All the recent news items below are real, believe it or not
BOFFINS IN JAPAN have developed a “smell bomb”. Deaf people can use them as silent fire alarms. When the device, made by Air Water Safety Service of Osaka, detects smoke, it unleashes a blast of wasabi (Japanese green spicy paste) into the air. Tests had sleeping volunteers wide awake and racing out of the house within 120 seconds. It costs US$560.
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Who needs it? When I was a kid, my mother would unwrap a block of super-hot seeni sambol (a condiment from Sri Lanka) and the whole city stopped breathing.
Corpses sprang from the graveyard next door.
Aircraft zigzagged erratically as they passed over our house.
People in the next CONTINENT would phone to complain.
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For non-deaf people, many things can be attached to fire alarms to get folk racing out of the house in 120 seconds.
A video of William Hung performing She Bangs would do it. Or just hook up the alarm to the CD on which William Shatner “sings” Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. (Sample at the end of this column.)
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Anyway, the smell bomb story was just one of the weird things I read in the paper lately.
Is it just me, or is life becoming increasingly bizarre? I know it’s April Fool’s day but the news items below are ALL REAL.
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1. “An influx of cheap electronic goods from Asia has prompted burglars to turn to other crimes.” I think this means they’re being retrained as investment advisors.
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2. “An iPhone application offers translations of baby cries to mothers.” I think I can guess what the most frequent baby cry is. “Put that @#$% iPhone down, stupid woman, and FEED ME.”
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3. “The W Hotel in Union Square, New York, filed for bankruptcy last week, owing creditors US$100 million.” It’s actually quite an achievement to lose so much money without the help of investment advisors.
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4. “Celebrities are lining up to claim Simon Cowell's seat as a judge on American Idol. All you have to do is sit in a chair and say, ‘That was HORRIBLE.’” People who have worked as restaurant food critics in Britain or Germany are automatically front-runners.
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5. “Scientists in Italy have developed a strain of chocolate-craving mice which will tolerate any pain, including electric shocks, to get some.” Let me guess. They spliced in genes from human women.
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6. “The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons reported that breast reduction for men is their fastest-growing procedure, with breast enlargement the top procedure for women.” Couldn’t the two groups simply swap identities?
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7. “A high-cabin truck in the UK sped down an expressway without realizing that a small car was trapped on its front fender.” People around the world who put their savings into Lehman Bros mini-bonds know just how that feels.
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8. “A bankruptcy petition has been filed by the creditors of the website Sex.com.” Now that Google has pulled out of China, many surfers can’t find the site, causing its rate of visitors to fall by 1.3 billion a day.
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Now if you’ll excuse me, I just have to go and deal with someone trying to break into my house. I think it’s an investment advisor.
I’m going to put on my William Shatner record. That should get rid of him.
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