Distracted? Attach Things to Your Head

Some laws seem incredibly stupid at first and only prove themselves after going into effect.. So, when New York's "no handheld phone use in car" law went into effect a few months ago, I was initially wary. It seemed to be another waste of effort Band-Aid law which addresses one symptom instead of treating the disease. However, after using a headset for a few months now, I'm convinced. Strapping things on your head is the only way to drive safely.

I'm an inventor, so, I've since invented several new headsets which allow people to do more things while driving than ever before. First, is the Whopper Champ. This allows busy, but safety conscious drivers to eat on the go, without looking at their food. It has a platform which holds a large fast food sandwich, fries, and has a three foot straw for a soft drink. The sandwich is fed to the driver at intervals, giving time to enjoy each bite interspersed with French fries which get vacuumed from their packs and launched into the mouth along with aerosolized ketchup. Just clamp the Champ to your head and chow down in perfect undistracted safety.

I've also developed the Coffee and Doughnut Focuser, so called because it let's a driver keep driving while it focuses on morning coffee and doughnuts. I had a few bugs in this one, at first. It turns out that coffee sucked through a straw is hotter than coffee sipped from a cup. I can't explain this, but its true. Tests also indicate that people prefer not to have coffee and doughnuts pre-mixed. This made one clever single-straw design unacceptable. The current design features a spring-loaded doughnut hopper, which ratchets doughnuts one at a time into the driver's consumption chamber...err...mouth. The driver sets the pace and, yes, it also works with bagels. Warm (not hot) coffee is sucked from a sponge leading to a coffee cup.

Another new headset I call the Babysitter. There's nothing more distracting than a child, particularly an infant, sitting in a car seat in the back. Kids say all kinds of distracting things from back there; like "I want more Juice, Dada!", "I wanta Get out!", "I need a new dinosaur, now!", "I took my diaper off", and "Who's this stranger back here?" The Babysitter solves all that by constantly stimulating a cranky child with a selection of favorite toys, snacks, beverages, and soothing songs, all while perched on the driver's head. If the troublesome child becomes too unruly, the Babysitter can calm him or her with a patented Ritalin-derived vapor called Happy Gas.

For myself, I know that pretty soon I'll have so many headsets, that I won't be distracted at all. I am already so keyed-in to my driving that I hardly pay any attention to my conversations anymore. In fact, half the time I don't even know who called. I just venture a tentative but highly undistracted "umm, what?"

I may have become too undistracted, in fact. I keep thinking about a headset that let's me take up smoking. And because I have developed so many headsets, I now seem to need a Headset Manager, which I think should also be a headset, called the Headset Headset, or maybe the Head Honcho.

I really want to thank New York State for making this article possible. After all, without this law I might have blown all my driving attention on holding my phone and wouldn't have been able to write this piece safely, using Head Pen and Head Paper, on my way to work.

The Dog's Point of View

Sometimes the difference between a prized possession and a money pit is simply a matter of perspective. For instance, I have a pure bred dog. She's a Belgium Tervern...Turvyuren...turveyon...a Belgian Turv. Her given name is Bora, which I think is Belgian for "expensive". I call her MooCoup Bucks, because that's what she cost - about twelve hundred of them. Her nickname is Moolah. She arrived as a puppy, making her worth about two hundred dollars a pound. I thought that was excessive. "Ah, but she'll grow" the breeder assured me with a twinkle.

You'd think that certain undesirable traits could be bred out of a dog - like chewing, barking, digging, and running away. But Moolah does all of those. Mostly though, she chews...and chews...and chews. She chewed the bark off the peach tree, which then died after making only one peach. A three hundred dollar tree. She chewed the seat-belts out of the car...all the seat-belts - nine hundred bucks. She brought back a neighbors shoe and chewed it in half. They won't sell you just one shoe so we replaced the pair. A hundred and fifty bucks. She chewed several toys, my gloves, a pillow, 2 dog beds, a shovel handle, her own leash and an old hat on the same day.

She also digs. And after pulling a handful of my son's beloved plastic dinosaurs, all with their heads freshly chewed clean off from one of her excavations, I knew I needed to find a new way of thinking about Moolah. So she became an investment.

To protect the neighbor's footwear, I surrounded about three acres of land with Invisible Fence. It cost about two grand and increased her value accordingly. I added everything up including her crate, air fare, collar, training, the tree and the other chewed items and figure she's still worth $200/lb...only now she weighs about 70 pounds.

I now look for ways to increase her value, like tying pork chops to 100 bills and leaving them in the lawn. I smeared peanut butter on the rest of the fruit trees, hoping she'd debark them and further add to her mounting worth.

In all truth, I know that I'd take a beating if I tried to sell her, but the bank doesn't know that, so I took out an equity line on her and if I do sell her, I should be able to declare the loss on my tax return.

The breeder was right. Moolah has grown. She's grown from a soft fluffy ball of liability into a beautiful full grown asset. And no matter what,she’s still beating the stock market over the past three years. See? It's all about how you look at it.

Partially Hydrogenated

I made some hydrogen last night...well, I didn't create it or anything...I just liberated it from a glass of water. The exotic equipment I used consisted of two #2 pencils, two wires, a 9 volt battery, and, of course, a glass of water. I strung it all together until hydrogen bubbles formed, and went to bed. In the morning, I still had plenty of water left - a nine volt won't drown you in hydrogen - but I reminded myself how simple it is. For those who don't know already, water is 2 parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. To get at the hydrogen, plug a DC current into water and hydrogen collects at one electrode and oxygen at the other. Pretty easy, but if you want to make a lot of it, consider joining the battery club at Radio Shack.

Hydrogen's been on my mind lately, because there has been so much talk about the hydrogen economy and, in particular, fuel cells powering our cars. Fuel cells take hydrogen, which is made with electricity and water and turn it back into electricity, and water. This may seem to be a rather pointless exercise, until you realize that hydrogen is very good at storing electricity, something windmills, solar panels, fusion reactors, and coal fired power plants are all very bad at. Lost in all the fuel cell fervor is that you can also burn hydrogen. Now maybe its just because I'm an American, and hydrogen's a flammable gas, and nobody burns stuff better than the good ole USA. Or, maybe it's because making a hydrogen engine isn't much, if any harder than making a gasoline engine. But, Instead of just turning our hard to make hydrogen back into electricity, let's make something else with it...like heat, expanding gases, and "vroom vroom" horsepower?I say, skip the fuel cell and just put a hydrogen eight cylinder in my SUV

Now, I like fuel cells, and the argument in favor of them is their high efficiency. It's sort of like this - We can increase a horse's efficiency if we turn him upside down, tie magnets to his hooves, and have his flailing legs induce a current in this special platinum coil. This argument, while compelling, doesn't mean that, while we're waiting for this breakthrough to hit the market, we shouldn't ride the horse to town the normal way. A hydrogen engine burns just as cleanly as a fuel cell, it just makes a little hot waste water at the tailpipe. I figure we can use that hot water to melt snow, or to clean off the windshield, or make soup...or whatever. It turns out that I don't hate inefficiency, I hate pollution.

Don't get me wrong. I'd love to have a fuel cell humming away in my basement, making heat, electricity, bagels, and whatever else they make. But to put the hydrogen economy on hold until they are workable enough to power our big fat American cars seems crazy. Some people have made the claim that the fuel cell in my new hydro car may produce enough electricity to power my home. That's great, but won't the refrigerator go off every time I drive to the store? Guess I better hurry back. I can just hear my wife "Hon, could you stay home today so I can turn on the lights and vacuum? No? Well, then could you leave the car? Thanks an mil!" Sure, dear, I'll just take the train...if there were any trains.

Still, the real problem is the hydrogen infrastructure. Yeah, I know there's a hydrogen fueling station in Las Vegas. And if I only lived a few thousand miles closer, I could make it there on a tank of gas. And the REAL real problem is that oil makes the electricity that makes the hydrogen that makes the electricity that makes the car zip down to Star bucks. So, no matter what turns the wheels, to make a big difference, we need a commitment to hydrogen production from green energy. Well, I've got a nine volt's worth of hydrogen floating around my house that says I'm ready.