Hopefully Emma Thompson is heading towards at least an Oscar nomination for her performance as novelist Karen Eiffel in the romance/comedy/tragedy (?) movie Stranger Than Fiction, in which Will Ferrell plays an IRS auditor whose life Eiffel appears to be narrating in a voice he alone can hear: "This is a story about a man named Harold Crick and his wristwatch." Harold is in a major rut and one of the awful things he does in his boring life is to count the number of toothbrush strokes he makes -- in every direction -- during his morning ablutions.
Well, glory be, in these days of product placement in movies (reportedly $55 million in Casino Royale with Ford coughing up $25 million of it), the producers of Harold's movie missed out by not involving Oral-B…
The latest smart toothbrush from Braun's Oral-B has a trademarked name of Triumph (how can you claim to trademark a word like "triumph" -- smacks of Texas Instruments and its "DaVinci"). It came to my attention from a TV commercial for the product where the word computer was used to describe its operational abilities.
Whether it has a microprocessor it or not -- and I think it unlikely -- it does have some smarts. There is a timer in it that tells you when you have used the product for the dentist recommended two minutes; the same "Professional Timer" beeps each 30 seconds during your brush as an attaboy and to encourage you to switch to another "quadrant" of your mouth; and, presumably, the same timer decides that you have used a particular head insert for long enough and you need to buy more Oral-B product.
I suppose that I don't mind the marketing jargon, but I do object to an adjective being used as a noun as in "Provide a superior overall clean" and tantalizing statements like "Tracks battery charge level so you can brush with optimal power." What does that mean?
Eat your heart out, Harold Crick: your counting doesn't begin to approach the Triumph's "oscillating-pulsating technology with 40,000 in-and-out pulsations that gently loosen plaque and 8,800 back-and-forth oscillations to sweep it away." Sounds a little painful to me, even at optimal power.
