Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Importance of Proper Titles

It seems to me that much of the advice given until the heading of "Life Hacking" was formerly available to readers of Redbook, or Woman's Day, or to the students of home economics classes, back in the days of strict gender separation. It may be that much of the remaining information was available in men's magazines of the 1940's and 1950's, or shop class. I don't really know. But here is a little "life hack" or household helpful hint, now available to all generations and genders.
One of the lovely things about summer is the easy availability of local, in season fruit. One of the less lovely results is that often, the fruit attracts fruit flies into your kitchen. Rather than buying traps that will need replacing, here is an easy (and nice smelling) fruit fly trap.
1 small shallow bowl
a small amount of a fruit based vinegar. (cider vinegar works well, I use raspberry vinegar)
a drop of dishwashing liquid to break the surface tension of the
vinegar.

Pour the vinegar into the bowl, you don't need very
much. Add the drop of dishwashing liquid. Leave near the fresh
fruit, or where you are finding the fruit flies.
*I'll bet with this blogpost title, you thought I was going to be writing about covens or magical orders or such. The point was that something titled "life hack" was far more likely to be read by an audience of the male gender than something titled "household helpful hints." And much more likely to be publicly crowed over as something new and remarkable.

5 comments:

Texan Zombie Goddess said...

I love tips like this! Thank you!

Jason Miller, said...

Marketing is important :-)

petoskystone said...

still working on getting the grandchildren to eat fruit!

Theo Huffman said...

Funny how "geeks" were decidedly unsexy, but "hackers" (think Julian Assange) are the new rock stars. Go figure.

As Ronald Reagan would have said: one man's geek is another man's hacker.

Unknown said...

I'm not going to front. If the title for this had been "household helpful hints", I'd not have read it. =( Excellent point.

...I'm glad I did though, how useful!