Notchweiner

No, those aren’t fancy new prosthetic blue testicles you’re looking at. Those are the next ShamWow, this month’s easily hatable Snuggies, the sensational ropeless jump rope fitness system known by in-the-know celebrities only as Jump Snap! And…I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. 

Yes, it’s the jump rope as new-fangled fitness contraption as second coming for the witless. Because jumping rope is too darn hard. Authentic tear. These battery-powered handles (because that’s all they are) actually make a snapping sound just like an actual jump rope! They also have an “on board computer” (because they’re from 1967) to help you track your inevitable and rapid shedding of pounds! Exclamation point!

It’s too easy to come out against Jump Snap as a sign that we’re all dumb enough and lazy enough and greedy enough to go ahead and call it quits on the whole damn thing. Everybody out of the pool. It’s over. So we won’t. Honestly, we’re all for senseless plastic crap that promises The Answer to every lazy, unquestioning couch potato. It’s entertaining and transient and hey maybe two people out of (god help us) 10,000 will get something beneficial from it. So, ok. 

Where we draw the line is claims like this:  ”Just by jumping rope, you can burn up to one thousand two hundred calories in one hour!” Come on. Even ShamWow guy wouldn’t twist the truth like that. (Bite it, maybe. Twist it, never.) Nobody, and we mean nobody, is going to jump rope for an hour, even if it doesn’t actually entail jumping rope. You can’t just take the calories you burn in five minutes and multiply it by twelve. By that logic, I could “burn up to 28,800 calories in just one day!” 

So come on, Jump Snap guys. Respect your snake oil origins and keep the so-good-it-can’t-be-true-isms to the level of “mildly irritating in their untruthiness.” Not “so blatantly untrue as to make you seem like a giant, raging ass.”