The Internet

I was disappointed today when, looking through my Favourites list, I discovered that some miserable git at AT&T has blocked the Armageddon Watch website. Well, how will we know when it’s the Armageddon now? The site, presumably, fell prey to the same laws as the Two Towers Protest Site, a delightfully idiotic page set up by well-meaning but basically stupid people who are extremely angry at film makers for trying to cash-in on the September 11 attacks by calling a film The Two Towers. I’m not about to sit here and list all the reasons this is imbecilic, but rest assured that if you need me to tell you why, this page is probably a bit high-brow for you.

All of this leads me, eventually, to one piece of advice: Check out www.alexchiu.com before they close that too. There’s quite a lot of it, so I’ll summarise:

Alex Chiu is an idiot who thinks he has developed an ‘Eternal Life Device’.

In more detail, he believes that placing a magnet either side of your pinky (the fingers, of course, being the positive and negative terminals of your body ’” presumably you should plug them into the mains to recharge, unless we run on DC) will amplify the natural magnetic energy in your body and allow your cells to line up better, and make you look lounger, heal faster, and live forever. Apparently, their ‘lawyer told [them] to use the word believe’. This was good advice on the part of their lawyer, but a more thorough lawyer may have suggested removing the word ‘proof’ from half his pages. And maybe the phrase ‘Everything you read is true and is important’.

I suspect, though, that the lawyer was a tad busy. He had to write their disclaimers, which range from the standard ‘Please consult your doctor if you have a heart problem or if you are pregnant before using this device.’ to the slightly Engrish ‘All written and oral statements are my true beliefs. There are at this moment not yet medicalclaims. I am basically writing this disclaimer to protect myself from the FDA. Thedevices are for research and experimentation of the buyers. Not to be carried outas treatment on someone else’s body.’, and culminate in his guarantee. His guarantee is separated into two lists.

The rings are believed (but not guaranteed) to:

  1. Alter aging process. (Turn a person physically younger.)
  2. Allow humans to stay physically young forever.
  3. Cure various kinds of illnesses and diseases.
  4. Improve health.

Alex Chiu guarantees:

  1. Speedy delivery

But, as Alex says, ‘I am not one of those stupid moron who don’t know what I am doing’, so obviously he patented his design. Surely not even the US Patent Office would allow this? This is his patent document (which includes his postal address). The truly bizzare thing about it is that it has been cited as a reference by another patent. Somebody has based an invention on the Magnetic Immortality Device.

The other intresting thing I found on the patent office website was the ‘Kids Section’. I quickly tired of this, and decided to type in a URL I’d seen on TV, in an advert for The Video Copilot. I thought it was a joke. When I first saw the advert, I genuinely expected the Egg logo to appear and offer me a credit card. But it turned out to be a wonderfully worthless device from the makers of the Garden Claw, a company called (really) Joseph Enterprises, who also offer monthly gardening tips from Peter Surridge, who is well known ‘as the horticultural expert who demonstrates the Garden Claw on TV’. This month (september, apparently), he reccomends using the Garden Claw. Isn’t that a suprise?