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Men (Okay, and Women) Like Toys
Next Andree took me to the men stuff, the toys.
The Sharper Image Personal Entertainment Center is a popular seller among guys. This gadget has a DVD movie player with a 7-inch screen, as well as a standard CD/MP-3 player and radio. It goes for around $600.
Men also like the Now You Can Find It product. This gizmo has a main control box, about the size of a pack of cigarettes, and a set of color-coded beeper disks that you attach to your various key chains. When you want to find a key, you click one of the corresponding colored buttons on the control unit. The lost disk beeps and blinks. All you need to do is follow the beeps to locate your lost item. It's a pretty cool toy for any of us absent-minded geek-heads, and it's priced reasonably, at around $50.
However, the big behemoth of Guy Toys at The Sharper Image is the iJoy Turbo 2 Robotic Massage Chair. It's a recliner chair like the one you sit in to watch a football game, but it has an electronic masseuse built in. Guys love this thing. For a one-time purchase price of around $800, it will massage just about everywhere that needs massaging. And if a guy buys the Human Touch OttoMan 2.0 Foot & Calf Massager for an extra $250, he can provide his lower extremities with the same fun and relaxation.
As I said earlier everybody, men and women alike want to look good, particularly when it come to hair and the absence of it. Men like the Turbo-Groomer 5.0, a contraption that removes "unsightly" hair from ears and nose. At first, this might not seem that important to anybody. But as just about any man over 45 will tell you, when you get old, you really do start to grow more hair in your ears and in your nose. It's an aging thing, and managing that growth is hard. You stick the gadget up your nose or in your ear, and, voilaì—the hair is removed painlessly. This is a lot easier that plucking hair out of our ears and nostrils. The Turbo-Groomer is a welcome addition to the aging process.
Women, on the other hand, like the Emjoi Optima Electric Tweezer & Shaver System. It's a modern-looking gadget, designed with the feminine eye in mind. It's sort of like an electric shaver on steroids. It is made to get at hair where it counts: under arms and at the bikini line. This product has "girl" written all over it: Pubic-hair management is not a really big concern for most guys. Yeah, some guys will wear a revealing Speedo to the beach, but most men will show up in a pair of baggy trunks and hit the waves. Women do not have it so easy. A gadget that eases the agony of body shaving is a welcome addition to a lady's arsenal of cosmetic accessories.
Then, of course, there is the added reality of environmental comfort, which everybody desires, even my sister. She told me that the last electronic gadget that she bought was an electronic car starter so that she could sit in her kitchen and drink coffee while her car got warm in the cold New Jersey winter. I asked her if color was a consideration when buying it. She said that she did not care about the color of her electronic car starter—or of her ceramic hair styler, either, for that matter. All she cared about was that both worked. She did admit that the hair styler was a girl thing. Go figure.