I have a confession to make. It's a two-parter:
- I check Woot! every day.
- Despite doing this for over a year, I have never bought
a thing from them.
Do you know Woot!? They're an overstock clearance outfit
with a big difference. The difference that receives the
most publicity is their method of selling: They put one
item per day on their web site. You can buy one or two or
three of them, for their (usually) bargain price. They
charge $5 for shipping, whether you buy a few-gram card (as in
the item below) or a projection teevee set that comes to your
house on a truck. Idiosyncratic? That's just the
beginning! They don't tell you how many of the items they have
for sale or how near to out-of-stock they may be. If they
run out, they simply put a "SOLD OUT" message on their site and
sell nothing for the rest of the day, which ends at midnight
Central Time. If you live on the East Coast and want to
get what turns out to be a hot item, you have to stay up 'til 01:00 since they don't
tell you what the next day's item is until they offer it for
sale. What do they offer? Mostly high-tech cast-offs*.
Discontinued television sets, computer monitors, GPS units,
watches, and the occasional consumer items like BBQ grills,
bottles of wine, and the random bag of crap. Literally:
That's what they call it. The last
must be the best deal of all since they inevitably sell out
instantly. They also have a mysterious Roomba fetish.
You can count on seeing a robot vacuum cleaner every couple of
weeks. I picture a special warehouse just for them; it's
one item that never sells out, or perhaps even sells at all.
Back to my confession
Why do I check Woot every day if I never buy? Because
the guy|team|lunatic who writes their descriptions is so good.
(I say "guy," by the way, because it's written from a
distinctly guy point-of-view, and gives me, superannuated guy
that I am, a peek into the language used by the young set of
gamers and hyperactive techies.) And he either has good
grammar skills or an editor, since I rarely find an error in the
parts I can understand.
Below is a non-random Woot!. This write-up especially
tickled me and I don't imagine the last line requires
elucidation. If you're curious about this eccentric
vendor, you can find a new bizarre blurb every day, complete
with an offer for something new and occasionally useful.
This year they've expanded to weekends as well. |
More GB Than You Can
Handle, Maybe
It’s amazing what a
little SD card can do these days…if your device can handle it. See,
there are 4GB of memory packed onto this little Connect3D SD Memory
Card. But before you start envisioning gazillions of JPGs dancing on the
head of this pin, you better check the manual for whatever gizmo you
want to use this with.
Not all devices can
handle a card this size. If you buy one and it doesn’t work, might as
well put it on eBay or use it as a guitar pick. We’re calling no
give-backs. Now, if you’ve got the equipment for it, this represents an
astonishingly good deal for so much portable storage. But that’s a big
if. The choice is yours: either RTFM or STFU.
Warranty: One year
![4GB SD card as shown on Woot!](070607-woot-sd4gb.jpg)
Features:
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*The Wall Street Journal Law Blog recently discussed the
issue of pluralization of compound nouns. E.g., is it
"attorney-generals" or "attorneys-general"? Some comments
actually suggested that the former is acceptable, a position I
adamantly reject. I told the writer that I would have more to say
after I finished my dinner of yummy lefts-over. However,
in writing "cast-offs" I intuitively first wrote "casts-off"
but after a moment's thought I realized that it didn't feel
comfortable, as does "lefts-over." Clearly this requires
more thinks-about.
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Asteriskal
follow-up 08 June 2007 |
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Seems there's a rule for everything. "Thanks, Deb," he
asserted unenthusiastically. From
Grammar-Monster: To
form the plural
of a compound noun, pluralise the principal word in the
compound. When there is no obvious principal word, add s (or es)
to the end of the compound.
Mothers-in-law
(pluralise the principal word "mother")
Paper-clips
(pluralise the principal word "clip")
Forget-me-nots
(no principal word, so add s to the end)
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