Beaning For Jesus

Two years ago I gave up chocolate for Lent. I'm not talking about not eating a certain type of candy bar, either. I gave up all chocolate, in all forms. It kind of sucked. Even with as much chocolate gorging as I got to do on Easter, it was still not worth it. Last year I decided not to do that again and went the other way, committing to doing something every day. Eventually I settled on biking, at first going for time and then a specific distance. Turns out I kind of liked biking and just kept on doing it, only missing about 10 days in the year it has been going on. So, as Lent was approaching I figured I should pick something new to start doing, since I appear to take to that a lot more than when I have to give something up. (By the way, if you are wondering where this devotion for giving up something for Lent comes from, especially considering how much of a lapsed Catholic I am in the other aspects of my life (chances I eat meat on Friday are about 95%), your guess is as good as mine. I can only assume it comes from the deadline aspect of Lent and the fact that I am super competitive. If the Pope came out and gave me an exact date as to when God was arriving I think I would be a much more attentive Catholic.) Anyway, after some consideration, I think I finally came up with a good activity: Beaning for Jesus.

For those of you who may not watch a lot of late-night television infomercials, the Bean is essentially a one-person, curved air mattress which you inflate and it allegedly helps you do crunches and other stomach-reducing exercises. It was quite the fad in the late '00s, so much so that at one time my parents' house had three of these Beans in it. Well, now I've got my hands on one and I'm committing to using it for the next 40 days. I haven't totally figured out how this is going to work, but I'm planning to start out doing a certain number of crunches a day and see if I pull an ab muscle, which would be a clear sign that God is displeased with my plan. If that happens I will adjust on the fly and go find something else to do. (I'm kind of keeping it vague in the hopes that will lower expectations and make it easier to keep going all the way through Lent.) Not to mention, I think that by allowing myself to switch around what exercises I do that will keep me interested. I hardly think this experiment is going to wind up with me having six-pack abs in the next 40 days, but it couldn't really hurt to try.

However, there is another thing which concerns me about my plan beyond the actual crunches and that is the fact that the Bean website is no longer up and running. The bean I got from my dad has a web address printed on it, but when I attempted to go to that website to see what kind of exercises may be available one of those generic "for sale" screens popped up. Normally this kind of thing only happens when you assume a company's website is one address and it turns out to be another, but by putting in the right address and getting one of those screens it means the company no longer owns that domain name and that can't be a good sign. You can still find Beans on places like Amazon and Overstock, but in this day and age of being able maintain websites for cheap money, the fact that this company decided it was no longer worth it to hold on to the domain name for their product can only mean they didn't have any money. Like I said, this was not some exercise fad from the 1980s which I was hoping to bring back. There are so many abandoned websites for products which aren't for sale anymore out there that are still up and running it is kind of rare to see a company which actually bothered to take their site down. They must have been hurting financially. It makes me question just how effective a product this thing really is. Face it - if you are trying to sell something these days and you don't have a website it would be like attempting to get a record contract by mailing all the major labels an 8-track. I mean, Chia Pets still have a working website but not the Bean?

Now, I don't like to think of myself as overly-snobby about my stuff. I don't feel like the things I buy have to be the latest and the greatest, but that doesn't mean I want to be using old, faulty equipment. There is something unnerving about planning to use a product and discovering they don't even make anymore. You certainly wouldn't eat food from a store that went out of business the next day. That may seem like a bit of an extreme, so I'll give you another example: in high school I used to drive around a hand-me-down Dodge Ram van. As much as I liked this vehicle, I knew it was time to start looking for a new car when the auto parts store no longer got the parts catalog and when I needed to order something to keep the engine running they had to look up the correct part numbers on microfiche. This is kind of that same principle. If something breaks, there isn't much I can do about it and the fact they've closed up shop makes me wonder if that happened a lot. Let's just say I am suddenly not brimming with confidence that my Bean will survive to Easter.