This Friday’s Museum of Possibilities employs several themes that are found in many of my pseudo-inventions: Hiding, duplicity, pretending and concealing. Today's ideas are offered as solutions to the problem of storing and using exercise equipment in a small home or apartment. Some of these concepts will seem coy and cute, but at the same time odd. Who in their right mind jumps on a trampoline inside a fake China closet in the dark, while listening to headphones? Who would not worry that a fine living room lounge chair that contained a hidden rowing machine might eventually become grimy with sweat? Yet I can imagine some – though perhaps few – situations in which such concealed exercise equipment might be just what is needed!
Visit Steven M. Johnson at his website.
I like to amuse myself creating these things!
I have a fan from many years ago who emails me telling me of my ideas that became real products. I would say that there is not much wrong with the wifi/TV/cam/Facebook/Skype accessible foldup treadmill furniture concept. I guess I failed by making it functional. LOL
I started creating comical inventions after I turned 36!
Thanks for pointing his work out to me, or reacquainting me with it!
I used to have his BETTER LIVING CATALOG paperback. Very funny stuff.
You refer to "quirky" minds. My quirky mind long ago concluded that words can often suggest similar concepts when you tally them by their first letters. My thinking is quirky, queer, querulous, quizzical, quarrelsome, quibbling, questionable; at times it is like a quagmire where normal thoughts sink as if into quicksand. If I were a doctor I would be labeled a quack. My mind at times can quiver or quaver.
I left out a few qu words that didn't fit my theory. :)
Anyway, I hope to look up Jaffee's work and maybe find an affordable copy of one or more of books in his Stupid Inventions series as a used book on Amazon.