Preposterous Products: the talking vodka bottle

Life used to be so simple. If you drank a lot and found the bottle talking back to you, you know you've had enough, and that it's time to stop. Conversely, if you were a bartender, and you saw one of your patrons having a conversation with the bottle, you knew it was time to call a cab and send the lush home.

That may change. Or at least in Russia, bickering with one's bottle of booze will no longer be considered odd.

As BBC News recently reported, in Russia, where drinking vodka is a national pastime, they've come up with the world's first ever talking vodka bottle top.

Every time you remove the cap from the bottle (" a vodka genie bottle top"), a voice starts talking, offering a series of popular Russian toasts. The voice also encourages people to drink up.

And then proving that Russian scientists and vodka marketers have a sense of humor, every successive time you open the bottle, the vodka genie's speech becomes more and more slurred.

And I used to think the Hallmark talking cards were clever.

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Geoff Williams is a business journalist and the author of C.C. Pyle's Amazing Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America (Rodale).