1993: Under pressure from his superiors to stop carrying his ventriloquist dummy with him while on patrol, San Francisco Police Officer Bob Geary decided to take the matter to the voters. He formed the "Committee to Save Puppet Officer Brendan O'Smarty" and succeeded in putting the issue on the ballot.
The voters decided by a narrow margin of 51% to 49% to allow him to continue patrolling with Brendan O'Smarty.
This turns out not to be the first puppet officer we've posted about. Just a few months ago, Paul posted about puppet officer Jerry McSafety. I wonder how many more puppet officers there are?
The Stimulator, which sold for $79, promised to cure headaches, allergies, swollen joints, backaches, and more. It did this by delivering low-voltage electrical shocks to whatever body part was hurting.
However, the FDA shut down its manufacturer in 1997 noting that the device was actually a modified gas-grill igniter which cost about $2 to make.
In 1995 Roger Powell was 46 years old and living homeless on the streets of London after the failure of his taxi business. And then, by a strange twist of fate, his life changed and he became a work of art.
Film director Tony Kaye had decided to display a homeless person as a work of art at the Saatchi Gallery. So he sent his assistant out to find a homeless person willing to go along with this scheme, and Powell was the one found.
Powell on display at the Saatchi Gallery. Source: alamy.com
Powell sat in the gallery beside a sign explaining that he was for sale as a "human work of art." The price: £1000.
As far as I know, no one offered to buy Powell. Nevertheless, Kaye continued to display Powell at various museums for the next two-and-a-half years, but most of the time not as an official exhibit. Powell would simply walk around the museums while wearing a t-shirt that said "For Sale, Roger, By Tony Kaye, Four Million Pounds." (The sale price had inflated quite a bit.) In return for doing this, Kaye paid Powell a small weekly allowance and gave him some money towards rent.
San Francisco Examiner - Nov 19, 1995
Eventually Kaye lost touch with Powell. Then, in 2002 Powell died. Kaye paid for Powell's cremation and received his ashes. He said he planned to use them to create a painting that would say "Dead Homeless Man." I don't know if he ever completed this work.
We recently posted about the American Airlines Wine Club, which allows people to enjoy wines served inflight at home. Turns out that in 1994 the company did something similar with its airline food, publishing a recipe book so that people could "prepare their inflight favorites at home". It was titled A Taste of Something Special.
1996: French engineer Yves Lecoffre proposed installing 70,000 "anti-pollution ventilators" (aka fans) around the streets of Paris to blow away the exhaust fumes from cars.
Was he joking about this? Was it some kind of April Fool joke? Not as far as I can tell. Though I can't imagine how his scheme would have made the slightest difference to Paris's air quality.
1999: Due to a spate of "chair-related injuries", the employees in the Seattle Police Department's Identification Unit all had to take a training session on how to safely sit in a chair.
I guess chair safety is one of those things that sounds silly, until you hurt yourself sitting down wrong. Below, Regina Cochrane, "professional accident preventer," offers some chair safety tips.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.