Rivative: Jonesing for Journals

STEVE -- 8/10/98 18:36:53 PM

On the way to the second reading of BLACKJACK, a new play by Erin Marie Tshantret and Stephen de Seve. Tonight's reading is expected to be unexpectedly well-attended. The Director, Julia Carey, has taken control of some of the scenes and has them blocked. It will be good to see a surprising followup to the first, successful, reading. I can think of little else. I am also running late. The reading is scheduled to start at 7:00. It is now 6:40 and I am writing this from an uptown A train. Everything I did today took 400 times longer than it should have. As it is, I have left dinner on the stove. Maybe it will reheat OK and kill everything that grows in it. It's about 80 degrees. Most of them on this train!

I am trying the powerbook in a briefcase routine. It's pretty good, unless the ridge on the inside of the briefcase causes a loss of blood flow to my hands. That should keep my hand cells from replicating as quickly, though, so my hands would live longer. My hands don't smoke. That is good too. Now I only have to hope they find a fix-up for the lungs. Teflon lungs. One of my earlier inventions that got laughed out of the patent office. Probably because the working model I had to submit was made out of 14 zip-lock bags. I didn't have any glue, so the only way I could get enough large sheets of plastic from materials on hand was to cut the bags at their seams and put them together ziplock by ziplock like bricks. Then I used a hole punch to make it semi-permeable, as I proposed the teflon lung would have to be. The success of the device, in my opinion, lay in the invention, by somebody else, of the teflon bronchi.

So, I sent the teflon lung prototype to the patent office with the word "teflon" written on it in El Marko marker and the recommendation that the patent investigators try the prototype in their own lungs for a week or so, and then take it out and wash it out for re-use. This way they would be able to tell if non-stick technology in the lung helps eliminate that end-of-the-day ossified smokestack feeling you get with normal, unimproved lung. I figured, who can pay for R&D testing and all the approvals and everything? Might as well have them do all this for free, since they had to examine the merits of the patent, anyway. My invention was just right to put with the companion technology that would be developed in the future.