Thursday, May 17, 2012

Patently Silly by Daniel Wright

Everyone thinks they have at least one good idea in them. Most of those people are wrong, of course -- their "good idea" is something like an Air Filled Brassiere or a Wind-Assisted Bicycle, or even Toothpick Jewelry. Those are actually bad ideas.

Patently Silly is a catalog of such bad ideas -- at least, as seen by author Daniel Wright, though a few things in here might cause different opinions among a very few people -- as evidenced by their patent papers, which Wright has researched and boiled down into quick, humorous descriptions. Like so many other funny ideas these days, it was a website first, at patentlysilly.com, and then turned into a book.
This book has a very specific place in any home -- on the tank in the smallest room of the house. And it serves its function there (in a way that a website really can't) very well: it's amusing, copiously illustrated (with the diagrams from the inventors' own patent applications), and made up of short pieces so that reading it can take precisely as long as desired. It may not be a perfect book -- what is? -- but it's very nearly perfect for its chosen niche, and that's vastly better than most books.

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