The World’s Weirdest Mice

“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” the cliché says. Try to build a better mouse, though, and there’s a good chance that people will smile nervously and edge away from your door. At least, that’s the case with many of the “improved” mice we found – they’re not so much better as just plain weirder. And then there are the mice–three of them!–that might just get you fired. Read on for more about the Peep Hole Mouse, the Busty Mouse, and the Instant RSI Mouse.

When you’re done, you might be interested in these other compendiums of oddball technology:

The World’s Weirdest Keyboards

The Stars of Sky Mall

Weird and Wonderful Case Mods

Ever heard of the Slow Food movement? The Hanwang T&Mouse is perfect for my new Slow Work movement. If I use a keyboard, there’s a very real danger I could finish a story in a day, thus conditioning my boss to expect me to produce something every day to follow. Sounds exhausting! But if I write my stories by painstakingly drawing the characters with a stylus on the matchbook-size, touch-sensitive pad on my mouse, one story could easily take weeks. That’ll cure my boss of any unreasonable expectations.

The iris scan authentication system has become a staple of modern movies, from The Incredibles to Angels and Demons. But in your average spy thriller, an iris scan always looks cool and cutting-edge. Not so much with the Qritek IRIBIO mouse. Instead of looking like Tom Cruise completing an Impossible Mission, our mouse model above looks more like Joe Perv ogling tiny images of French underwear models. That’s too high a price to pay for security.

Entry #1 in our list of Mice That Will Get You Fired comes from Swiss trinketeer Pat Says Now, maker of a wide array of novelty computer mice. (Some of these mouse-torsos come clothed in tiny, tight-fitting sweaters emblazoned with the logos of various soccer teams, but as the product description reads, “Your mouse needs to take off her shirt for working properly.”) And if using it doesn’t earn you a trip to HR, well, someone at your place of employment is not working properly.

Not surprisingly, each breast on the torso is a button. They would have added a scroll wheel somewhere in between, but they’re saving that for the triple-breasted “Total Recall” edition.

Entry #2 on our list of Mice That Will Get You Fired: This mouse in the shape of a Sig Sauer P230 handgun from CyberGun. While it doesn’t in fact shoot any projectiles, it should be creepy enough to keep most co-workers from interacting with you at all–until security comes to escort you from the premises.

Mice That Will Get You Fired, #3 – While the mere presence of this Thanko Kinniku mouse on your desktop shouldn’t get you in trouble, there are still numerous pitfalls waiting for you. Using the mouse is supposed to stimulate your muscles with small electric shocks via stick-on electrodes, causing your muscles to contract involuntarily. It’s like getting a massage, but not.

How’s that going to get you fired? Try either of these phrases in your cube farm and see where they get you: “Pardon me, would you mind lifting my shirt and rearranging my electrodes?” or “I find your use of my mouse quite stimulating!”

Introducing the most anti-ergonomic mouse ever produced: pixelated Mario. In case use of Super Mario does not immediately produce Super Repetitive Stress Injuries, you can also try Invincibility star and Goomba mice from the same sadistic company.

The LS-100TKM from Canon flips open like a 1990s cell phone to reveal a secret integrated calculating device (aka a “calculator”) and numeric keypad. Don’t have any actual math questions at the moment? Type in “1134” and hold it upside down. You’re a badass!

We all want to secure our PCs, but few of us want to deal with the hassles required, like remembering long, complicated passwords or peering into a tiny iris scanner on the side of our mouse. That’s where the amazing Zalman FG-1000 FPSGun mouse comes in. You can make your password “password” and even the most sophisticated data thief won’t be able to get a thing from your PC –they’ll be too stumped by the mouse. I don’t care if your computer is packed with CIA secrets, no criminal will be willing to invest the hours and hours of frustrating trial and error you’ll have put in just to figure out how to left-click. Call it security through obnoxious design.

The LED Message Mouse not only contains an integrated fan to cool your sweaty palm during a Quake IV tournament, but it also displays a message on said rotating fan using LEDs. Sadly, it’s a message that you’ll never see…because you’ll be covering it with your sweaty palm.

To humorously paraphrase the former hit song:

“Who let the dogs out (to sit behind a bizarre miniature desk that’s actually a pretty much useless plastic mouse)?

Who?

Who?

Who?

Who?”

Seriously: Who did this, and, for the love of humanity, why?

Konami designed the Pop’n Music Be-Mouse to double as a game controller for playing–what else–Pop’n Music, a Japanese rhythm game. But failing that, you could always use its numerous buttons to trigger something far more exciting: Excel macros.

The ASUSTek Vito W1 mouse keeps track of your heart rate and reports it to an application on your computer. If your pulse is too high, a yellow smiley face frowns at you. If your pulse is too low, you may be dead. But you didn’t need an ASUSTek Vito W1 to tell you that.

If there were any insect rights groups they would be up in antennae over these new mice that contain real animals imprisoned in clear acrylic resin. Pictured here are the beetle and spider models; also available are mice containing real starfish, scorpions, and crabs. It’s a great idea if you don’t mind resting your palm on a dead bug.