Call me sentimental but I do think this is a quotation for the ages. It’s from the guy who made the ‘bomb detector’ thingy out of an antenna and a hinge and a plastic tag, and sold lots of them for $40,000 each, and got arrested on suspicion of fraud for doing that.
We have been dealing with doubters for ten years. One of the problems we have is that the machine does look a little primitive. We are working on a new model that has flashing lights.
Do admit. The sunny innocence, the tenderly confiding honesty of that brings tears to the eyes, does it not? He sweetly admits there are ‘doubters’ – people not convinced that a stick and a bit of duct tape and a ‘card’ and a bit of plastic can actually detect explosives. He admits that one little stumbling block (to what? charging $80,000 apiece?) is that the ‘machine’ (the bendy stick with the bit of plastic inside) looks a little primitive even though in reality of course it is more elaborate and complicated and technical and sciencey than an MRI or a particle accelerator or an iPod or an electric toothbrush. And then, in the bit that is so limpid and childlike and of the dawn dawny, he murmurs of his exacting technical labors on a new model with flashing lights. So what you would have then, see, would be a bendy stick with a ‘card’ and a bit of plastic all topped, like a car wash, with flashing lights. So there you’d be shuffling around the checkpoint in Afghanistan, swinging your bendy stick around sniffing for explosives, and your life would be made more glamorous and exciting and Christmassy and convincing by these exciting flashing lights on your bendy stick. Until you stepped on the bomb, of course.
Comments
13 responses to “Flashing lights, and a beeping noise”
and don’t forget the stupidity. It burns bright. Both in this man and his customers.
Yes, some people just can’t be parodied because they are their own best parody. Monty Python couldn’t do it better. Except, they did do it better, if only because they could be funny without killing anybody in the process.
It seems these devices have actually caused deaths among those who have relied on them. Could that be reflected in the charges brought against the principals involved? Seems to me no different to peddling fake anti-biotics or infected blood plasma.
Presumably they will argue that they believed in their own claims.
Part of me wants to see this guy placed in the middle of a mine field with one of his devices and an actual metal detector just to see which one he would use if his own ass was on the line.
Maybe if I pitched it as a reality TV show…
Many thanks, OB for drawing my attention to the marvellous opportunities in this expanding field. I’ve got a box under the house full of old electronic junk: cards and motherboards out of computers; various chips; bits and pieces of old cassette recorders, an old B&W TV…
I’ll be able to cobble all this into a variety of detectors in no time: mine detectors, yours detectors, dog detectors, bill collector detectors, UFO detectors, cop car detectors…
Fortune, here I come.
Maybe he’s trying for an insanity defense.
That, or mental defect.
It should at least go ‘ping.’
I don’t know how he could claim to really believe that these devices work.
It’s not like he just stumbled across them one day – he built them so he knows exactly how they (don’t) work.
This man is being persecuted for heresy against the positivist scientific paradigm. Science is a belief system like any other, and just because his claims are not “true” in terms of this hegemonic discourse, with its privledging of empiricism and a narrowly defined self-serving logic there are other ways of knowing. Just thought I’d say.
I would love to see this man demonstrate the efficacy of his company’s device on live munitions.
Good parody, Gordon!
Raises teh question why the Iraqi Goverment order so many of these things without testing them. Could there be a little bit of fraud?
Having read the thread below, I should say that teh Iraqi officials involved should count themselves lucky that they are not Chinese. I will be very surprised if any action is taken over this.
Hard to know if it’s fraud or credulity. Either way…a horror.