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WalletPop editor-at-large Jason Cochran interviews a couple of entrepreneurs who've made millions, 99 cents at a time, by selling their unique iPhone apps. Don't be turned off by the names - iFart is one of the apps, for instance - these are true stories of how some, er, creative types are making a buck. Or lots of bucks. Like the $39,000 worth of iFart apps that were downloaded on Christmas Day as new iPhone owners decided they simply had to have it on their phones. Watch this video to find out what led to these extraordinary success stories.

The Product: Topsy Turvy Tomato Planter
The Price: $19.99 plus $7.95 shipping and handling
The Claims: Grows delicious tomatoes without the back-breaking work.
Buy-O-Meter Rating: 4 out of 5

If you've got pets, you've got pet hair, and The Furminator claims to be one of the best pet hair combs out there. Find out what happens when WalletPop contributor Lisa Kaplan Gordon puts it to work on her furry friend.

The World's Longest Yard Sale is the flea market of your fantasies. For four days in August, Highway 127, running through six states, is converted into one 675-mile rummage opportunity. The game: Drive 30 seconds, pull over, browse, buy, get back in car. Repeat until exhausted. Jason Cochran went to rural Tennessee, where the sale was born and where it's still headquartered, to show you what a marathon of bargains looks like.
The idea for the World's Longest Yard Sale started small, in Jamestown, Tenn. It came about in the 1980's as a way of pulling tourists off Interstate 40, which beelines between Nashville and Knoxville, so that they'd spend a little money in the countryside.

What's smaller than a bread box, easy on the environment, and cool enough for your kindergartner, fifth grader and high school student? That would be a bento box.





Bento -- a single-portion meal packed into a re-usable box, are as common as our brown bags in Japan. Traditionally they're filled with rice balls (o-nigiri), bits of fish or tofu, and some pickled or grilled vegetables. But with their growing popularity in the west, intrepid lunch-packers are learning that just about anything fits into a bento.

Of course, you're free to turn your kids onto o-nigiri (triangle-shaped rice balls with a bit of fish or pickled plumb tucked in the middle). They're the Japanese equivalent of a PB&J. Nutritious, delicious ... and way more healthy than that PB&J.

Interested in learning more? Here's a super-cool site featuring a wide-variety of bento boxes. And the go-to site for learning how to fill them? Lunchinabox.net, of course. Plug in your rice cooker and get started on the newest way to pack a back-to-school lunch.

Don't even think about buying a house - that's the advice of financial analyst James Altucher in conversation with DailyFinance's Nikhil Hutheesing. What does he think we should do with that money? Invest, invest, invest.

The market is in the toilet - what better time to look at new investments that are priced to sell. Watch this Daily Finance video for three smart picks right now, according to one investment analyst.

The Product: Shake Weight
The Price: Online $19.95 plus $9.95 shipping and handling
The Claims: Tones and firms arms and shoulders in just 6 minutes a day.
Buy-O-Meter Rating (1 to 5): 1
Shake Weight is a one-joke hand weight whose pumping, throbbing and grinning infomercial is making hearts pound -- but not in a good way. The 2.5-pound dumbbell, with springs on both ends, claims to tone flabby arms and work shoulder and chest muscles in just 6 minutes a day.

Theoretically, you can shake the weight different ways to work different upper body muscles. I did feel the burn when I tested the Shake Weight -- a burn in my neck, the result of tightly gripping the dumbbell so it wouldn't shake out of my hands and through the window.

In fact, the Shake Weight info-models look like they're having a lot more fun than I had. The weight doesn't produce the same satisfying pump as seen on TV. And it's awkward to shake in almost every position. Personal trainers I consulted say Shake Weight is a waste of money. "It's virtually useless," says Kim Sanborn, a Virginia trainer who concluded that the dumbbell is not heavy enough to sculpt muscles or increase heart rates significantly. "You'd have to do 10,000 repetitions." One Shake Weight costs $19.95 plus $9.95 shipping and handling.

A couple of 2-pound hand weights cost half that and can condition muscle systems throughout the body, Sanborn says. Shaking just about anything for 6 minutes a day is a better workout than lying still on a couch.

But pumping the Shake Weight exercises only one thing -- your imagination. Read more of our As Seen on TV product reviews and send suggestions for products you'd like to see us review to ConsumerAlly@WalletPop.com.

In this world of paying upmarket prices to dress down, nothing defies logic like paying $500 for a pair of ripped-up designer jeans. The more distressed and downright ratty they are, the more fashion cred they have. If you are pining for that frayed but expensive look, watch this video and find out how you can 'design' your own.

Two hundred and 11 years after his death, George Washington still surprises. The custodians of his old estate at Mount Vernon, Virginia have just begun distilling and bottling whiskey using Washington's own recipe. Bet you didn't know that our First President was also one of America's biggest whiskey producers. But there's more to the story that that. I went to Mount Vernon to see the rebuilt distillery, check out the whiskey, and find out what George Washington has to say about his choice of business venture.





You see, George was one of the guys who helped institute the first big federal tax upon Americans. In the early 1790s, our toddler government decided prove its power to the population in one swoop by creating and enforcing the collection of a tax on whiskey.

It wasn't popular. We were a country of mostly farmers back then, and most of us didn't have much money. The tax also favored the big whiskey producers and was tough on the folks who just made it for their families and their communities.

Some of the men who made whiskey in Pennsylvania, many of them straight off the boat from the champion distilleries of Scotland, decided they would fight to stop the American government from -- gasp! -- reaching into their pockets to fish out a tax.

They tarred and feathered some unfortunate tax collectors, which was an extremely painful fate, and burned down some of their houses. The government, embarrassed, decided that being flouted like that would set a bad precedent, so they they sent some 13,000 troops -- more than in most battles of the Revolutionary War -- to the Pittsburgh area to quell the violence and force the new Americans to cough up their money.

The guy who led those troops and aimed his guns at the anti-tax rebellion was, by the end of the decade, himself one of the country's biggest whiskey producers: George Washington. He helped crush the mom-and-pop American whiskey industry -- and then he learned to dominate it.

Say it ain't so, Georgie!