THE NFL ON TWITTER

This year, Twitter made a rumoured R1,4 billion deal with the USA’S NFL to live-broadcast ten Thursday night American football games. (It made similar deals with major league baseball and ice hockey.) For Twitter, it was a way to find new users, and something to actually sell ads against. Viewers could watch football, for free, no matter where they were or what kind of pay-tv package they had. But it means having to share the game with all the people on Twitter. Twitter gives everyone a voice, which is nice, but that voice during a football game is usually yelling – about how a particular team sucks or how stupid the announcer’s cap is – and it never seems to go hoarse. In that respect, it’s like being at a real football game, where you never know who will sit next to you. But instead of costing you a couple of grand and an hour in parking-lot traffic, Twitter is absolutely free. And there’s no last call on the beer in your fridge. You can handle the yelling. And if you decide you can’t, simply turn your phone to landscape mode and the conversation stream disappears.

Scrub Daddy is a brightly coloured smiley-face sponge, with holes for the eyes and the mouth. It’s ugly. But it works. Invented by the former owner of an automotive buffing company, the Scrub Daddy uses a temperature-dependent polymer-based foam called Flextexture, which was originally invented to help mechanics clean their hands. In warm water, the sponge’s texture changes, becoming softer and more malleable. When the water is switched back to cold, the sponge increases in roughness, easily scraping away old soap scum and mildew. And it smiles at you the whole time. No matter what it’s covered in.