Bullet pencils: Pocket-friendly utensils from a bygone era

Just for fun…

Woodclinched

For reasons I can’t explain, I usually only talk about half of my pencil collection on here. I talk about new products, mostly — pencils available to most everyone that is for sale now.

But I also have a lot of advertising and souvenir pencils. Probably ten cigar boxes worth. They’re not particularly known for being good quality pencils, but they appeal to me in their uniqueness. Many of them are decades old; and I can only imagine that there are not many left in the world.

One subset of that collection are several agricultural bullet pencils. A good friend of mine gave them to me a few years ago after her grandmother died and my friend was in charge of cleaning out her farmhouse in Illinois. There was a drawer full of these old pencils — given to her by salesmen from seed supplier, feed yards, stockyards, and more.

View original post 548 more words

‘Brilliant tricks’ with D cells and electromagnets save 70% on your electric bill

Watts Up With That?

You know, marketing is sometimes ridiculous, and this one is no exception. I spotted this ad over on the Sierra Club website that was obviously targeted for “low information voters”. Why? Well if you’ve any basic 4th grade science you’ll recognize this photo used as part of the ad to suck people in to looking at some solar panel scheme:

It’s a D-cell wired up to a coil of wire to create a weak electromagnet. 

Some trick.

That ad links to this page, which then goes on to tell you about another, totally unrelated, ‘brilliant trick’.

Right. What they don’t mention is that while you might save 70% on your electric bill, you’ll probably pay close to that (with some smaller savings left) to pay for the solar panels that company installed. You’ll swap one payment for another, but you surely won’t get the full 70% in savings.

‘Caveat Emptor’…

View original post 5 more words