As-seen-on-TV gadgets go live

Josh Eastman picks up an old Styrofoam box and sticks on a little black button half the size of a golf ball with a thin black wire hanging from it.

Suddenly the sound of Pearl Jam booms from the box and echoes through the Expo Hall at the Florida State Fair, loud enough to turn heads 30 yards away.

"This can turn anything into a high-fidelity speaker," Eastman says, sticking the tiny SonicQuake speaker on an empty box of granola bars, then a tissue box, then an empty pizza box.

"You might have surround-sound at home, but what good does that do you in a hotel room. You can take this little guy anywhere and stick it on anything."

Price: $50, with discounts for buying more than one.

Eastman and his SonicQuake occupy a busy corner in the Marrakesh-like bazaar of the fair, next to the hot tubs, jewelry racks, magnetic balance bracelets, grandfather clocks, bins of taffy and $39 teeth-whitening kiosks.

In the most authentic sense of the word, pitchmen such as Eastman come to hawk the gadgets and gizmos you didn't know you couldn't live without — like the ShamWow towel, Vitamix blender or Spin Mop.

In fact, Winnie Normile is just around the corner, showing a crowd how the Spin Mop can clean up the grubby Expo Hall itself.

After a hard scrub on the concrete floor, she dunks the mop into the handy bucket and then into a white plastic device that resembles a Salad Spinner. With a few steps on a foot lever, the mop begins a frenzied whirl, spinning out all the water until dry.

"Hey folks, let me show you how the Spin Mop works," she says as people stop to watch her cleaning the floor. "It's great for campers or your boat. Have you ever seen anything like it?"

Price: $30.

Privately, Normile confesses to idolizing the "real sellers" on television's QVC and HSN.

"Really, you're selling yourself as much as the product. … I do this because I love people and love to travel, so I'm all over the country doing this."

An aisle over is the Super Whipper, a kind of combination cooking whisk and spiral drill.

"With one motion, the whipper makes quick work of cake mixes, pudding mixes, soups, salad dressings, anything you can think of," a woman says just as her partner makes nearly the same pitch to another crowd a few yards away.

"But unlike that old whisk you have at home, this spins one direction when you push down, and the internal, durable mechanism spins the other direction on the way back up, cutting your work in half!"

Price: Two for $24.

A few kiosks down, Avery Haskell demonstrates the Go Sticky pet hair picker-upper. A passer-by, Stephanie Parsons of Ontario, Canada, already is a convert and preaching to her friends.

"Oh God, I had one of those for 15 years, and it just picked up every little thing," Parsons says, pulling on her friend's elbow to come see. "But I lost it, and the two cats, so there you go. But they really, really do work — they do!"

A kind of sticky paint roller on a long stick, the Go Sticky has a larger version, the Mighty Go, and two pocket-size versions, Mini Gos, that pick up ground-in pet hair. "Perfect for the car!" Parsons says.

Price: $29.99, but only at the show. "Oh, sorry," Parsons says. "I think I paid a lot less than that for the one I had."

Meanwhile, Jeff Hajari, an inventor, walks by looking for somewhere to pitch his product, an innovation called TwisterNock, for the sport archery market, U.S. patent No. 7,922,609.

Unlike normal arrows with feathers on the back to stabilize the shaft in flight, Hajari's arrows spin like a bullet from a rifle. Temporarily taking over the floor mat at the nearby DirecTV booth, Hajari purposefully hurls the back end of his arrow to the ground and it bounces back up spinning.

"The design of the arrow hasn't really changed in tens of thousands of years," Hajari says. "This device spins the arrow at 8,000 rpm in flight. That means a longer, straighter, more accurate flight."

Price: To be determined. For details, see www.treeapron.com.

Besides the main Expo Hall, this year's fair has the Special Events Pavilion. It has a quieter atmosphere and focuses on arts and crafts.

There, Gerald Lewis of the Montana Antler Craft company shows off his innovation: a combined flint and magnesium rod for starting fires. With a small scraper that's included, Lewis shaves off a few slivers of magnesium, then pivots the rod to show the flint side. A quick flick on the flint creates sparks that set the magnesium ablaze.

"Now, that burns at more than 4,000 degrees," Lewis says. "That means it can start a fire on wet wood in the rain."

But the coup de grace is the mounting: a polished deer antler — found shed in the woods, he said.

Price: $19.95 for a small version, $29.99 for large.

Next door is Ronnie Mixon of Decatur, Ala., and his Log Cabin Tea Company. Besides a range of herbal and medicinal teas, Mixon sells what he calls "the second-oldest knife design in the country, besides the Bowie Knife" — the Tennessee Mountain Bow Knife.

Carved from wood, the knife looks like a beefed-up violin bow. It has a razor-sharp serrated blade strung tight across the bow.

"This knife is so sharp," Mixon says, "that I cut that apple open there, and when I leave tonight, it still won't have turned brown."

Price: $40 for a knife and matching mahogany cutting board.

Along the spine of the hall there are $9.95 switch plates decorated with illustrations of the Pillsbury Dough Boy and Michelangelo's "David." There are $29 Canjo banjos made of aluminum cans, $29.95 LentiZoo towels that look like animals, $24.99 grill spatulas laser-cut with designs such as the Florida gator and Dale Earnhardt's No. 3, and clay blobs called Frumples that purportedly improve balance, sleep and focus (prices vary).

There are nameplates made of hammered horseshoes, hand-blown glass sculptures of polar bears, and wind chimes made of teapots and pounded silverware.

If all this chaotic commerce sounds like a headache in the making, there's a treatment for that, too: the Migraine Buster botanical oil.

"Just four drops on the base of your neck, and poof," seller Phyllis Burzee tells a crowd. "Who in your family is the one with headaches?"

"Oh, I am," one lady bursts out. "I get these migraines, and I'm down for like five days, let me tell you."

Burzee didn't make that sale, but she hopes busier days are ahead for the fair. Later in the day, Burzee's fortunes have turned. "It just sells like hot cakes," she says. "And it's not snake oil, believe me."

Price: $40 a bottle.

She has other items for sale, too: bottles of toenail fungus buster and all-natural, organic, botanical dog shampoo.