First of all, let's clear something up: the Fushigi Magic Ball only floats in the sense that if you hold something up, it's floating. Like if I stop typing and pick up my computer mouse right now and kind of hold it up in the air? IT FLOATS! IT LEVITATES! Mostly because I am holding it up in the air but LOOK IT'S FLOATING.

Aside from the FLOATING trickery, this is one of the few infomercial products which 100% does what it's intended to do. It's just a pity that they have to keep lying about the FLOATING thing.

The Fushigi people are aiming for a class action lawsuit, if you ask me. The commercial shows the Fushigi ball literally floating over the box! And the box itself (which I scrutinized closely at a Rite Aid earlier this week) repeatedly asserts that the ball floats.

Any child of the 80s is familiar with the Fushigi ball as "that Labyrinth thing." Many of us actually attempted to do "that Labyrinth thing." There was actually sort of a mini-craze for this at my school. I am both proud and embarrassed to admit that I was always the best at it.

Technically this is called "contact juggling," and it was developed by Michael Moschen in the early 1980s. For the movie "Labyrinth," Moschen stood behind David bowie and stuck his hands through Bowie's costume to be filmed, while Bowie held his own arms back behind him.

I recall that the trick to doing this stuff is to have a ball that's as heavy as possible, but UNBREAKABLE. Because you will drop it and fling it frequently. The weight of the ball is what keeps it on your hands - thank you, inertia - whereas a ball that's too lightweight (like a tennis ball) will tend to keep being flung by the slightest movement.

One of my friends had an actual glass ball. It was pretty awesome, and I remember when she let me borrow it to practice while sitting on the bed, it worked so much better than the racquet balls I had been using. And yet, it was so heavy that when I dropped it on my thigh, it left a severely ugly bruise and hurt like hell.

I would have been pretty stoked if I could have bought an acrylic ball. I really would have impressed my school chums! (With what a dork I was.) I even vaguely recall thinking that a clear solid acrylic ball would have been ideal. But it was the 1980s and we didn't have the internet then, and I took my idea no further. IF ONLY I HAD KNOWN.

If you don't have a Fushigi ball, or you want to save yourself the twenty bucks, you can indeed start practicing with any old ball. Go to a pet store and search for a dog ball made of solid rubber. It will give you the same size and heft, with a lesser (but still non-zero) chance of breaking a lamp.

The only real mystery about this ad is, why now? Is it like the 25th anniversary of "Labyrinth" or something?