Inventors have made it feel like a game
BOFFINS HAVE finally created a way to make men do the housework and like it: mops and trash cans guided by handheld game controllers.
Guys can sit on the sofa and use buttons and joysticks to make the Sugoi (“incredible”) Mop zoom around the floor, brilliantly moving dust particles from their original locations to new, exciting locations a few centimeters away.
And if the guy’s sofa itself gets filled with snack detritus and beer cans, they use a different remote control to summon the GomibaGo (“trashcan-go”), a bin on wheels. Men can thus clear their sofa without vacating it. Genius.
These wonderful products come courtesy of a reader named Hiroto in Japan.
He himself is waiting for an even cooler device, successfully prototyped by an inventor called FRP. You toss garbage in the general direction of the Intelligent Trashcan, and it scoots at high speed to the exact right spot to catch it. (Here’s a video of it.)
I MUST have this product, which would make my ultimate ambition come true: to live in a world that feels like a cartoon. (An aim that is shared, I suspect, by most males, even if they don’t know it.)
How well do these devices work? Hiroto said: “They clean superficially and not very well—in other words, they clean the house just like men.”
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IN OTHER NEWS…
IN THE past two weeks, there have been at least six cases of members of the US pro-gun lobby accidentally shooting themselves. So, this is turning into one of those problems that solve themselves.
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FORGET PIRATED discs. Fakesters in China are now reproducing entire towns. I learned this after meeting people involved with erecting a new office block near my own, designed by top architect Zaha Hadid, famed for her massive, jutting lines and flying buttresses. (Her buildings are curvy too.) This is a matter of great interest to me personally, since one desk in the new Zaha building in Hong Kong has my name on it, and I’m due to move in in June.
Architects said a whole complex of wavy-lined Zaha buildings is being built on the road between Beijing and its main airport. But investigative reporters from Der Speigel magazine found an almost identical complex being built in Chongqing, central China.
(Original)
(copy)
They are so similar that architects said: “It is possible that the Chongqing pirates got hold of some digital files or renderings of the project.”
Meanwhile, builders in Guangdong have created a copy of an entire Austrian village, complete with lager louts and Hitler as a small boy.
Soon, China’s tens of millions of tourists can just stay at home all year. “Look, there’s Paris. Look, there’s New York. Etc.”
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DID YOU read about the massive cheese fire that closed down a road tunnel in Norway for six days? Who knew cheese was flammable? Is it a potential weapon? “Stick your hands up or I will light this Kraft Processed Single.”
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USEFUL MEMO from reader Mio Debnam of Hong Kong: “Note to self: next time I renovate, buy doorknobs, not handles. The dog, who is tall enough to press down on the handle, keeps bursting into my bedroom and even the bathroom all the time. He doesn't even knock.”
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PEOPLE IN Taiwan are up in arms after it was revealed that local financial firms are taking bets with families on the dates elderly relatives will die. Hang on. Isn’t that what we call Life Insurance?
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A READER named Dul suggested that Keepers, the Japanese anti-embarrassment firm, should rush to locations of accidents and change people’s underwear so that doctors are not shocked and dismayed.
On the other hand, Lift Lurker reckons that people wearing non-fresh underwear are likely to be more careful so less likely to get into accidents.
Clearly this is a topic that needs scientific research.
Incidentally, why do commandos not wear underwear? Surely with the dangerous situations they get themselves into, they need it more than anyone?
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