the dangers of bruising and damage to the drum aside, stick contton buds in your ear is bad hoodoo. i use them to clear up wax, but they leave little traces of cotton all over. wax exists in the ear to stop things, like cotton, reaching parts the shouldn't. as such, my ear soon raps the cotton in little waxy parcels; and so the process repeats.
what we need, and buds that don't fall apart. we need tips that are high enough friction to almost be sticky in the ear, but without leaving glue (or anything else) behind. i thought about some kind of rubber, but i don't think it's up to the job. wax sticks to cotton quite well, but i think it would lubricate rubber. what we need are buds like the feet of many small climbing animals.
thousands of tiny hairs would cover the tip. the friction is created my the incredible surface area. ahem, the 'good bud'.-- seanbo, Dec 21 2004 News story about ideal material http://www.theheral...var.1555679.0.0.php20th July 2007 - if this material is cheap enough, i think we can successfully upgrade this idea to 'fully baked' [seanbo, Jul 20 2007] I thought this was gonna be an invention that stops Budweiser tasting like piss. I was disappointed.-- etherman, Dec 21 2004 I thought it would be a novel method for flowering cannabis.-- wagster, Dec 21 2004 I am picturing velcro Q-tips.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Dec 21 2004 Perhaps wax tips, which would substitute wax for cotton. It would be exactly the same chemical composition as earwax, and so would stick well to earwax. It could be colored deep blue, so you would know if some was left in your ear. Actually each box would be a different color, because you would not know some was left in there until next time you tried to remove it, and it would be hard to distinguish old blue wax from new. You would use a red waxtip to remove blue wax, a green wax tip to remove red, white to remove green, then back to blue. Using them in the wrong order would be illegal.-- bungston, Dec 21 2004 [Tabs] - having your ears injected with a lot of someone else's earwax.-- wagster, Dec 21 2004 That would be sueded polyester, baked. [wagster], that would be ultra-violet LEDs.-- mensmaximus, Dec 21 2004 wax tips eh? not a bad idea really. wax certainly sticks to wax. but would the wax stick to your ear better than it would to the bud?
etherman & wagster: this half baked idea was brought to you by health & ears, so it was never going to improve your collection of recreational drugs. that said, nothing can stop budweiser from tasting like piss. the two of you might want to venture into to holland or switzerland, where you can get the propper german budweiser and all sorts of flowering cannabis.-- seanbo, Dec 22 2004 Ahhh Budvar. Having heard (second hand) from my great grandmother that the only thing I should stick in my ear is the opposite elbow, I have to be cautious about this.
Disregarding ancestral advice completely, I use the cotton swab on plastic stick thingies that the manufacturers tell you not to stick in your ear, despite the appearance that they were designed for that purpose. I haven't yet noticed them leaving any cotton behind.-- st3f, Dec 22 2004 st3f - the cotton they leave behind is so small as to be unoticable. in fact, that's the problem.
tabs - i know it's from the czech republic, but budweiser is actually the german name (as opposed to budejovicky), that's why you can get it in countries close to germany, like holland and switzerland. in fact, you can get it from anywhere in europe, even tescos.-- seanbo, Dec 23 2004 some lovely beaches on Tescos.-- po, Dec 23 2004 i just added a link to a news story that explains an invention made by some fellas either side of the pond.
this bit is just here as a reference to when the link was added compared to other comments (ie, after the ones before here)-- seanbo, Jul 20 2007 random, halfbakery