Dumb and Dumber Products of the Year

The inventors of the excessively overengineered and outrageously improbable were hard at work all year long.

Day after tireless day, they trudged into their vast underground laboratories, consumed mass quantities of caffeinated beverages, worked feverishly into the night, and came up with ... a briefcase that zaps unsuspecting carriers with 100,000 volts of electricity. Microprocessor-equipped dentures. And a telephone that turns off your lights.

In the spirit of the New Year, then, let us raise a glass to these, er, ingenious creations. What follows is a sampling of the year's most nut-worthy (whoops, noteworthy) gizmos, gadgets, inventions, and technologies of 2000.

Microchips in the Darndest Places

The Finger-Frying, Eardrum-Splitting Briefcase: CCS International's B-100 Shocker Briefcase is designed to protect your valuables from theft. Imagine this: You're tra-la-la-ing through Manhattan toting a briefcase loaded with diamonds, cash, and a couple of Moon Pies. Suddenly a thief snatches the case and dashes down 42nd Street. Do you scream for the police? Pursue the heathen yourself? Nope.

You simply whip out your remote control, and the briefcase delivers 100,000 volts of electricity and a 130-decibel, ear-piercing alarm, forcing the hapless criminal to drop your goodies and presumably fall to the ground in tearful, pained surrender.

The SB-100 is also equipped with a motion sensor so that you can ward marauders away before they place their larcenous digits on your briefcase. Coming next year: the SB-200, which features all the above antitheft measures as well as a retractable, remote-controlled hand with fingers that you can use to poke the perpetrator's eyes, Three Stooges style.

The Digital Denture: A Japanese dentist recently invented a way to implant a microchip into a false tooth on a denture plate. The microprocessor can be detected with a radio transmitter-receiver, thus enabling the denture wearer to be identified.

Presumably one would think that a dentist about to perform a root canal would already possess at least a vague idea of the patient's identity. The killer app for a digital denture, then, is nursing home identification.

"In facilities such as a senior citizens' home, in which a number of old people are received ... all the dentures are collected from their owners after each meal, and then the dentures are washed all together," according to the dentist's patent. "In such case, it is [important] to identify all the dentures to give back to their correct owners without any mistake."

In other words: It's hard enough to walk a mile in someone else's shoes; you certainly wouldn't want to eat a meal in their teeth, too.

The Channel-Surfing Telephone: STMicroelectronics and Digital Mobility showed a technology that will enable you to control "smart" household appliances, such as TVs and stereos, with a Wireless Application Protocol-equipped telephone.

The devices talk to one another over the Bluetooth wireless network specification. Just think: You can switch to QVC and order the Suzanne Somers bracelet being hawked on that shopping channel by using the same device. But we wonder what happens if your phone rings while you're using it to turn up the oven. Does your caller get a busy signal--or a whiff of pepperoni pizza?

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