They make irresistible reading, I am won over by them, and I forget nature, so monotonous because, at least here, «non facit saltus» (and I am hoping my aircraft will behave in the same fashion). Culture, as we know, is all the more interesting if it serves to revise and correct nature. Nature is tough and hostile; culture, on the contrary, allows people to do things with less effort, saving time. Culture frees the body from the enslavement of toil and opens the way to contemplation.
Just think, for example, how tedious it is to handle a nasal spray, one of those little pharmaceutical bottles that you press with two fingers to allow a beneficent aerosol to penetrate the nostrils. But relief is at hand! Just insert the bottle into the Viralizer machine ($4.95), and it is squeezed for you, so efficiently that the spray reaches the most intimate areas of the respiratory tract. Naturally, you have to hold the machine in your hand, and the photographs suggest a Kalashnikov being fired, but then everything comes at a price.
I am struck (but I hope not literally shocked) by Omniblanket, which costs all of $150. At the simplest level, it is an electric blanket, but it can be programmed so that the temperature varies from one part of your body to another. In other words, if during the night your back feels cold but your groin tends to sweat, you adjust the program accordingly. Omniblanket will then keep your back warm and your groin cool. If you are nervous and toss and turn in your sleep, ending up with your head at the foot, then you’re just out of luck.
You will roast your testicles or whatever you have in that area, depending on your sex. I doubt the inventor can be asked to make improvements, because it seems he was burned to a cinder some time ago.
Naturally, in your sleep, you might snore and disturb your partner, if you have one. Well, in that case, try Snorestopper, a kind of watch you fasten onto your wrist before sleeping. The moment you begin to snore the Snorestopper, alerted by an audio-sensor, emits an electronic signal that, from your arm, reaches some of your nerve centers and interrupts something or other; anyway, you stop snoring. It costs only $45. One drawback: it is not advisable for those with heart trouble, and I wonder if it might not endanger the health even of an Olympic athlete. Furthermore, it weighs two pounds. You could use it, no doubt, with your husband or wife after decades of familiar intimacy, but hardly with a near-stranger during a night of romance. Making love with a two-pound weight on your wrist could cause alarming side effects.
It is well known that, to reduce their cholesterol levels, the Americans have long since taken up jogging: they run for hours and hours until they drop dead of a heart attack. Pulse-Trainer ($59.95), worn on the wrist, is attached by a wire to a little rubber sheath slipped over the index finger. When your cardiovascular system is on the brink of collapse, an alarm goes off, apparently. A real achievement, if you consider that in underdeveloped countries a person stops running only when he is out of breath—a highly primitive criterion, and perhaps for this reason children in Ghana are not brought up to jog. It is curious, however, that despite such neglect, their blood cholesterol levels are almost imperceptible. With Pulse-Trainer you may run without a care and, further, if you attach to your chest and your waist the two Nike Monitor straps, an electronic voice, programmed by a microprocessor and featuring Doppler-Effect UltraSound, will tell you how many miles you have run and your median speed ($300).
For the animal lover I would advise Bio/Bet. You slip it around your dog’s neck and it emits ultrasounds (Pmbc Circuit) that kill fleas. And it costs only $25. I don’t know whether, applied to your own body, it would eliminate crabs; I’d be afraid of overkill. Batteries not included. The dog has to go out and buy his own.
Shower Valet ($34.95), a single unit that can be hung on the wall, provides you with a no-mist shaving mirror, integrated radio-TV, and both razor-blade and shaving-cream dispensers. According to the ad, it can transform your boring morning routine into an «experience to remember.» Spice Track ($36.95) is an electric machine stocked with little tubes of all the spices you might wish. In poor households the spices are kept in a row on a shelf over the gas stove, and when, for example, the family wants some cinnamon on its daily dish of caviar, they have to sprinkle the spice with their fingers. But, as a member of the privileged class, you will simply tap out an algorithm (in Turbo-Pascal, I believe), and the spice of your choice will come spinning to a stop right in front of you.
If you want to give that special person a present for his or her birthday, a mere thirty dollars is enough to have him/her sent a copy of the New York Times of the date of his/her birth. If he/she was born on the day of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, or on the day of the Messina earthquake, that’s just too bad. This gift can also be useful in humiliating people you dislike, if they happen to have been born on a day when nothing occurred.
During flights of some length, for three or four dollars, you can hire headsets that allow you to hear various musical programs and the sound track of the in-flight movie. For frequent and compulsive travelers with a pathological fear of AIDS, the sum of $19.95 will buy a personal, or rather personalized (sterilized), headset you can carry with you whenever you fly.
As you move from one country to another, you will want to know how many German marks a British pound is worth, or how many Spanish doubloons you need to buy a thaler. The underprivileged use a pencil or a ten-dollar pocket calculator. They look up the exchange rate in the newspaper and they multiply. But the rich can purchase a twenty-dollar Currency Converter: it gives the same answer as the calculator, but every morning your CEO has to reprogram it according to the newspaper values, and in all likelihood it is unable to answer the (non-monetary) question: what’s six times six? The exquisite aspect is that this instrument, costing twice as much, does half what the others can do.
Then there are the various miracle engagement organizers (Master Day Time, Memory Pal, Loose-leaf Timer, etc.). A miracle organizer, superficially, is like an ordinary engagement book (except that as a rule it won’t fit into any pocket). As in an ordinary engagement book, for example, after September 30 you find October 1. What changes is the description. Imagine—the helpful example goes—that on January 1 you make an appointment for 10 A.M. on December 20, almost twelve months in the future. No human mind can memorize such an insignificant detail for so long. So what do you do? On January 1, you open the book to the page for December 20 and you write, «10 A.M., Mr. Smith.» Wonder of wonders! For most of the rest of the year you can forget that burdensome engagement. And then, at 7 A.M. on December 20, as you are eating your breakfast cereal, you open the book and, as if by miracle, you remember your appointment…. But what if on December 20—I ask—you wake up at eleven and don’t look at your book until noon? Answer: if you have spent fifty dollars for the miracle organizer, you will at least have the common sense to get up every morning at seven.
To save time at your toilet on that busy December 20 there is the tempting Electric Nose Hair Remover, or Rotary Clipper, for sixteen dollars. This is an instrument that would have fascinated the Marquis de Sade. You stick it into your nose (as a rule) and, as it rotates, it snips off the hairs inside, inaccessible to the nail scissors with which the poor usually, and vainly, attempt to cut them. I haven’t been able to find out whether or not there is a macro version for your pet elephant.
Cool Sound is a portable refrigerator for picnics, with built-in TV. The Fish Tie is a necktie in the form of a cod, one hundred percent polyester. The Coin Changer (a little machine that dispenses small change) spares you the trouble of having to dig into your pocket before buying the newspaper: unfortunately, it takes up the space of the reliquary containing St. Alban’s femur. There is no information as to where you will find the coins to fill it.
Tea, provided it is of good quality, requires only a vessel for boiling water, a spoon, and, if you like, a strainer. Tea Magic ($9.95) is a highly complicated apparatus that succeeds in making the preparation of a cup of tea as laborious as that of a cup of Turkish coffee.
I suffer from various liver ailments, excess uric acid, atrophic rhinitis,
