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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Made in America: Hope,
happiness, cheese-in-a-canI don't understand why America is in the doghouse with the rest of the world on this Fourth of July when you consider all the great contributions America has made to mankind, like the doghouse, for instance.
Before Elroy Jambowski invented the doghouse in 1869, dogs were homeless, left to wander the streets. Then Elroy started making tiny houses for dogs, and the rest is history (dog apartments, dog trailers, dog tents, dog bed and breakfasts, dog time shares, etc.).
America deserves a lot more respect than it gets. But we aren't a country of whiners. We aren't going to beg the rest of the world to appreciate us. But it might be timely on this day to point out some of the great inventions and achievements America is responsible for (in no particular order).
The microwave oven. This revolutionary way of cooking allowed home chefs to elevate cooking to new sophisticated heights.
Microwave pork rinds. With this invention, microwave cooking reached its zenith.
Golf spikes. Leroy Groblink got tired of seeing golfers falling on their butts all day and began hammering nails into shoes. The original prototypes were not successful, but the product took off when he learned to add the spikes before golfers put on the shoes.
The hangover. Now, aspirin was a great medicine invented by German Felix Hoffmann in 1899. But it was relatively unused until American O'Reilly O' O'Reilly invented the hangover in 1921 after consuming 142 bottles of Guinness stout. He later refined his invention, fashioning hangovers on a mere two or three bottles of whisky.
Drink umbrellas. Shortly after O'Reilly O' O'Reilly's invention, a fellow inebriate patented "a protective device to keep alcoholic beverages from sunstroke while projecting a festive aspect."
The toothpick. Invented in 1947 by an out-of-work forest management expert living on 200 square feet of wooded land.
Adhesive tape. Tape had been around for decades as a method of sealing packages and placing insulting notes on your neighbor's front door, but only became truly useful when someone thought of adding a sticky adhesive to one side of it. This worked much better, although there was an upswing in the number of neighbor-related homicides.
Ballpoint pens/ballistic missiles. Ironically invented simultaneously. Jerome Watson (Thomas Edison's Watson cousin) invented ballpoint pens, which caused him unimaginable fury because they kept getting clogged up. He would angrily throw the offending writing implements across the room, once impaling his assistant in the head, resulting in one of those "Aha!" scientific moments that lead eventually to submarine-launched intercontinental multi-nuclear-headed ballistic missiles and, more important, felt-tip pens.
There is so much more America brought the world (cheese-in-a-can, barbed wire, paper cuts), but space and modesty preclude mentioning them. America did some other little things like free slaves, give women the vote, defeat Hitler, cure polio, land on the moon and, most recently, free Iraq of a bloody psychopathic dictator. For that and more, I guess the world will never forgive us. Nevertheless, Happy Independence Day, if I may be so rude.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Charles Memminger, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists' 2004 First Place Award winner for humor writing, appears Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com