of a house.

  Underwriters Laboratory (UL) is an organization that essentially certifies which products are safe and which ones aren’t. UL does not certify any turkey deep fryer because they do not deem that any of the many on the market are actually safe to use.

  “There are no UL listed turkey fryers because the turkey fryers on the market do not have the level of safety features we deem necessary,” said John Drengenberg, a spokesman for UL to the New York Times on Nov. 25, 2008. “Most turkey fryers are essentially a large pot over sitting on a frame over an open propane flame,” he explained. “Most don’t have thermostat controls, and there are situations when the hot oil can spill over into the fire. Then you’ve got something like a vertical flame thrower in your hands.”

  Even more turkey fryers explode when they are either overfilled with oil or when a partially frozen turkey gets placed in the oil. The water from the ice in the partially frozen turkey can literally result in an effect that basically turns your fryer into a flamethrower.

  6

  Microwave Food: Maybe a Shake Does Not Need to Be Microwaved?

  Microwaves make sense for heating up water for tea, reheating certain leftovers, and warming up dinner if it has been out of the oven or off the stove for too long. Even certain prepackaged microwave meals like Lean Cuisines are not entirely awful, but when the microwave first became popular, people were eager to cook anything and everything in the device. You could buy pans to make roasts in your microwaves (which resulted in roasts with the consistency of leather boots) and special devices to cook everything from potatoes to bacon.

  In the 1980s, as microwaves became popular and a fixture in nearly every home (the ones with dial-based timers and doors that might open without turning off the microwaves), companies began releasing pretty much any food you can think of in microwaveable form. Some of the more ridiculous ones included the microwave shake—which was essentially a frozen-solid block of shakelike chemicals that you melted in your microwave. The resulting sludge neither looked like nor tasted like an actual shake. It was more like hot ice cream soup with frozen chunks floating in it. No setting or amount of time in the microwave produced the correct texture.

  Another popular microwave product that never should have been made was the microwave cake. This came in both mix form and premade in microwaveable pans. In either case, the resulting product that emerged from the microwave looked like cake. But while it looked like a cake, it tasted more like a Nerf football. Cake should, theoretically, be moist and maybe a bit crumbly. Microwave cake had the consistency of the old Styrofoam containers McDonald’s used to sell everything in.

  Perhaps the worst microwave product ever, though, was the microwave hamburger. Though there were various companies that released microwave burgers, all of them had the same basic premise. It was an entire burger/bun combo (sometimes with condiments) that got heated up in a microwaveable sleeve. These sleeves (which were also included with the microwave Belgian waffles) had metal on the inside, which seemed like a bad idea as everyone knows that putting metal in a microwave results in a veritable lightning storm inside your microwave. Somehow, the cardboard sleeve acted as a shield for the metal, which magically then cooked your burger. Of course, it cooked your burger, so half of it was ice cold and the other half was molten lava hot. That didn’t really matter though because the consistency of the burger was so wrong that it was difficult to tell where the bun ended and the burger began.

  One of the key problems with microwave burgers, shakes, cakes, and other items was that it was not significantly quicker or easier to make them in the microwave. The reason someone would, say, boil water for tea in the microwave and not put a kettle on the stove is that the microwave does in just over a minute what takes six to eight minutes on the stove. With products like burgers, cakes, and shakes, that was not really true because any time saved was spent putting your food back into the microwave, trying to get a consistent temperature.

  7

  Death on a Plate: The Krispy Kreme Burger

  Americans are always looking for new ways to kill ourselves. From extreme sports to competitive eating, we are eager to test the edges of human endurance even when no particular reason to do so exists. This has led to us attempting to fry nearly everything possible (fried pizza seems a bit excessive) and to creative cooks finding ways to combine foods that don’t actually go together. Perhaps the worse of these would be the Krispy Kreme burger.

  For the uninitiated, Kripsy Kremes are extremely addictive donuts that are made on a conveyor belt and served fresh. Few people eat just one of these calorie bombs and in many cases—if the donuts are coming off the conveyor belt hot—a Krispy Kreme employee will actually hand you a fresh donut as soon as you step into the store while you consider what to order. The donut is merely an appetizer to the actual meal which will consist of more donuts, because that’s really the only thing on the menu at a Krispy Kreme.

  Hamburgers are, of course, a staple of the American diet. Not exactly health food, burgers consist of ground beef and various toppings served on a bun. Both the Krispy Kreme and the hamburger are delicious, but neither could be considered good for you and both pack a lot of calories. One is, of course, a sweet treat, while the other would have to be considered savory. The only reason one could think of to mix the two products would be the fact that donuts are sort of shaped like a hamburger bun. Otherwise, a donut-burger makes about as much sense as pouring beef gravy over a slice of chocolate cake.

  That complete lack of compatibility did not, however, stop one minor league baseball team from creating a combination Krispy Kreme/hamburger. This death-defying treat was introduced as a publicity stunt. That would be just fine if the public—ever eager to die quicker—didn’t jump on the bandwagon and actually start eating the things.

  The burger features a Black Angus all-beef patty covered in melted cheese and two strips of bacon served between a sliced, deep-fried Krispy Kreme donut. On the plus side, at least the Gateway Grizzlies, a team in the Illinois’ Frontier League that serves the treat (which was created in Atlanta), resisted the urge to use two separate donuts as the bun. Still, the Krispy Kreme burger packs more than 1,000 calories and enough saturated fat to give an Olympic athlete a heart attack.

  The KFC Double Down

  Kentucky Fried Chicken once was so worried about its reputation as a purveyor of unhealthy treats that the chain actually attempted to rebrand itself as KFC. Of course, they still sold almost entirely fried chicken, but by dropping the name, they at least created the appearance of trying to be healthier. For a while, the newly rechristened KFC actually pushed its grilled chicken option in an attempt to court customers seeking healthier alternatives.

  All that effort went for naught, however, when KFC introduced the Double Down, this monstrosity decided that the bun was just a waste of space. So, instead of some bread, the Double Down used two fried chicken patties as the outside of the sandwich. Served in a grease-saturated cardboard sleeve, the Double Down features the aforementioned two fried chicken breasts, bacon, cheese and special sauce. KFC claims this “treat” only contains 540 calories, but a number of websites dispute that total. Either way, eating two fried chicken breasts, two slices of cheese and two pieces bacon all slathered in special sauce is a recipe for heading to an early grave.

  STUFF

  8

  The Segway: Two Wheels and a Dream

  Looking like the illegitimate child of hand truck and a unicycle, the Segway was supposed to revolutionize how people got around. These two-wheeled, self-balancing personal transports were touted as the next great invention—something that would change the way people live their lives, Instead, the Segway turned into a novelty that people might rent while on a vacation, the land-based equivalent of one of those boats you propel by pedaling.

  Invented by supposed genius Dean Kamen (if your type of genius invents stuff nobody actually buys), the
Segway uses a very clever system of gyroscopic sensors to stay balanced. The rider actually stands up on the machine, telling it which way to go by shifting his weight about. The driver uses the handlebars to turn and, in optimal circumstances, Segways can go up to 12.5 miles per hour.

  A clever concept, the problems begin for Segway when one begins to consider practical uses. Let’s pretend that someone living in a city like New York was legally allowed to use the Segway as transportation (you aren’t). Exactly how many places do people go where they only need to transport themselves? The Segway’s design does not exactly allow for luggage and major cities do not have a lot of places to safely store this type of device. So, that makes the Segway perfect for short trips where you won’t need anything with you other than what you can carry and where you can either lock your vehicle up somewhere or not mind too much when it gets stolen.

  The second major problem with Segway is that despite its supposed safety and ease-of-use, the average driver has a bit of a learning curve. It’s possible to fall off of a Segway and it’s possible to drive your Segway into things. Driving while standing up is not a natural position to most people who generally learn to drive while sitting in a car.

  Segways, like any other vehicle, can also be driven places they should not go—a problem magnified by the fact that not every driver instantly picks up how to safely use the vehicle. This problem came to the forefront when Jim Heselden—the owner of Segway—accidently drove his off a cliff, leading to his death. In general, when the owner of your company accidently kills himself while attempting to use your product, it’s hard to consider that good publicity.