Further Lost Inventions That Would Have Made Further Millions

Discovering that my invention of the Question Comma was actually a delusion, and this useful punctuation device, to be used when you wish to drop an interrogative note (like this, right?) right in the middle of a sentence, was already out there, has led me to review my other stupid inventions in the hope of finding something vaguely original. (At least I still have the cardiostrophe - the deadly opponent of the snark...)

I see that the idea for Olympic Peace, which I discussed several years ago with Tom Shakespeare, is also currently 'out there' and not, as I had supposed, snug and secure in this here cranium, so I suppose that the exercise bike video plan is also being marketed aggressively by some Apprentice reject even as I mope.

This, in case you were still interested, was a set of DVDs of bicycle journeys in exotic locales to be played as you struggled toward your 15-30 minute goal of mild sweatiness and inflexible calves: you could have urban or rural as you wished, gentle or near-suicidal speeds, terrains and musical soundtracks, depending on your fitness or fright level - in fact, if you wrote to us ('us' being another delusion of mine), we'd send someone to cycle wherever you wanted, film it, then send it to you. Anywhere in the world - that's how practical this one was.

Then there were sun farms - I remember going on about those a little too loudly one summer in Crete, when we were climbing up sun-scorched slopes shunned by even the mentalist Kri-kri (an indigenous goat) and the lammergeier (a vulture-y thing). It was my opinion the near-equatorial deserts should all be covered in cheap solar panels, and that the planet would thereby be saved - and now apparently, they are. But it isn't. Something to do with the corrosive filtration system called Capitalism getting in the way there...

Then of course there was the anatomically correct chocolate heart with a small mechanism inside along the line of that thing they put in cans of beer so that, once the box was opened by your beloved, the realistic arteries would spurt a little raspberry coulis, while another device in the lid played that bit at the start of Dark Side of the Moon.

(A little more downmarket was the cruncheon - a Crunchy in the shape of a policeman's truncheon. But those in receipt of the heart might want to get and use it as a form of 'thank you' confectionery.)

Of course the need to be original is not really focussed on inventing anything practical, otherwise I'd be copyrighting like an idiot, as opposed to idiotically posting here. It is always and only focussed on the need to distinguish your own thought from the opinions of others, to determine whether or not there is something - anything - that you 'really' think. Our thought processes come to us as communal activities, what is 'mine' is already lost in the forest of 'ours', although we prefer not to distinguish the two.

All invention in this sense is self-invention, or rather conscious connivance in the unconscious creation of something we like to call both 'conscious' and a 'self' - literally a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this as in so much we in general resemble the Scots in particular, whose greatest invention remains the idea that they invented everything.