Necessity is not always the mother of invention…

I knew the December 13th NY Times Sunday Mag that my brother-in-law gave me was going to be a good source of blog material.  I didn’t realize just how good until I started scanning the round-up of patents on the last page.

Do we really need any additional “Food Product Comprising Fat and Salt” (7,523,360)?  Don’t we already have the potato chip?

Speaking of the unspeakable, which is patented food, in general, I can’t wait to stick my fork into “Foodstuff Containing a Moist, Meaty Filling” (7,485,330).  Actually, I’ve done plenty of that: pot-pies, Szechuan dumplings, ravioli.  It’s just that none of it was patented…

And how about “Method of Starting a Fire” (7,597,727)? Didn’t Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble discover that when they took Pebbles and BamBam camping? Hand me that stick, Barney. Fire good!

Someone’s patented another “Mousetrap” (7,506,471).  Hope it’s a better one. And someone’s got a design patent (D600,187) for something called, quite simply, “Wheel,” which I guess answers the question ‘do we have to keep reinventing the wheel?’ Apparently we do.

There’s a design patent out there for “Removable Underwear” (D585,182), which, pardon my confusion, I thought we already had. (Just the thought of non-removable underwear gives me the heebie-jeebie equivalent of opening a can of Chef-Boyardee and finding a rat in the rav.)

And I’m wondering how the “Appearance-Inspection Apparatus” (7,557,911) improves on the mirror.

Someone has patented a “Passenger’s Weight-Measurement Device” (7,614,680). If this can help insure that the passenger weigh-in gets done discreetly, I’m all for it. Years ago, my husband and I flew from outside of Galway to Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands. We got our tickets in Galway City, and when we bought them, the clerk told us that we’d be weighed at the airport in Rossaveal.

Hmmmm.

I laughed and told her that, unfortunately, I wasn’t going to be able to lose 10 pounds by the next morning, but she assured me that the weigh-in was handled with the utmost of Irish discretion.

Well, think “Irish Whisper,” why don’t you.

The weigh scale at Rossaveal International had a face the size of Big Ben, which faced out onto the passenger waiting area.

Fortunately, as there were only three of us on the flight, they didn’t bother to weigh us.

Of the dozens of patents shown in The Times – cleverly compiled by Alexandra Horowitz and Ammon Shea, and illustrated by Paula Scher – the one that gave me the most pause, however, was the one granted for “Panties with Skin Whitening Effect” (7,581,262).

I’d say that America hasn’t lost its inventive edge quite yet, but this one, which I looked up on the USPTO’s nifty patent search site, was invented in Taiwan. Here’s the description (from the USPTO):

A pair of panties with a skin-whitening effect comprises a wearing space defined therein, and one or more gel blocks each covered by a release film attached to the panties so as to press close to a groin, a waist, and borders between hips and legs of a user to wear the panties. Thereby, after the release film is torn and the panties are worn by the user, skin-whitening, skin-color-lighting, and wrinkle-softening agents contained in the gel blocks can perform skin-whitening, skin-color-lighting, and wrinkle-softening treatment on the above-mentioned user's body portions, while not disturbing the user's daily life.

I get that some people with vitiligo may want to even out their skin color. And that some folks, unfortunately, find “white” a more desirable flesh color than whatever they’re sporting.

But why would anyone focus their whitening treatment where the sun don’t shine?

Does this assume that there are shirts, stockings, gloves, and masks that take care of the rest of the body? And that having whitening panties just completes the job, so that a vitiligo sufferer can even himself or herself out. (As, I understand, Michael Jackson did.)

Or is there some fetish or other that calls for a milky-white bum, even if the rest is not-so.

Maybe the operative feature is the “wrinkle-softening agents”, promising soft as a baby’s bottom?

Anyway, I’m scratching my head over this invention, and just noticed that my fingernails are a bit ragged.

Maybe I should look into that “Fingernail Sander with Debris Bag” (7,500,486).  Thank goodness there’s a debris bag with it! I hate the thought of just blowing all that fingernail debris away, and I never seem to have a debris bag when I need one.

Who says that necessity is the mother of invention? Sure looks to me that sometimes it works the other way around.