Great inventions

I belong to an inventors club so I know that when writers run out of ideas they often fall back on the theme of inventors and inventions ... and expect instant interviews from our members.

Last week for example a trainee movie-scripter was referred to me by another member “too busy” or too cunning to be interviewed.

With breathless excitement the young fellow explained this novel theme he had thought up.

“What do you think is the greatest invention of the last 2000 years?”, he was going to ask, “... a lot of important people like you”.

Of course I was flattered enough not to tell him he’d pinched the idea from the Net where 100 v.i.p. had been asked the same question just before Y2K, and answered it, mostly in Halfbakery style, i.e. answers soft in the middle.

Worse still, when I told him my choice was The Pill, I didn’t tell him I in turn had pinched that choice from the Net too, it being my favoured invention of the 100.

Why was it my choice? Because nobody else was game to name The Bomb as the “best” way of solving the problem of problems : i.e. the world population graph going vertical soon. Nor am I, was I, game.

Which leaves The Pill as the best invention, its future even then halfbaked, because allegedly the well-educated people that democracy needs are becoming fewer while poorly educated ones that dictators love are, in spite of AIDS and The Pill and condoms, becoming rapidly more numerous.

My interviewer departed red-faced. I think he must have been R.C. I refrained from telling him not to worry; Italians, paradoxically close to the very centre of Catholicism, will soon die out completely, according to some gloomy [half-baked] predictions. The Pill has been “blamed”. How half-baked was my choice?