Woot : One Day, One Deal (SM)

“I was just sitting there minding my own business in the privacy of my own home, watching a movie – it was that Tropical Lightning one – when I heard it, clear as day, during a battle scene. Gunfire, coming from somewhere to my left. Pop! Pop! Pop-pop pop! I thought it was the movie, but then I realized there wasn’t no speaker over there. Soon as the movie ended, me and my husband both up and ran out of the house. We ain’t been back since. Ghosts maybe I can handle, but ghosts with guns? No thank you.”

That’s the voice of Andi Hughes of Cincinnati, Arizona. Her and her husband are but two of the growing number of Americans who claim to have experienced phantom surround sound, or PSS, a paranormal phenomenon in which two speakers appear to produce home theater surround-sound. This often occurs in tandem with an event known as a near-HD experience, or NHDE, when normal-definition DVDs appear to display in HD to the untrained eye.

The scientific establishment holds that such phenomena are impossible, blaming hallucinations, mass hysteria, and kitchen gas. But Frank Baconham of Granite Mountain, Florida tells another story.

“Our family watches Timecop every Christmas, so I’ve seen it at least a dozen times. But this year, after I hooked up my new Philips HTS6600 DVD Home Theatre System, everything was different. The colors were brighter. The action seemed sharper. The jokes even seemed funnier, and that’s saying something. It wasn’t just me who felt it, it was the whole family. The whole experience was heightened, I guess you’d say. We were just sort of lifted off of our couches to…somewhere else. It’s like we were looking down on these people who looked just like us, and they were watching Timecop like they were seeing it for the first time. I can’t explain it.”

Contacted for comment, Philips says there’s nothing supernatural about it. They claim that the Philips HTS6600 uses “psychoacoustic” engineering and precise driver positioning to replicate 5.1 surround sound. And the sharper picture, according to them, is merely a result of the player’s DVD upconverting capabilities.

But Hughes isn’t so sure.

“I thought maybe I was imagining things until we got to the credits. When I saw the name ‘Robert Downey Jr.’ come up, I knew there was something paranormal going on. Through the whole movie, he looked like he was black.”

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Does it seem a little empty on the site today? That could be due to Woot’s advance team already being in Las Vegas! Last night the first wave of our crack CES Reporting Team arrived in style…

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At some point in the not-too-distant past, we asked you to show us a mythologized version of a scene from Woot's history. Legend has it that Wootbot visits all the good little Wooters the day prior to a Woot-Off and sprinkles energy powder on their last meals of the day. You'll know if you were visited or not if you had to prop your eyelids open with toothpicks at any point during the last Woot-Off. What? You fell asleep? Then you must not have been a good little Wooter and you probably missed that one item you would have bought if you had seen it in time. Or maybe you did do something right, because Wootbot has chosen to bestow the three cash winners with double-sized prizes just this once, in honor of the 200th contest. Maybe you can use it to invest in coal.

First Place - $200
cicada - Brave Ride in a Flying Chair
"They were heard to splat loudly."

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Large Irate Man: Hey! Hey, you, in the blue polo shirt! Is your name Tom?

Tom, Bargain Barn Associate: Sure is! Can I help you?

Large Irate Man: Yeah, help me with this fist, you pervert!

Tom, Bargain Barn Associate: Ow! My nose! I – I think it’s broken – so much blood -

Large Irate Man: You like talking dirty to old ladies? Huh? That how you get your kicks, sicko?

Tom, Bargain Barn Associate: Please, I don’t know what you’re talking about…

Large Irate Man: Yeah, right. You didn’t wait on a little old lady with silver hair? Earlier today? Ring any bells?

Tom, Bargain Barn Associate: Yeah, but -

Large Irate Man: “Yeah, but” nothing! That was my mother. She came in here looking for high-quality portable sound for her iPod, and you spewed filth all over her! She’s eighty years old, for crying out loud! I never heard of anything so sick in my life!

Tom, Bargain Barn Associate: But, but, I just recommended the Polk miDock!

Large Irate Man: Polk miDock?

Tom, Bargain Barn Associate: Yes, the portable iPod boombox and charging station from the esteemed Polk Audio people.

Large Irate Man: So you didn’t tell her to poke your -

Tom, Bargain Barn Associate: No! Of course not! I just thought the Polk miDock’s superb acoustic design, rich bass, and iPod dock would provide a good solution for your mother’s personal audio needs!

Large Irate Man: Seriously? Wow. Man. I guess, uh, I guess her hearing isn’t so good anymore. Sorry about that, Tom. It’s just, you know, you think some pervert’s getting sick with your mom…I guess I overreacted.

Tom, Bargain Barn Associate: It’s OK. Don’t mention it.

Large Irate Man: And you know, that Polk miDock does sound pretty good. I’ll take two. Thanks.

Tom, Bargain Barn Associate: I really think you’ll enjoy it. That’s thanks enough for me.

Large Irate Man: So what were you saying when my mom thought you were talking about her “luscious rumpcakes”?

Tom, Bargain Barn Associate: Oh, that part, I really did say. Your mom’s got a fine, fine butt. Will that be all today?

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We're old enough to remember when the number 2000 was a signifier of the frighteningly distant future, when men would either zoom through the stars in laser limousines or scrounge in the atomic rubble for edible rocks. Either way civilization turned, bad-ass vehicles were always on the agenda. The year 2000 has come and gone, with disappointingly few instances of roadbound, airborne, or space vehicle combat, but we can still dream. Your challenge this week:

Create a futuristic battle-mobile from past and current Woot products.

You can go the Buck Rogers route with a fancy hi-tekk star-van, or get all Mad Max up in this mug with a post-apocalyptic junkyard jeep, or whip up something in a '70s decadent-murder mode a la the original Deathrace 2000 or Rollerball. Just make it look like the future, and make it out of Woot stuff.

Post your entry here by 11:59 AM CST on Monday, January 12, 2009. Prizes are $20/$50/$100 for 3rd/2nd/1st. The rules and criteria for winning: our panel of volunteer judges can and will make stuff up as it goes along. Use Photoshop, linoleum blocks, pastels, MSPaint, cave painting, tattoos, tribal scarification, whatever, but it’ll only be judged if it’s visible in our forums as a jpg, gif, or png. As we are fond of saying, try to keep your maximum width to 450px. If you need a place to host your pictures, try www.imageshack.ws or www.photobucket.com. We have no connection to either, but they seem free and easy to use. And if you want us to be sure your entry was indeed your work, post links to your source images. The more sure we are that you did your own work, the more likely we are to consider it for a prize.

Some of you out there may not know that today is the twelfth day of Christmas. We wish we were you this year. Because, here at the offices, way back in September, we all decided we’d go for an old fashioned Christmas celebration that lasted for twelve days. It sounded like such a great idea at the time. We were all behind it.

But now, we really want to just sit down and watch a movie on our refurbished Philips DVD Recorder w/HDMI&1080p Upconvert. Only we can’t do that. Firstly, because of all those drummers drumming on the main floor. They’re very good, it’s just impossible to hear even with the Dolby Digital quality sounds. And before you suggest it, we did consider headphones, but the pipers piping really carries through the offices. What can we say, we’ve got good acoustics.

We also can’t go into the other rooms, because everyone is leaping and dancing. And you would not believe how much milk we’ve got in the warehouse right now. We thought about going out back and setting up the Philips DVD Recorder w/HDMI&1080p Upconvert to record the NTSC signal from the air, maybe right to a DVD+R or DVD-R disc, but swans are mean, mean birds. They basically took over back there and it’s really ugly what they’re doing to the geese. So we’re kind of out of options at this point.

We do like that the Philips DVD Recorder upconverts to allow for sharper images of normal recordings. We got a pretty nice camcorder when we sold off the gold rings and that plugs right in to the i.LINK digital input. We also can play DivX, MP3 and JPEG and there’s digital coaxial, composite video and HDMI in and out. And there is a remote, even though that might show up with some feathers on it from all the birds.

Unfortunately, the Philips DVD Recorder w/HDMI&1080p Upconvert does not work as a converter box, so when February rolls around, you’ll have to have some way to convert the signal before you can record it. We heard this directly from the hens. But if you’ve got digital cable, or one of those nifty little boxes, the Philips DVD Recorder w/HDMI&1080p Upconvert will continue to work fine. One might even go so far as to say it will be an absolute dove about it.

We hope when you get it home, you’ll find a nice, quiet place to enjoy a few movies with your Philips DVD Recorder w/HDMI&1080p Upconvert. We’ll be envying you. And keep an eye out, because we might have a sale on pears in the near future. It’s always nice when the holidays are finally over.

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There used to be this girl who worked in our office—great kid, smart as heck, super helpful. When you gave her an assignment, she’d just run with it. No complaining. No procrastinating. No checking back every half hour to ask a dumb question about how to work around whatever minor obstacle she’d encountered.

Sure, sure, they say there are no stupid questions. Whoever “they” are, they didn’t have interns. One kid came upstairs once to tell us he’d used up all the letterhead, and would it be OK if the rest of the shareholder letters went out on this goldenrod paper he found?

We had none of that with this girl. Karen was her name. She was a problem-solver. An initiative-taker. A go-getter. An obtainer of rare antiquities.

She reminded us, in a lot of ways, of the Lexmark X9350. No hassles, no laborious set-up when it’s time to get to work, just: Boom. On it. Getting the job done.

Like how the X9350 will connect to an Ethernet or a wireless network. It doesn’t care, however works best for you. You’re the boss.

And how it’s always at the ready for a variety of jobs: Printing, copying, scanning, even faxing. Like Karen. She wouldn’t give you any static about faxing. Some of our less helpful assistants, they’d be like: “Faxing? Really? Do people still do that? Well, alright, but wouldn’t it be better if I just emailed it? I’m not sure I even know how to fax something.”

But not Karen. And not the Lexmark X9350. They’re just on the case, no guff, no problemo, no questions asked.

You need that kind of help in the office, you know? Flexible help. You want to print from your camera via a Bluetooth connection? Sure thing. Or print directly from a USB drive? Or a memory card? You betcha, right away.

Another thing that Karen and the X9350 had in common: Both endured creepy, inappropriate romantic overtures from Luke, who worked in billing. That Luke was a weird dude. And he was apparently really, really into that compact, boxy body type that Karen and the Lexmark shared. So that was why Karen eventually left. It’s also why the optional 150-sheet paper tray on our X9350 is broken, according to the latest rumors surrounding our Holiday Party.

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Sometimes our writeups make people call us names. Names like “filth” and “pottymouth”. They tell us we’ve got our minds in the gutter. So it’s nice that iRobot even makes a robot for people like we.

The iRobot Looj Gutter Cleaning Robot puts an end to sitting in your own filth while thinking up dirty metaphors and ways to make jokes about body parts. If you’re in a gutter that fits this template, the iRobot Looj Gutter Cleaning Robot will work for you. And this sweet little centipede of joy moves forward and backward with a three stage auger that spins in both directions. That gutter will be cleaned in no time at all. Which means you can spend the next year filthying it up again! Underpants!

Don’t wallow in mulchy bitterness while unemployed english majors puff cloven smoke and judge you unredeemable. Keep on offending the world from a clean, shiny hole with the help of your new best friend, the iRobot Looj Gutter Cleaning Robot. It will even laugh quietly to itself every time you say the word hole. Hole. Hahahahha! Hole!

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Dear Lee,

What the hell, man? What the hell? I thought we were in this together. I really thought I could trust you. You’re godfather to my remote, you know? I told you things I never told anyone else. And what’s that in big print on your website? Oh, nothing much, just that magic word steroids, no biggie, just a great way to end a career.

Lee, this isn’t the Seventies. People care about these things now. Kids look up to me as a way to fill a room with high definition sound. I’m a role model, Lee. People hear my built in amplifiers and think “hey, if I worked hard, I could do that too.” I don’t need to tell you how important image is to a career. And yet, there it is, my biggest secret, right on your stupid website for everyone to see.

My patented Neo-sandwich magnets mean big bucks in endorsements, Lee. So you better pray I don’t see headlines like “Soundmatters MainStage HD HiFi Theatre Console In Doping Scandal” or “Why, HiFi Guy, Why? Bye Bye Bye!” because if this gets out to the mainstream media I’m coming over with a bat. And you can bet that I’ll be juiced enough to teach you a lesson.

Your former client,
Soundmatters MainStage HD HiFi Theatre Console

PS: By juiced I meant that carrot banana smoothie I drink to keep my internal subwoofer healthy.

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In one corner, the Breville 800BLXL Blender, with a 1,000-watt motor, crevice-free easy-to-clean die-cast base, and three blending speeds (four if you count “off”). In the other corner, our iconic orange Woot-Off lights, the best way to waste a USB port since Candi the USB Pole Dancer. Isn’t the latter just crying out to be pulverized by the former? Don’t you just wanna throw those damn lights into that friggin’ blender and just blend the hell out of them and howl HELL YEAH WORLD I DID IT AND I’D DO IT AGAIN like some kind of web 2.0 barbarian?

Well, don’t. For one thing, you might hurt yourself. For another, you’ll definitely hurt your fancy Breville blender. And for a third thing, we already tried it. Put your goggles on and check out our New Year’s fireworks display:

Hey, this whole blending-inappropriate-stuff idea could really take off. We’ve already got these kick-ass blenders – now all we have to do is find a few more things to blend and come up with a catchy name. We’re thinking something like “Can This Device Blend Things That People Don’t Usually Blend?”

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