You say you want a revolution

I would have loved to have lived in the 50s because of all the wonderful household inventions that came on the market during that decade.


Two words: Tupperware's Wonderbowl

It's true. Take a look back and you'll see that advertisements promised unimaginable efficiency at the push of a button for the American housewife, as well as modern, stainless-steel elegance.

And Americans bought it: In the first five years after World War II, the amount of money spent on household furnishings and appliances rose by an incredible 240 percent.

Who wouldn't buy it? Appliance companies promised freedom from the back-breaking drudgery of housework and the ability to look elegant doing it. One ad pictures a woman in an evening gown preparing a cake by pushing a button. If she wasn't about to dash off to what was obviously an upscale and important party, she'd probably have time to squeeze in a quick tennis game before Ward got home. (As an aside, that ad should have told us that something was terribly amiss, but that's another blog for another day...)

Today, a similar revolution is happening with today's domestic products. Only we've pretty much already made things as easy to use as possible.

As any good Southern lady knows, the only thing left to do is accessorize.

Now we're hard at work on making our functional products cute -- so cute we can't help but use them.

Take, the Lysol "Ready Brush" called a "revolution in toilet bowl cleaning" (is this the same revolution the Beatles sang about?).

Dawn has discovered the "future of dishwashing" with the cutting-edge Wash and Toss.(Dawn also makes a Power Dish Brush. Mind you, it still has to be held by actual human hands to work; however, it does vibrate. But again ... another blog for another day. )

And of course, dusting and mopping have gone precious -- Procter and Gamble's Swifter and Clorox's Ready Mop (of which I'm a fan. It's not any more "ready," per se, than my old sponge mop, but it tops the charts on cute).

I know first hand that all of this is working. I know it's working because even my dad will use these products.

His favorite invention is The Swifter. He swings the thing all over my parent's North Carolina home in his free time, picking up dust for fun. Recently he even took it up a notch.

This came in an email from my mother this morning:

I've got one for you on Dad. You know he loves the Swifter and is always going around the house with it dusting the floors. Well, I saw advertised that they now have a Swifter-Vac, so I got one. After charging it up for twenty-fours hours I used it yesterday and it works pretty good. So when Dad got home I showed it to him and he got the thing and started Swifting and running the vac part at the same time. He was all over the house with the it and said this is the cat's ass. Now he has a new cleaning toy to play with. I wonder how long it will last?

Presumably, Mom, until Swifter comes out with a Swifter+vac+TV remote, in which case you'll have to pry it from his cold, dead hands.

But ours is not to ask why or wonder how long.