Ouija Boardgames, Nunjas and the Piranha Dishwasher

Ouija Boardgames, Nunjas

and the

Piranha Dishwasher

A Collection of Half-Baked Ideas and Inventions

by

Christopher

L I G H T B O D Y

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Christopher Lightbody

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Ouija Boardgames, Nunjas

and the

Piranha Dishwasher

Table of Contents

Introduction

Ideas

Alphabetical Index of Ideas

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Introduction

What's all this, then?

The history of humanity is the story of the ideas which have inspired and transformed us, allowed us to see the world in new ways and accomplish feats which our distant ancestors would have found miraculous.

You will not find any such ideas in this book.

Instead, brace yourself for a rag-tag assortment of the useless, the ridiculous and the patently absurd. If you have any sense of practicality, utility or efficiency, best just to stop reading now and maybe take a course in woodworking or something instead.

These ideas and inventions celebrate the mundane and the obscure, looking askance at the things we take for granted to produce needlessly complicated, extravagant and often physics-defying monstrosities that would have no place in our modern everyday world of health and safety, cost analysis and resource conservation.

Anyway – enough of this piffle. Let's get started.

Washing Machine Lava Lamp

What goes around comes around.

You’ve got to admit, there is something strangely fascinating about watching your washing machine go through its motions. Washing machine designers knew what they were doing when they made that little round door transparent. Seeing your disembodied clothes entumbling around each other in an oddly sensuous circular dance makes you view them in a whole new light. With no regard for fashion sense or color co-ordination, illicit, soapy relationships are often formed between random items of clothing which would otherwise never meet about your person.

Shaped like a conventional Lava Lamp, the Washing Machine Lava Lamp takes this alluring aspect of apparel to a whole new (ornamental) level. Instead of lumps of wax, the WMLL is filled with tiny replicas of the contents of your wardrobe. Smaller even than doll’s clothes, these tiny shirts, jumpers and jeans are suspended in an oily medium slightly more viscous than water. A tiny propeller revolving slowly and hidden in the base of the lamp keeps the contents in constant, languid motion. From a distance, it just looks like a morass of intricate blobs of color; but on closer inspection, there’s a slow motion waltz going on between your favorite pair of trousers and that shirt you’ve never worn that you bought from a charity shop.

Each Lamp comes pre-stocked with a single tiny sock made of some mysterious material with a specific density that ensures it will always waft in a lonely fashion around the main column of clothes.

Joustpipe

Two skaters enter, one skater leaves...

Halfpipes. Skateboaders love ‘em. Imagine a capital letter O, chop it off halfways up, and build it on a grand scale out of plywood. You’ve now got skater heaven, and a recipe for terminally grazed knees, in my limited (yet painful) experience.

But, truth is – watching people skating on a halfpipe is kind of boring. A little like watching tennis, but with a bit more up and down action at the extremities. I’m sure it takes a lot of skill to do, but it sure can be dull to watch.

So here’s what I’m proposing: a skatejoust. Make the half-pipe a bit wider, and make the skaters wear more padding. Suspended from the ceiling above the ramp are various weapons, all non-lethal, which can be grabbed by the enterprising skateboarder. Lances with boxing gloves on the end, those giant padded Q-tip-type things that they used to use on Gladiators, foamy nunchuks, et cetera. The more useful the weapon, the higher from the half-pipe it is placed. The most devastating weapons (and I have to admit I’m not sure how this would be done) are suspended in such a way that it’s only possible to grab them if you’re upside down, or using both hands, or in some other orientation which would ensure that the skateboardee has to pull off a particularly impressive move to get at them.

Already a new element of strategy enters the sport. Do you concentrate on building up momentum in order to snatch the lofty bean-bag gun, bearing in mind you’ll have to avoid your opponent (who’s just hastily grabbed the lowest echelon polystyrene truncheon) while doing so? Or do you just tear the mid-height rubber mace from its Velcro moorings and prepare for a more messy, low-down and dirty blow-trading scrap instead?

Obviously, the first to fall over loses, but extra points are awarded for artistic merit and/or chivalrous conduct. Milady.

Would also work with rollerblades and BMXs. Preferably all at the same time.

Kipper Tie Kites

One for all the bored, besuited office monkeys out there. You know who you are.

For all too many of us, the suit is a symbol of our lack of personal freedom. It’s a uniform almost as fixed and rigid as the fatigues of the military. Every day, hundreds of thousands of us press-ganged souls don these bland work clothes like deep-sea divers, and plunge ourselves into the murky depths of corporate slavery for yet another day. The tie is a particularly concrete sign of our oppression – day in, day out, some of us have to tie this literal yoke around our necks out of financial necessity. It’s no fun, yet it has to be done. Still, every time I wrap my tie around my neck, I imagine I hear the clinking of chains, and sometimes I swear it even feels like there’s a heavy lead ball on the end of it.

So – let’s turn this sad situation around. Rather than go for all-out revolution (which might make a mess of my neatly-pressed shirt), we’ll lower our horizons somewhat and make Kipper Tie Kites instead. A kipper tie, for those not used to comparing neck adornments with denizens of the deep, is basically just a really wide tie. In my design, however, it has a thin spar running between the widest points, and another running from the top to bottom of the entire tie. The extravagant-looking Windsor knot at the top of the tie actually conceals a quick-release stud, which, when pressed (at coffee or lunch-breaks), disengages the kite-tie from its throat-based moorings. Hey presto – a tiny kite. The bit of your tie which you wrapped a few times round your neck in the morning before going to work can now be unraveled to form the long, ribbon-like tail of your little kite. Also ensconced within that faux Windsor knot are several tightly-coiled feet of string. Enough for you to fly your tiny tie-kite to your heart’s content, and watch it soar far above your workplace and all the petty little rules that you have to adhere to if you want to get your pay check at the end of the month.

No longer a symbol of servitude, your humble tie becomes a metaphor for your personal freedom as it arcs gracefully over the work cafeteria.

I also like the idea of the kite being held aloft by the updraft of like-minded colleagues wearing those revolving bow-tie things. Obviously I have far too much time on my hands.

Invisible Ninja Sculptures for the Blind

Great sculptures are not made by what’s left behind, but by what the artist has taken away.

Tapping his cane in front of him, the old blind man enters the room. In the centre of the room, unseen by the old man, stands a figure swathed in black who holds a long bamboo staff. The old man advances, tenuously at first, swinging his cane before him as he steps towards the dark, silent figure. Suddenly, in the instant between one footfall and the next, the black-clad man springs forward and, flicking his staff deftly around his body, checks the old man’s cane with a speed and precision that almost defies belief. The two stand there for a moment – the black figure statuesque in his stillness: the old man looking slightly puzzled…

At once the most esoteric and physically demanding form of performance art ever conceived, Invisible Ninja Sculpture is practiced only by an elite few. Simultaneously training intensively in arts both martial and aesthetic, the masters of this particular discipline spend years honing their unique skills.

After perhaps decades spent perfecting their sculpting skills, each adherent eventually produces a single piece which they consider to be their masterpiece, the very pinnacle of their art. When this point is reached, the artifact is re-created time and time again in different scales, materials and using different techniques.

Meanwhile, in parallel with this exacting regime, the sculptors also undertake a punishing regimen of martial arts training, focusing in particular on staff fighting. With an emphasis on blocking rather than attacking.

Finally, after years of effort