Jumping the Shark (Immediately)

There’s jumping the shark because you’re crossing into the second decade of your TV show about an aging motorcycle dude who still hangs out with high school kids and there’s jumping the shark immediately, for no good reason, right at the beginning.

Fonzie jumped the shark after 10 years. LED smart bulbs did it faster than you can strap on a pair of waterskis that complement your iconic leather jacket.

Because those bulbs completely skipped any sort of mainstream, vaguely normal use case and were immediately marketed as technicolor LED shows to work alongside gaming computers with RGB lighting and dorm room disco balls.

While normal-ass adults would have been delighted to hear that they can turn any lights in their homes into easily-controlled cool-to-warm dimmers controlled by their phones, these were always billed as a way to induce seizures by making red and green flashes that keep time with your Trans-Siberian Orchestra holiday soundtrack.

Instead of selling these things at that weird store at the mall alongside lava lamps and black light posters, they really should have been at the home goods store between the live-laugh-love wall art and the tasteful garden gnomes (as opposed to the gnomes we have here sometimes). It really could have made all the difference.

So if you’re a normal boring adult (or a wonderfully unhinged adult with some appetite for normal boring lighting), these are exactly what you’ve needed all these years. You no longer need to be limited to that one switch in the dining room that happens to have a dimmer built in—the softly glowing white light of the world is your oyster. At least it will be if you buy a six-pack of these and use them how you will.

Oh, and if you do happen to be into wacky programmable multi-colored lighting? That’s cool, too. But maybe you want one room in your house that has a little subtle sophistication, unlike that other room in your house, where you let your freak flag fly.

Killer deal, by the way. They were $80 at Target. And they sell both the disco balls and the live-laugh-love bullshit. So they would know.