This Just In

And now, a word from the 3DTV wet blankets. Yes, those ever-so unfun folks who don’t just hop on the latest bandwagon and spew the jargon. (Let it be noted that I am typically one of those and typically proven wrong, but thankfully, no one keeps score.)

That said, I’m going to venture that 3DTV is being just a wee bit overdone. I am not the first. Others have delicately mentioned amid the current wave of hysteria that 3D has been tried on TV many times before. Some search the ceiling while mentioning the nausea factor. Then there are the glasses that won’t work with someone else’s TV and may well induce seizure when looking at the part of the world that really is in 3D, e.g., everything in a room that’s not dual-image TV screen.

One might also surmise that folks in nearly every household in the country just replaced their old TVs with new TVs, digital or HD. And that a lot of those folks are home watching those new TVs because they’re still out of a job, making another wave of TV replacement a tiny bit less likely.

There could even be a bit of murmuring about the absence of standards for 3DTV. Even Mr. Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Electronics Associa-tion, says, ahem, standards would be a darn good idea so people don’t take pitchforks and torches to the nation’s eleventy billion Radio Shacks. That, and making people vomit is generally regarded as a poor marketing strategy.

But nay, none of these are the basis for today’s assertion here that the whole 3D thing is getting slightly out of hand.

Forsooth, dear reader, today’s rant is brought to you by dentifrice. Big business, toothpaste. So it is that toothpaste makers come up with every per-ceivable enhancement to grab market share and bump the price a bit. And what better way than to latch onto the latest trend in consumer electronics? TV and toothpaste go back a long way, so why not have 3DTV and 3D toothpaste?

For 50 cents more than the regular premium whitening toothpaste, 3D whitening toothpaste “can remove up to 80 percent of surface stains in 14 days!” It can render your teeth in 3D, people! Who wouldn’t want their teeth to be in 3D?

Oh, wait a minute... right.