4 December 1996

Meretricious Contraption

I was disappointed in the quality of the exhibits at the annual Inventor's Exposition. To cite just one example, someone was demonstrating a "Baby Watch" contraption. It seemed like a good marketing idea to appeal to parents' paranoia that their kids would be stolen by slavers or mad scientists or some other deranged person. Unfortunately for the inventors, though, it obviously didn't work: someone had already stolen the kid by the time I got there and the alarm hadn't even sounded.