Everyday this week…Brett Rounsaville brings us the Weirdest Inventions ever conceived.

Are you one of those people who, when confronted with a crying baby during a long flight, all you can think about is how incredibly satisfying it would be to strap a ball gag to it’s face and shove it into the nearest overhead compartment? (Me neither. And for the record, if you are…please don’t have children…) Then today is your lucky day.

It seems, every once in a while that rare individual comes along who not only has never had children, but only appears to know of their existence at all through second hand stories AND prides themselves in their self-titled position of “inventor.” Only that man (let’s call him Crazy Jim) could create, The Strap-On Pacifier.

I can only assume Crazy Jim created this particular product with hordes of armless screaming babies belonging to negligent parents in mind. (Wow, now that I type that out it kind of sounds like it would make an incredible B movie, right? Coming to a theater near you, Summer 2011: The Armless Screamers! “This summer, just because they’re armless does not mean they are harmless. WAHHHHHHHHHHH!” Cue blood shooting out of ears and bursting crystal glasses.)

Seriously, I respect that babies spitting out their pacifiers is an actual issue but is their any chance that strapping said pacifiers to tiny little still-developing ears is a good idea? I hope Crazy Jim plans to sell them in conjunction with “safety tape.” (I’m picturing duct tape but with cute little piggies and sheep printed on it to use for swaddling your kid-let so they don’t rip their own ears off while trying to take the pacifier out to say their first words.)

Am I wrong here? Should you treat your baby like Tarantino’s Gimp? What are your thoughts? Most importantly, are there even WEIRDER baby/child related inventions out there? Share in the fun right down there in the comments!

Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we pity the poor Babysitter. Monday we found out why these darlings are hunted. Wednesday we look at how the legend survived the digital age.

Babysitter. Killer. Telephone. We’ve taken a neatly assembled story and plucked off the buttons, ripped the stitching and unloaded fistfuls of stuffing. Might as well see it the rest of the way through. Parents. Children. Let’s add them to this strewn mess of analog technology, gender stereotyping, Aquarian culture wars and artificial maternity.

I had briefly mentioned that, in many versions of the Babysitter and the Stranger Upstairs, at least one of the sitter’s employers is a doctor. In almost every version, the parents, doctorate holding or not, are wealthy. On the surface, this seems a mere plot device – the teenaged kid-herding neophyte is lured into the job by the promise of healthy dividends while, at the same time, the couple’s sizeable home fulfills certain narrative logistics. In other words, it would be difficult for the killer to call the babysitter from inside a single-phone apartment, or sneak unnoticed through a ranch-style house. And that makes enough sense. But let’s say we take a moment to get cynical:
Even if we accept many folklorists’ assertions that, when deconstructed, this urban legend takes on gender oppression and warns girls away from fast-tracking themselves toward some sort of patriarchically enforced homemakership and oppressive motherhood – that it’s a GRRL power ballad played in the key of independent womanhood – we need to consider the story’s intended demographic. After all, “gala-bound rich couple seeking responsible teen for one-night babysitting job $$$” rarely bypass the nearby middle-class McMansions and make a beeline for the barrio. Likewise, many blue collar families comprise two working parents who are beholden to shift work, and older children who are busy enough looking after each other, or working themselves. (Obviously, these are gross generalizations, but remember, we’re applying them to a story in which the main characters are Rich Couple, Attractive Teenage Girl, Sleeping Children, and Anonymous, Motivationless Killer.)

Get the rest AFTER THE JUMP…
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Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we pity the poor Babysitter. Monday we found out why these darlings are hunted. Come back Friday for the conclusion.

I don’t know how the story of the intercourse-interloping hook murderer plays out these days – the inset latch that adorns most modern car doors doesn’t seem especially conducive to bloody-hook dangling. Likewise, “hitchhiker” is a distinctly 20th century identifier. Vanishing or not, a trail-schlepping wayfarer with a hopefully extended thumb would confound even the hippest wagoneer or pony express messenger. So that whole police- or phone company-traced call coming from inside the house thing? Nothing to worry about, right? The legend is quarantined in the 1960s, a primitive ape of a horror story, thwacking an analog phone receiver against a monolithic switchboard to the swelling soundtrack of a droning dial tone.

Well, no. Not exactly.

It’s true that the initial story was rooted firmly in the days of land lines and ancient analog phone hook-ups, when a few patient taps to the receiver button could make intra-house Jerky Boying possible, but unlike the aforementioned door handles, which made it increasingly difficult for murderers to lose their deadly prostheses to inadvertent chastity warnings (though probably much easier for murderers to simply click open the door and bury their tines into the writhing flanks of the intertwining lovers), technology kept pace with the psychos. Despite the death of the veritable Cro-Magnon phones of the (club) swinging 60s, in-house murderers were quickly afforded new means of telephonic harassment in the form of multi-line phone systems (note that in many versions of the babysitter v. homicidal stranger story, one of said babysitter’s employers is a doctor, a fact that lends veracity to the presence of a second phone line in the house). Then, of course, everyone got cell phones, which put every babysitter (not to mention every babysitter-employing landline-reliant household) just ten digits away from the hungry fingers of the merciless sadist upstairs. Give it a few months and the stab-happy psychotics will be Skypeing their victims from portable media devices.

Do the evolution… AFTER THE JUMP

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Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we pity the poor Babysitter, check back Wednesday and Friday for more.

“We’ve traced the calls! They’re coming from inside the house!” Not exactly a shocking twist these days. Let’s face it: the elements that make urban legends so compellingly repeatable and readymade for national ubiquity (not to mention fun) – bloodshed, panic, sexual disaster, embarrassment and grotesque coincidence – are the same things that make them so falsifiable. Only so many people’s cousin can have the same friend who got a cheek full of spider eggs, a candy apple full of razors or a snizz full of frozen hotdog before folks start wising up. The legends manage to live on because each new generation of kids represent blank slates upon which someone’s gonna scratch out a Pepsi and Pop Rocks death equation or caricature a hook-handed killer. At the same time, these legends undergo the inevitable cultural makeovers required to ensure that they neither outstay their welcomes nor develop unsightly anachronisms.

So even if the call isn’t coming from inside the house… even if there aren’t even any calls because, clearly, the babysat children’s parents, wherever they me be, are available via portable media devices… the babysitter suffers.

So we have the cash-hungry high schooler whose babysitting experience is repeatedly disrupted by the eerie presence of a life-sized clown doll that, from one fearful glance to the next, seems to slightly shift its position; when she finally calls the parents to ask if she can toss a blanket over it, they have no idea what she’s talking about. Of course, by then it’s too late.

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