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Proctor : September 2015
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63 PROCTOR | September 2015 It’s not only Wok and Roll The Buddoflex Abdominatron 2000 is here As I write this, I have not long returned from a trip to Townsville to visit my new nephew, the first child for my brother and his partner. My wife and I took our kids along, in part to show the new parents exactly how poor a decision they had made in having kids, and partly because my wife and I had forgotten what it is like to travel with our children. Not that our kids are bad travellers – they are great, and don’t cry or carry on when in the plane; in fact, they are so used to flying now that they are a bit jaded by it all. We might have been flying through majestic skies above cloudscapes of breathtaking beauty, but the only thing that impressed my kids about the flight was the free wi-fi . They sat there quietly without incident, as long as you don’t count 1143 arguments over whose turn it was on the iPad as incidents. No, our kids are seasoned and well-behaved travellers, but confine them in a hotel room for too long – say, about four seconds – and they can argue over pretty much anything, including whether or not one of them is getting more air molecules than the other. This situation is not helped by hotels, which now mostly offer digital TV rather than pay TV. Having become used to pay TV at home, my kids were somewhat nonplussed by the choice of programming, and reacted pretty much the same way Moe reacts when one of the other stooges pokes him in the eye, but without the mature dialogue. To be honest though, my kids have a point (about TV programming, not air molecules). There is so little worth watching on free- to-air TV that I have no idea why people without pay TV bother having a television at all. Free-to-air TV seems to consist mostly of reruns of M*A*S*H (This week: Hawkeye comes up with a crazy scheme to fool Henry; next week: Hawkeye comes up with a crazy scheme to fool Frank) and TV shows which are actually one long ad for either fitness equipment, cooking implements or things that do both (“Introducing the Wok and Roll Treadmill and Wok Burner! Burn calories while you cook dinner for the family! Just 10 monthly payments of $37.95!”). Fitness equipment is a big deal on shopping networks, especially the kind of equipment that helps you lose weight without exercising – a great concept only slightly discredited by virtue of the fact that it is impossible. Most of the equipment on sale has the same overall effect on the waistline as eating a kilo of chocolate each day, and the only real chance of weight loss would be if you dropped the item on your foot and ended up bleeding a lot. Probably the most ridiculous fitness item I saw on TV, in between refereeing my kids’ arguments (“No, it isn’t possible for him to breathe in all the air molecules in the room!”) was a flexible strip of plastic which has a cool and trademarked official name, but which is actually what top-level engineers refer to as – sorry to get technical here – a stick. The concept seems to be that you stand still and wobble the stick, and in six to eight weeks you will, if you keep at it, look remarkably like an idiot holding a stick. The ad for the stick featured a number of fitness models who clearly lift weights, run marathons and consume enough steroids to kill Arnold Schwarzenegger (that is of course a joke; we all know Arnie cannot be killed) all claiming to have achieved rock-hard abs and lost 50 pounds using nothing but the stick. These ads always use American measurements, partly because the entire fitness industry is run from California and partly because no one in Australia can convert from pounds to kilos and will therefore assume that whatever weight is claimed to have been lost was a lot. These ads also always have a fine-print disclaimer which is written in a font so small it requires an electron microscope to read. I don’t have an electron microscope (and if I did, my kids would be using it to count up and allocate evenly all the air molecules in the room) but I am pretty sure the disclaimer goes something like: “Warning: the people in this ad are professional fitness models who live on diet celery and quinoa, and have been selectively bred to evolve bodies that do not carry fat. You will never, ever, as long as you live have abs like they do, especially if your strategy includes using the equipment shown in this ad. In accordance with US law the advertisers acknowledge that this piece of fitness equipment is actually a stick.” I am actually surprised anyone ever buys the stick. Not because most people are shrewd consumers who research their purchases and buy only things proven to work – most consumers would buy used dental floss if it was marketed as a ‘Holistic Health Energy Band’, endorsed by Jane Fonda and advertised by a footballer with six-pack abs – but because on the very next ad there was a machine you simply strap to your stomach, switch on and watch as it “melts away fat”. If it worked, why would anyone buy the stick, the combined treadmill and stair climber, or any of the 2348 other items with the word ‘flex’ somewhere in their name? Personal trainers would be out of a job, although that probably isn’t anything unusual, since personal trainers now constitute 26% of the Australian population and outnumber people who actually exercise by about three to one. I think the best reaction to this plethora of fitness equipment for sale is to get in on it before someone makes a law against selling things that don’t work, so I am now introducing the Buddoflex Abdominatron 2000, which will melt away ugly pounds and tone your abs, thighs and earlobes while you watch TV. The Buddoflex Abdominatron makes use of quantum chromodynamics and actually physically rests in a different dimension – probably the 8th dimension, I’d say – so you can’t actually see it. It emits quarks while you sleep, which attach themselves to fat molecules and literally teleport your fat to the 8th dimension. I sent one to Brad Pitt to try, so if you send me $150 I will have one beamed into your house and I see no reason why you will not soon look like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, depending on the setting. (DISCLAIMER: Buddoflex Abdominatron may not actually exist. The term ‘quantum chromodynamics’ is used because you don’t understand it and it sounds cool; it may not actually allow you to access other dimensions. The word ‘flex’ is used in accordance with consumer legislation requiring all fitness equipment to incorporate it in the name; it does not mean the equipment will actually flex your muscles. All air molecules divided equally). Suburban cowboy Shane Budden is Queensland Law Society advocacy and policy manager. by Shane Budden back to contents
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