So, in the Crawling Hand episode, Joel shows the Mads a powersaw that will automatically shut off if you plunge your hand or other extremity into it. I realized that it was the first time that I noted to myself that, “Hey! That’s a thing now!” (Maybe it was a thing back then and I didn’t know about it until recerntly.)
A lot of the inventions were too specific/useless to be genuinely marketable, but I know that never really stopped anyone from trying to sell a thing, so are there any other inventions from the Invention Exchange that you’ve recognized in the wild?
Re-writable tattoos are available either as custom-printed temporary tattoos or as reactive tattoos. (They’re developing one for diabetics where if it becomes visible or changes color, it means your blood sugar is low.)
Ear-shaped earmuffs exist, but with elf/vulcan ears.
Tragic Moments figurines are likely available on Etsy if you want to go looking. I don’t.
We have standing desks now. Not quite Dr. F’s “cellular desk,” but close. I’ve also seen human cocktail tables where the waitstaff are given dresses with wide circular shelves so that if they walk carefully they can carry food and drinks around. Which was weird and controversial.
They do make rain gutters for deck umbrellas, which isn’t quite Mike’s more portable gutter bumper chute, but along those lines.
Cowboy Mike’s Red Hot Ricochet BBQ Sauce probably doesn’t count, as it’s a parody of midwest hot sauces that utterly fail to live up to their promised bold flavor.
Didn’t someone find a foldable bubble fan for sale and post it in another thread? I thought I had seen that, but can’t find it now that I’m looking. May have imagined it or am thinking of the homemade one that got posted.
Joel’s airbag helmet from The Robot Vs The Aztec Mummy is now a thing - although I’ve never seen anyone with one - I think they are more like an airbag in a snood in the real world. But the concept is broadly the same.
Basically I guess what I’m saying is that we should be able to avoid the next Kickstarter by just suing for what MST writers are entitled to for their intellectual property!
@GameraIsFilledWithMe (needed badge LOL) The “Bathroom Hand Dryer/Air Hockey Table” invention would be more interesting now with the high-powered hand driers.
I have spent the last couple of weeks working on a new remote temperature monitoring system for our department’s medication refrigerators that automatically sends out a SMS alert and email to the appropriate building manager and on-site staff if the temperature rises/falls beyond a certain target threshold.
Of course, I’ve named it Fridge Alert, the app icon is a red box with a black and white thermometer surrounded by concentric red lines, and it plays the alarm sound effect from the experiment as the alert tone.
Sadly, I didn’t have the project budget to incorporate real-time facial recognition, so there’s currently no way to make it only trigger when the ghost of William Conrad is attempting to steal your insulin.
I should note that it was almost impossible to find a usable section of the alarm sound effect that didn’t have Trace and Frank laughing hysterically over the top of it, so I had to loop about a second of audio from when Trace first opens the door several times to try to come up with something similar.
If anybody happens to know where they got the stock sound effect they used in the episode, I’d love to get a cleaner copy. I checked YouTube for actual First Alert commercials that were on TV at the time but they all sound like regular smoke alarms, so they presumably got it somewhere else.
At any rate, I’m quite pleased with having worked a 30-year old MST3K reference into a serious government project.