American Inventor

Is anybody watching this show? It's actually pretty decent. I haven't seen all the episodes, but they do a pretty good job with it.

For those who don't know, the show had people pitch inventions to a panel of experts and they get moved through the show American Idol style. Right now it's down to four. The inventions are all pretty neat too.

One is a "receiver's training pole". It's used to teach football players to catch the ball with their hands instead of up against their chest. It's a vest which has a pole running parallel to the wearer's chest about 6 inches in front of them. I thought there were two really funny things about this one. First, the guy's from Detroit, and if you've seen the Lions play in the last 5-10 years, the one thing they've been best at is dropping easy catches. Second, everyone was talking about how much money they've invested and how it's taken over their lives. When the panel asked this guy about how much he spent, he says "50 bucks". Classic.

The youngest guy on there is 19. He's got this really cool double-ride bike that has a seat built into the handlebars and a second set of pedals attached to the front wheel. It's quite cool.

The most boring one is the guy who has a word game for kids. It's pretty cool and all, it's just not interesting to talk about.

The one that I thought was absolutely brilliant the second I saw it was from this guy whose young daughter was killed in a car accident. It's a new type of child seat for a car. It's kind of hard to describe, it's like a half-bowl with another bowl inside it that rotates and swings so that in the case of an accident, the child swings back and forth instead of being held against the force of the crash by a seatbelt. It's a lot cooler than I'm describing it.

Of course, American Idol-style means really crappy inventions too. Like:

The Pet Petter (it pets your dog)

The Bladder Buddy

My Therapy Buddy (this guy's gonna go nuts one day)