Categories
Glass House

Newsflash: Corkscrews are practical (The Glass House 24/8/05)

A British poll on usable design breakthroughs has been topped by the armed corkscrew. I don’t know whether I necessarily agree; I tried an armed corkscrew on a new wine bottle, and it broke. Much easier to just unscrew it, I reckon.

An Al Qaeda survey voted the nuclear-armed corkscrew even better…

Disposable nappies came in at number twos…

Electric toothbrushes are also highly rated. I didn’t know that many people had electric teeth!

Electric toothbrushes are also highly rated. Maybe one day, if we’re lucky, we’ll have electric teeth. BZZZZZ!

Electric toothbrushes are also highly rated. In light of this popularity, inventors are working on electric dental-floss, electric toilet-paper, and electric urine.

Tabloid newspapers also made the top ten design breakthroughs. We won’t be reading about this poll in The Australian then…

Above all else, we just love a push-button time-saver, with TV remote controls our third most loved design, central locking at number four, and push-button telephones at six. In fact the poll found that the innovation most people were looking for was a push-button remote-controlled corkscrew. With arms.

Armed corkscrews were popular not just for opening wine bottles, but also for drunken hand-to-hand combat. One violent pisspot said, “Makes it easy to get in a surprise jab to the eyeball!”

Among the innovations which have made life more difficult were automated call centre phone systems. That will teach them to use automated call centres to conduct surveys.

Ready-tied bow ties also made the top ten – well, you try tying a bow tie after six or seven goes at your fave corkscrew.

No-one knows when the first corkscrew was invented. Experts have theorised it was probably just after they invented the first cork.

No-one knows when the first corkscrew was invented. It was a big night…

Low on the list were left-handed carpet, fire-proof slide-rules and hypercolour T-shirts.

Number 10 on the list of inventions improving everyday life was the ready-tied bow tie. Who needs a bow tie in everyday life? I could only think of Bernard King and Humphrey B. Bear. And I’m not even sure that Bernard King is real.

The list of only 50 useful inventions included self-scan supermarkets and pre-tied bow ties, but not mobile phones or cars. Bow-ties are more useful than cars? Have you ever tried driving from Sydney to Alice Springs in a bow-tie? The fuel economy’s shithouse.

Number one was the corkscrew with arms. In the equivalent Australian survey, the armed corkscrew was only number two; it’s even easier to get pissed with a cask.

They had to be inventions created in the last twenty years, so the wheel was out, as was fire and this joke.

By Wok and Mat

Warwick Holt and Mat Blackwell are long-time writing partners, who created the mega-award winning web series Bruce, and wrote loads of jokes for TV shows including Good News Week, The Sideshow and The Glass House. Several years of their raw material for those shows is posted right here on this blog.

Leave a Reply