yanoblog

It’s been six months since my last Drool Tools posting. In that time, I’ve picked up two more regular readers of my blog, so this next part is directed at that half of my audience.

Drool Tools is my attempt to mourn the decline of the Cool Tools website. It used to be filled with interesting tools. Then, perhaps because of the pressures of needing to post regularly, the content started to go from cool to drool. Hence my clever name. I gave up posting for the last six months once a mock “Cool Tool” that I created became real (read about it here). Since then, I decided to Let It Go.

But no longer. There have been too many dumb postings lately.

Exhibit A. A Belt That’s right. A belt. The description starts:

I’ve never been a fan of notches. But most cinch belts just don’t do the job.

Why not suspenders? Hold, before I go too far, I should check…Oh. My. God. They have done suspenders.

Anyway, moving right along in our tour of silliness, we have

Exhibit B. Popcorn Popper as Coffee Roaster.

Ah, where to begin. First of all, this is not what I would consider a cool tool so much as a cool hack. And it’s not a particularly novel one.

But most importantly, the instructions for doing it on the website are really, really bad.

Roasting doesn’t produce a lot of smoke, but does produce enough to set off a smoke detector. Be sure to disable it while you’re roasting inside.

Um. No. It can produce a huge amount of smoke. Don’t do it inside, ever. That’s what the experts say. Also these folks say it’s smoky and these folks emphasize the dangers.

Next cool tool: you can use pots, pans, and some glass beakers to make a stovetop meth lab. It’s safe too.

Exhibit C. A Windbreaker.

The 80s called. They want their “cool tool” back.

Exhibit D. Another book. Sigh. This one is on snowflakes.

What a useful tool.

Exhibit E. A timer made just for Yoga.

The idea that you’d need a special timer for meditation is kinda, well, weird. Other upcoming tools include a voice memo recorder for monks with vows of silence and special guns for mixed martial arts fighters.

Exhibit F. Another Belt.

Oh, the hell with it. I give up.

They win.

When life imitates mockery…

To deal with my sadness at the long slow decline of Cool Tools, a blog of sorts about actually useful tools, I have begun reviewing their poorer choices.

In my second drool tools posting I mocked the Dictionary of Symbols by creating my own fictional, as-far-as-I-could-tell-ridiculous Cool Tool: The Compact Edition of the OED.

Before continuing, you should read that post. I’ll wait.

<tapping fingers>

Ah good, you’re back. Here’s why I asked you to do that.

Today’s Cool Tools posting is the Compact Oxford English Dictionary. No, really. I swear.

Let’s compare descriptions. I thought about doing this as a puzzle (guess the real Cool Tools posting), but why bother? I can’t touch this kind of prose:

The classic, Compact OED is a smaller, handy version of what is the best English dictionary, bar none, the famous OED. Because it’s photo-reduced, it contains the entire OED, all 20 large volumes in one convenient reference (it comes with a reading glass). Aside from saving space on your shelf, it’s also significantly cheaper. It’s quite large, but you could definitely fit it in a regular backpack, if you’re a student or need to transport it (although it is about 10 pounds!). I’ve been using it for 3 years now, at least twice a week for general queries, as I enjoy discovering and using obscure words and I also often look up words and dive into etymology as part of my Wikipedia editing. For example, recently I used my OED to look up an archaic usage of the word “quaint”. Apparently Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” makes use of the old meaning where “quaint” also refers to female anatomy. Who knew?!

Carrying it around in a backpack?! Look, I love books as much as the next person, but carrying around the OED seems a bit… extreme to me. I don’t think you should pick your dictionaries based on portability. If that really is important to you, buy the CDROM.

Also, if you are just going to use it to augment your vocabulary, consider subscribing to the OED Word of the Day.

Anyway – you read it here first – the OED is a Cool Drool Tool.

Hope springs eternal. Every day, I hope that Cool Tools will live up to its name. Most days, I am disappointed. A few days ago, I was genuinely shocked to see a new category – Cool Tools Untried.

If I wanted to read a gadget blog, I’d go do that. After all, Cool Tools claims to be about known quantities:

There are plenty of places to read about stuff that should be cool, or that looks new and cool, and that might be useful. These recommendations here, on the other hand, are based on people who have used this item and many similar and have come to see its superiority.

Setting that aside, the last few “tools” are setting new lows.

1. A book – Reading Comics

Now, I’m not saying it’s a bad book – I haven’t yet read it. But if we’re going to single out a book on comics, it should be Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (available on Amazon). (If you haven’t read it and you like art in general, comics in specific, or thinking at all, you should get your hands on it).

2. U-Haul Box Exchange

Um. Yeah.

3. Moleskine Book Cover

Putting a cover on a moleskine seems to me a bit like putting a case on an iPhone, but who am I to judge? If you want to drop $40 on a leather cover for your moleskine, so be it. But it’s about as much of a tool as poker is a sport (and I like poker) or as much as most of these are actual hacks.

But it’s not all bad. I suppose this could be useful.

Ohmig-d. I mean, Oh. My. G-d.

Cool Tools goes from drool to drool.

Two days ago, it was the Ice Cream Scoop. You know, the kind with a little anti-freeze in the handle to make it easier to scoop. I thought these things were well known. After all, it was invented in 1935. What’s next? The safety razor? Plastic cups?

But today is even worse (or better, if you are like me and flailing for a blog entry). Jam Sessions is a pocket guitar game for the Nintendo DS Lite.

From the Cool Tools description:

As with Electroplankton, you touch a stylus to the screen to create sounds, except in this case you’re playing an actual, well, virtual instrument: six-string guitar….

If you’re a musician, this could be a fun, albeit potentially-productive, way to pass a long flight.

(Emphasis mine).

It’s nothing like an actual guitar. Except that it makes sounds that resemble a guitar. It “could be fun”? I’m also not clear on what makes it a game. Although I always hated to practice the many instruments I failed to learn, I still think that this seems like the kind of game Principal Skinner would invent:

I made a game of it. Seeing how many times I could bounce the ball in a day, then trying to break that record.

Here’s a video of someone using it:

Here’s a tool that’s almost cool. SteriPEN is used to purify water while camping (well, it’s to kill bacteria, it doesn’t remove heavy metals or eliminate viruses). It costs $125 (available at Amazon). But, as the poster notes, “Quick aside: SteriPEN’s solar charger is way too heavy at this point.” (Fortunately, the batteries last a while).

In fact, although (as of now) this change doesn’t appear on the website, in the RSS feed for Cool Tools, that sentence has been changed to read, “Quick asides: SteriPEN’s solar charger is way too heavy at this point. For a DIY SteriPEN, simply fill a bottle with water and leave it in the sun for several hours—the UV rays will kill the bacteria.”

So, with a little planning, you can save the $125. So the real Cool Tool is the source of most of the energy for life on Earth, our Sun. Fair enough.

BTW, Cool Tools doesn’t always drool. Today there is a genuinely cool tool – thread made out of Kevlar®

Sigh. My aforementioned desire to just ridicule actual tools on Cool Tools has given way to reality. There are no longer enough bonafide tools being profiled to provide enough fodder.

So, today, I shall ridicule the current posting:

In art, literature, film and life, even the littlest image or reference can open a world of interpretation. This thick encyclopedia, with contributions from scholars in various disciplines, is an excellent guide to the major and more esoteric origins of seemingly everything – from “abracadabra” to “Zodiac.” There are a ton of spiritual, mythological and/or cultural tangents that hopscotch the globe and back in time. Whenever I pick it up, I learn something new. I find the animal and food-related facts particularly enlightening (ex; oranges, a fertility symbol, are given to young married couples in Vietnam; and in Ancient China a formal offer of marriage was accompanied by a gift of oranges to the girl). The book’s title is somewhat misleading. It does not have illustrations – it’s all text. Some entries are a couple sentences, others stretch for a few pages. If you have plans to deconstruct the next season of Lost, you might find this one handy.

– Steven Leckart

Dictionary of Symbols

Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant

1996 (current translation), 1184 pages

$15 (available from Amazon)

I have a “cool” tool too:

The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary

Guide to the English Language

In art, literature, film and life, even the smallest word can open a world of interpretation. This multi-volume “encyclopedia” of language, with contributions from scholars in various disciplines, is an excellent guide to the major and more esoteric origins of seemingly everything – from “A” to “Zyxt.” Every time I open it, I learn a new word (e.g., bangarang, a general exclamation meant to signify approval or amazement). The book’s title is somewhat misleading. It does not have only “English” words – English is a polyglot language, so many foreign words are also defined. Some entries are a couple of sentences, others stretch for a few pages. If you have plans to understand the next season of Lost, you might find this one handy.

– Jason Yanowitz

The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary

1991 (current edition), 2424 pages

$239.97 (Available from Amazon.)

Also, if that’s too small, you can get the full edition.

And don’t forget the companion tool, The Meaning of Everything, also available at Amazon.

For a few years, I have enjoyed Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools, a blog about… cool tools. It reliably cataloged tools of which I was not aware. Even if they weren’t immediately useful to me, they were interesting. Admittedly, the occasional silly tool still slipped through in the early days, but the signal/noise ratio was, overall, impressive. In recent months, this is no longer true. Now, it is rare that the “cool tool” is useful. I think this is probably because Mr. Kelly feels pressure to post something almost daily. That’s a shame.

In response, I’ve decided to start ridiculing the cool drool tools. After all, it’s easier to tear-down than build-up; easier to ridicule others than do my own work.

I’ll try to pick actual tools to insult. This seems to be getting harder, as the last week of Cool Tools posts demonstrates:

1. Podcasts—3 of them
2. Post Hole digger—an actual tool!
3. A Website—Redfin
4. A Book—Rule the Web: the Missing Manual for the Web
5. Software—Logic, an audio manipulation tool

Podcasts, Books, Websites, Software—all of these are amply covered on the net already. I turn to Cool Tools for things like Atwood Mini Tools.

But even when it’s an actual tool, they are increasingly less cool, more drool:

1. Credit Card Survival Tool. Ummm… not only has this been around and well-known for ages, it’s exactly the kind of thing you can no longer keep in your wallet if you travel by air, as it’ll get confiscated by airport security. A ceramic version of this—now that’d be cool.
2. Tire Tote They are subtitled, “Maneuverable wheel covers.” What’s next, an ice pack (“Maneuvarable chilling device”)?

More to follow…