Composed on a pad of Paper v1.0

I was watching television last night (I know what you’re thinking: “Sheesh, no good can come of that!”) and I happened to see an advertisement extolling the virtues of a new toothbrush, courtesy of our good friends at Oral-B. It seems that I have not been getting the full oral hygiene experience, and that it now requires and on-board computer to assist my fellow sapiens in the difficult and highly technical task of brushing their teeth. Let us all hope that it comes with a wifi link to MapQuest, so that anyone stupid enough to think that they need one of these contraptions can at least find directions to an orifice to stick it in. After purchasing one, I plan to keep mine next to my touch-screen-activated toilet paper.

Lest you worry about our hero, I was able to control my wrath and got a pretty good night’s sleep, in spite of the wild dreams that come with wearing a nicotine patch. I got up this morning and felt just ducky until I tuned into NPR (while showering) and discovered what some of my fellow humans (probably the same ones with the computerized toothbrushes) were drinking this fine morning for breakfast – you’re gonna love this:

An 8-ounce cup of Kopi Luwak coffee sells for $10 at Jim Cone's "Coffee and Tea Limited" store in Minneapolis. One-pound bags go for $420. Oh my, but this gets even better. Kopi Luwak comes from Indonesia and is also called Civet coffee because the beans are first eaten by Civet cats. The cats apparently love red coffee beans, especially the skin, so they eat them. After they have “processed” them in their bodies and discharged them, people actually pick them up and clean them. The collected partially digested beans are exported all over the world. I’m not lying here, check the story out at the following link:

http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_008062023.html

So let me see if I have this surrounded…after being so imbecilic as to think that they require electronic assistance to clean their pearly-whites, folks are actually going out and not only drinking cat-shit coffee, but are paying $10 a cup for the privilege. I think that I speak for all of us when I say, “Hmmmmmn!?!”

This is hardly unprecedented, however, and there are even words we can summon up in order to converse with other enlightened minds (at least those not drinking ten-dollar mugs of steaming TidyCat) and that describe what happens when ingenuity goes awry. “Chindogu” is the Japanese word coined for the art of the useless idea. The art of Chindogu was born in the late 1980's when amateur inventor Kenji Kawakami discovered that a not-quite-usable idea for a new gadget or product could nonetheless be enjoyable if one were to create a prototype and take delight in the way it misses its mark. The term “chindogu” entered the English vocabulary in 1991 when then senior society member Dan Papia published an article on the subject in Japan's leading English-language magazine, the Tokyo Journal.

Some examples of early chindogu include the Alarm Fork (US patent number 5,421,089 / issued 1995) which beeps to tell you when you might have consumed too many calories. There was also the Butter Pen (pictured) for those who do not own or don’t care to use silverware. If you like that, you’ll certainly not want to miss out on a Solar Powered Night-Light (no explanation needed there). For the fitness enthusiast, there is the Downhill Stairmaster and Low-calorie PowerBars. If you are too lazy to extend your arm (literally), perhaps a remote control for your Video iPod is in order. United States patents have been issued for candy bars with stannous fluoride added to prevent the tooth decay that they cause, for battery powered battery chargers, for reduced calorie (and low-carb) water, and for AC adapters for solar calculators. You can even buy a camcorder with Braille-encoded buttons. My absolute favorite bad idea, however, has to be Survivor, the Videogame.

Miller’s Law #21 (see my entry of 11/8/06): Just because a thing can be done, does not necessarily mean that it should be done.

I remember the first LED digital watch that I ever saw as a lad, it was a Seiko that sold for well over $300 in 1978 dollars. Several years later, manufacturers were able to produce small LCD digital clocks for mere pennies. Of course, they soon started to appear on the dashboards of cars, on coffee makers, on flashlights, in cereal boxes, etc. They became so ubiquitous that you could find them anywhere. The thinking seemed to be that any product, say a loaf of bread, could be made much better by adding a digital clock to it, so that one would know exactly what time it was when, or for how long, one was using the product. It is classic “if some is good, more must be better” thinking. It became ridiculous, and the same is true today. Do I really need ten blades on my disposable razor? Do I need for it to be battery operated (check your local pharmacy, they are for sale) thus eliminating dreaded shaving-fatigue. Do I need a GPS system built into my Nikes in order to navigate my neighborhood, or can I just check a map, which has been lovingly printed on good old-fashioned paper, version 1.0?