Product report: Hoodia, the Wonder Cactus

If you’ve ever looked over on the right side of this page, you might have noticed that I’ve got a little ad up trying to sell some hoodia. I’ve never had any myself, but a lot of people seem to like it, so I made a whole blog about hoodia to try and get some money out of it before the whole thing blows over. If you click on that ad, or any of those on the hoodia page, the vitamin company sends me a cut of what they make on it. It all comes out of their part, and the people buying the hoodia don’t have to pay any extra. So it doesn’t hurt them to click the ads, but they’ve got nothing to gain from it either, since they’re gonna have to pay the same no matter who gets the money. My plan’s to try to work with the hoodia a while, and then if things don’t pick up there I’ll probably move on to something else that there’s a lot of interest in, like iPods or pornography.

I thought it might be a nice gesture on my part if I checked out the hoodia to see if it really did anything, rather than just relying on some bushmen and TV news people. I didn’t really want to take it myself and kill my own appetite, cause if I didn’t want to eat there wouldn’t be much left that I did want to do, except maybe watch some TV, and I’m not even so keen on that until they get some new shows on. I don’t have much interest in watching those old shows over again, because by now I already know that they’re not any good, but with the new shows you don’t know that yet. You know what they say, hope springs eternal. Besides, I don’t weigh a whole lot as it is, and if I quit eating it’d just make things worse.

So instead I talked my roomie Linda into clicking on the ad and sending away for some. It came last week and she’s been taking it a few days, so I asked her what she thought of it. (This next part is the real product report. All the rest is stuff I threw in extra because I drank a little more green tea than usual.) Linda says that it did take away a good deal of her appetite, and that also she felt a bit more energetic than usual and that it knocked back the ADD and improved her ability to concentrate. She hadn’t expected anything more than the appetite part, and seemed pretty pleased to have gotten the other effects for no extra charge.

I wasn’t surprised about the extra effects, because I had read a similar report from those bushmen. They like to take it to go on these long hunting trips--seems it keeps them from getting tired of hunting quite so fast, and furthermore if they don’t catch anything, they don’t feel as bad about it as they usually would, but just eat some more hoodia. I don’t know if that occurs generally for most people, or if it’s just the bushmen and Linda, but if it does I hope the FDA doesn’t get wind of it, or I never will get anything out of those ads. For the most part the government doesn’t mind you taking something to fix a problem you’ve got--even if it gives you something worse than you already had, like that Vioxx--just so long as it doesn’t make you feel any happier than you did before you took it. If it comes out that people are taking something that makes them more cheerful than seems reasonable, the government will step right in and put a stop to it. For example, if you were to go on a big hunting trip but you didn’t catch anything, then when you got back home there wasn’t anything to eat there either, but instead of getting down about it you just thought “Oh, what the hell!” and kicked back with a glass of water and a big smile on your face, that’s the sort of thing the government would find vexatious, and would have to try to do something about it.

I would like to thank Linda for taking the hoodia and then reporting back to us about how it worked for her, and for clicking on that ad when she went to get it. I often test stuff first on Linda, because she’s got a strong constitution, and nothing bothers her very much. Over the years I’ve tried out a bunch of things on her, radioactive isotopes and all sorts of stuff, and she’s never had much of a problem with any of it. Once this guy told me that it wasn’t ethical to use Linda as a guinea pig, but you know how some people never are satisfied with what anyone else is doing, if they didn’t think of it themselves. The thing is that if I’d wanted a guinea pig, I’d have just gotten one at the store. I picked Linda on purpose because I thought she’d do a better job than that guinea pig, and not require so much cleaning up after.

It’s not like I try to hide the stuff in her food or something and trick her into eating it like you have to do with a cat—I always just hand it to her and say “Here, take this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s like a vitamin, kind of.”

She’s always come through OK, and I think that isotope thing is working out really well for her, cause if she has to get up in the night now for some reason, she can see where she’s going, and not run into stuff, and other people can find her in the dark too, if they need to. If I’d had some isotopes myself I probably wouldn’t have hit my toe on that mop bucket that Linda left out in the hall when I got up to go pee last night. The fact is I was meaning to have some, except that a little later I read where they’d given it to some rats, and they didn’t take to it like Linda had, and then they pulled it off the market. Though by then it was too late for those rats, and they never did quite get over it. I was sorry to hear about that, because when I was a kid I had a rat named Fred who made a pretty nice pet, so I have more feeling for rats that people do generally. Anyway, I wasn’t sure whether I’d prove to be more like Linda or a rat, so I decided to steer clear of that stuff, even though you could still get it on the internet for a while.