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Honolulu Lite
Charles Memminger
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Hula Chair will make you squirm
ZEALOUS protectors of our islands' unique cultural identity likely won't be as offended as they were by the launch of a nuclear attack submarine named Hawaii or a cruise ship advertisement showing King Kamehameha holding a glass of champagne, but bizarre new exercise machines dubbed the Hula Chair and the Hawaii Chair are bound to leave them squirming.
I personally find these chairs more offensive than the attack sub or Kamehameha drinking champagne, because if the king could have gotten his hands on an attack sub, you know he would have taken it and then toasted the acquisition with a bit of the bubbly. But he never, ever would have sat his royal posterior on a ridiculous electric chair that rotates the okole around like a warped 33-rpm record.
Inventors of exercise equipment have come up with a staggering variety of apparatuses that look more suited to Spanish Inquisition torture chambers than home gyms, but the arrival of the "hula chairs" means they have finally run out of ideas. It's bad enough that one company would market a "hula chair," but a second company seems to be playing copycat.
THE 9 Speed Hula Chair looks like a badly designed office chair, which I suspect is where the inventor got his idea. I imagine the guy sitting in an office chair when the seat broke and he began rocking back and forth yelling, "Hey, look! I'm doing the hula!" This is a product for people who want to get in shape but are too lazy even to get their fat butts out of a chair.
The bottom of the chair rotates, moving the buttocks around in a very nonhula way. To tie such a beautiful ancient Polynesian dance into what looks like a human stuck in a blender is unfortunate. The fact that it costs $375 is even more unfortunate. The Hula Chair brags that it is "the original" because another company is marketing the Hawaii Chair, an identical piece of nonsense. You can pick up the Hawaii Chair for "six easy payments of $69.99" or, I suppose, 350 easy payments of $1.
The spokes-huckster in the Hawaii Chair infomercial is inexplicably Miss Arkansas 1997. (Hawaii should be happy for this.)
Aside from weight loss, the electric okole chairs allegedly "give the intestines and stomach a rhythmic massage helping with indigestion and constipation."
All I know is that just watching the infomercial ("Aloha Tamara! Aloha Brad!") left my stomach and intestines on the verge of a major eruption.
Buy Charles Memminger's hillarious new book, "Hey, Waiter, There's An Umbrella In My Drink!" at island book stores or
online at any book retailer. E-mail him at
cmemminger@starbulletin.com