How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays

How to Buy Gadgets

The aircraft flies majestically over boundless prairies, immense deserts. This American continent can still offer moments of solitary, almost tactile encounter with nature. I am forgetting civilization, but it so happens that in the pocket of the seat back before me, along with instructions for rapid evacuation (of the plane, in the unlikely event of an emergency), a pamphlet with information about the in-flight movie, and the program of the Brandenburg Concertos available through the headset, there is a copy of Discoveries, a brochure that lists, with alluring illustrations, a series of objects that can be purchased via mail order. In the days that follow, on other flights, I discover analogous publications: The American Traveler, Gifts with Personality, and their similars.

They make irresistible reading, I am won over by them, and I forget nature, so monotonous because, at least here, "non facit saltus" (and I am hoping my aircraft will behave in the same fashion). Culture, as we know, is all the more interesting if it serves to revise and correct nature. Nature is tough and hostile; culture, on the contrary, allows people to do things with less effort, saving time. Culture frees the body from the enslavement of toil and opens the way to contemplation.

Just think, for example, how tedious it is to handle a nasal spray, one of those little pharmaceutical bottles that you press with two fingers to allow a beneficent aerosol to penetrate the nostrils. But relief is at hand! Just insert the bottle into the Viralizer machine ($4.95), and it is squeezed for you, so efficiently that the spray reaches the most intimate areas of the respiratory tract. Naturally, you have to hold the machine in your hand, and the photographs suggest a Kalashnikov being fired, but then everything comes at a price.

I am struck (but I hope not literally shocked) by Omniblanket, which costs all of $150. At the simplest level, it is an electric blanket, but it can be programmed so that the temperature varies from one part of your body to another. In other words, if during the night your back feels cold but your groin tends to sweat, you adjust the program accordingly. Omniblanket will then keep your back warm and your groin cool. If you are nervous and toss and turn in your sleep, ending up with your head at the foot, then you're just out of luck. You will roast your testicles or whatever you have in that area, depending on your sex. I doubt the inventor can be asked to make improvements, because it seems he was burned to a cinder some time ago.

Naturally, in your sleep, you might snore and disturb your partner, if you have one. Well, in that case, try Snorestopper, a kind of watch you fasten onto your wrist before sleeping. The moment you begin to snore the Snorestopper, alerted by an audio-sensor, emits an electronic signal that, from your arm, reaches some of your nerve centers and interrupts something or other; anyway, you stop snoring. It costs only $45. One drawback: it is not advisable for those with heart trouble, and I wonder if it might not endanger the health even of an Olympic athlete. Furthermore, it weighs two pounds. You could use it, no doubt, with your husband or wife after decades of familiar intimacy, but hardly with a near-stranger during a night of romance. Making love with a two-pound weight on your wrist could cause alarming side effects.

It is well known that, to reduce their cholesterol levels, the Americans have long since taken up jogging: they run for hours and hours until they drop dead of a heart attack. Pulse-Trainer ($59.95), worn on the wrist, is attached by a wire to a little rubber sheath slipped over the index finger. When your cardiovascular system is on the brink of collapse, an alarm goes off, apparently. A real achievement, if you consider that in underdeveloped countries a person stops running only when he is out of breath—a highly primitive criterion, and perhaps for this reason children in Ghana are not brought up to jog. It is curious, however, that despite such neglect, their blood cholesterol levels are almost imperceptible. With Pulse-Trainer you may run without a care and, further, if you attach to your chest and your waist the two Nike Monitor straps, an electronic voice, programmed by a microprocessor and featuring Doppler-Effect UltraSound, will tell you how many miles you have run and your median speed ($300).

For the animal lover I would advise Bio/Bet. You slip it around your dog's neck and it emits ultrasounds (Pmbc Circuit) that kill fleas. And it costs only $25. I don't know whether, applied to your own body, it would eliminate crabs; I'd be afraid of overkill. Batteries not included. The dog has to go out and buy his own.

Shower Valet ($34.95), a single unit that can be hung on the wall, provides you with a no-mist shaving mirror, integrated radio-TV, and both razor-blade and shaving-cream dispensers. According to the ad, it can transform your boring morning routine into an "experience to remember." Spice Track ($36.95) is an electric machine stocked with little tubes of all the spices you might wish. In poor households the spices are kept in a row on a shelf over the gas stove, and when, for example, the family wants some cinnamon on its daily dish of caviar, they have to sprinkle the spice with their fingers. But, as a member of the privileged class, you will simply tap out an algorithm (in Turbo-Pascal, I believe), and the spice of your choice will come spinning to a stop right in front of you.

If you want to give that special person a present for his or her birthday, a mere thirty dollars is enough to have him/her sent a copy of the New York Times of the date of his/her birth. If he/she was born on the day of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, or on the day of the Messina earthquake, that's just too bad. This gift can also be useful in humiliating people you dislike, if they happen to have been born on a day when nothing occurred.

During flights of some length, for three or four dollars, you can hire headsets that allow you to hear various musical programs and the sound track of the in-flight movie. For frequent and compulsive travelers with a pathological fear of AIDS, the sum of $19.95 will buy a personal, or rather personalized (sterilized), headset you can carry with you whenever you fly.

As you move from one country to another, you will want to know how many German marks a British pound is worth, or how many Spanish doubloons you need to buy a thaler. The underprivileged use a pencil or a ten-dollar pocket calculator. They look up the exchange rate in the newspaper and they multiply. But the rich can purchase a twenty-dollar Currency Converter: it gives the same answer as the calculator, but every morning your CEO has to reprogram it according to the newspaper values, and in all likelihood it is unable to answer the (non-monetary) question: what's six times six? The exquisite aspect is that this instrument, costing twice as much, does half what the others can do.

Then there are the various miracle engagement organizers (Master Day Time, Memory Pal, Loose-leaf Timer, etc.). A miracle organizer, superficially, is like an ordinary engagement book (except that as a rule it won't fit into any pocket). As in an ordinary engagement book, for example, after September 30 you find October 1. What changes is the description. Imagine—the helpful example goes—that on January 1 you make an appointment for 10 A.M. on December 20, almost twelve months in the future. No human mind can memorize such an insignificant detail for so long. So what do you do? On January 1, you open the book to the page for December 20 and you write, "10 A.M., Mr. Smith." Wonder of wonders! For most of the rest of the year you can forget that burdensome engagement. And then, at 7 A.M. on December 20, as you are eating your breakfast cereal, you open the book and, as if by miracle, you remember your appointment.... But what if on December 20—I ask—you wake up at eleven and don't look at your book until noon? Answer: if you have spent fifty dollars for the miracle organizer, you will at least have the common sense to get up every morning at seven.

To save time at your toilet on that busy December 20 there is the tempting Electric Nose Hair Remover, or Rotary Clipper, for sixteen dollars. This is an instrument that would have fascinated the Marquis de Sade. You stick it into your nose (as a rule) and, as it rotates, it snips off the hairs inside, inaccessible to the nail scissors with which the poor usually, and vainly, attempt to cut them. I haven't been able to find out whether or not there is a macro version for your pet elephant.

Cool Sound is a portable refrigerator for picnics, with built-in TV. The Fish Tie is a necktie in the form of a cod, one hundred percent polyester. The Coin Changer (a little machine that dispenses small change) spares you the trouble of having to dig into your pocket before buying the newspaper: unfortunately, it takes up the space of the reliquary containing St. Alban's femur. There is no information as to where you will find the coins to fill it.

Tea, provided it is of good quality, requires only a vessel for boiling water, a spoon, and, if you like, a strainer. Tea Magic ($9.95) is a highly complicated apparatus that succeeds in making the preparation of a cup of tea as laborious as that of a cup of Turkish coffee.

I suffer from various liver ailments, excess uric acid, atrophic rhinitis, gastritis, housemaid's knee, tennis elbow, avitaminosis, articular and muscular pain, hammertoe, allergic eczemas, and perhaps also leprosy. Fortunately I am not a hypochondriac into the bargain. But the fact is that I must remember every day, at the right time, which pill to take. I have been given a silver pillbox, but I forget to fill it in the morning. Moving around with all those filled bottles means that you must then spend a fortune in leather goods, and it's also inconvenient when you use your skateboard. Now Tablets Cupboard has found the solution to all that. Occupying no more space than a Volvo, it accompanies you throughout your working day and, rotating, automatically it offers you the right pill at the right moment. More elegant, however, is the Electronic Pill Box ($19.85) for patients who have no more than three diseases at any one time. The box has three compartments and a built-in computer that emits a beep at the moment you are to take the pill.

Trap-Ease is magnificent if there are mice in your home. You insert some cheese and set the trap, and then you can even go out to the opera. In a normal trap, the mouse, on entering, touches a spring activating a metal bar that kills him. Trap-Ease, on the contrary, is designed in the shape of an obtuse angle. If the mouse dawdles in the vestibule, he is spared (but he doesn't get to eat the cheese). If he nibbles, the object turns 94 degrees and a shutter comes down. Since the device (which costs eight dollars) is transparent, you can, if you choose, watch the mouse in the evening when there's, nothing good on TV; or you can liberate it in the fields (the ecological option), or throw the whole thing in the garbage, or—during sieges—empty the trap directly into a pot of boiling water (or oil).

LeafScoop is a glove that transforms your hands into those of a palmiped born, through radioactive mutation, from the crossbreeding of a duck with a pterodactyl via Dr. Quatermass. It is used in the collection of fallen leaves in your eighty-thousand-acre park. Spending a mere $12.50, you save the salary of a gardener and a gamekeeper (we recommend it to Lord Chatterley's attention). TieSaver covers your neckties with a protective oily film so that, Chez Maxim, you can eat tomato sandwiches without then appearing at the Board of Directors meeting looking like Dr. Barnard after a difficult transplant. Only fifteen dollars. Ideal for those who still use brilliantine. You can wipe your forehead with the tie.

What happens when your suitcase is crammed to the bursting point? Fools rush out and buy a second suitcase, in suede or pigskin. But this solution means that afterwards you have both hands occupied. Briefcase Expander is, so to speak, a packsaddle that sits astride your regular suitcase, and you can use it for everything that won't fit into the first bag, achieving an overall girth of six feet or more. For forty-five dollars you enjoy the sensation of boarding the plane with a mule under your arm.

Ankle-Valet ($19.95) allows you to conceal your credit cards in a secret pocket fastened to your calf. Indispensable for dope smugglers. Drive-Alert is placed behind the ear when you drive, so that the moment you doze off—or start to zzz, as the comics put it—and your head slumps forward beyond an established safety limit, an alarm goes off. The photographs indicate that it transforms the wearer's ears into something reminiscent of Star Trek, Elephant Man, or the young Clark Gable. When you are wearing it, if someone asks you, "Will you marry me?" don't answer with too vigorous an affirmative. The ultrasounds would do you in at once.

I would also mention in passing an automatic birdfeed distributor, a personalized beer stein with a bicycle bell (ring it to order a second round), a face sauna, a Coca-Cola fountain in the form of a gasoline pump, and Bicycle-Seat: a double bicycle seat, one per buttock. Good for those with a prostate problem. The ad informs us that the device has a "split-end design (no pun intended)."

If between planes you also explore the newsstands, you learn many things. Some days ago I discovered that there are various magazines addressed exclusively to treasure-hunters. Trésors de l'Histoire, for example, which is published in Paris, contains articles about fabulous caches possibly buried in various zones of France, giving specific geographical and topographical details and information on treasures already found in those localities.

The issue I bought includes directions regarding treasures to be found even on the bed of the Seine, ranging from ancient coins to objects thrown into the river over the centuries: swords, vases, boats, not to mention other goodies including works of art; there are also treasures buried in Brittany by the apocalyptic sect of Eon de l'Estoile in the Middle Ages; treasures from the magic forest of Brocéliande, dating back to the days of Merlin and the Grail cycle, with detailed instructions for identifying, if you strike it rich, the Holy Grail itself; treasures interred in Normandy by the Vendéens during the French Revolution; the treasure of Olivier le Diable, the barber of Louis XI; treasures mentioned—ostensibly in jest, though they actually exist—in the Arsène Lupin novels. Further, there is a Guide de la France trésoraire, which the article only describes generically, because the complete work is available for 26 francs. It contains 74 maps (scale 1:100), allowing the reader to choose the region most convenient for him.

Meanwhile, the reader will be wondering how you hunt for a treasure underground or underwater. No problem: the magazine offers articles and advertisements describing a vast range of equipment essential for the treasure-hunter. There are different types of detector, variously sensitive to gold or metals or other precious materials. For underwater hunting, there are wetsuits, masks, machines with discriminating devices that identify only jewels, and, of course, there are fins. There are even special credit cards with which, after spending two thousand dollars, you can select another two hundred dollars' worth of goods, free. (The existence of such a bonus is puzzling; by this time the customer should have discovered, at the very least, a casket filled with pieces of eight).

For eight hundred dollars you can be the proud owner of an M-Scan. Though somewhat bulky, it can identify copper coins at a depth of twenty-two centimeters, a chest at two meters, and a metal mass enclosed in an impenetrable cell as much as three meters below your feet. Further instructions explain how to hold and orient the various types of detectors, advising that rainy weather facilitates the hunt for large masses, while dry weather is best for small objects. The Beachcomber 60 is specially engineered for searching beaches and highly mineralized terrain (as you can imagine, if a copper coin is buried next to a vein of diamonds the machine might act up and ignore the coin altogether). Moreover, another ad reminds us that ninety percent of the world's gold is still to be discovered, and the easy-to-handle Goldspear detector (fifteen hundred dollars) has been specially conceived to identify auriferous veins. A pocket detector (Metallocator) is available at a modest price for use in fireplaces and antique furniture. For less than forty dollars, an AF2 spray will clean and remove rust from the coins you find. Also for the less wealthy enthusiast, there are numerous radioesthesic plumblines. And for further information there are numerous volumes with such alluring titles as The Mysterious Story of French Treasures; Guide to Buried Treasure; France, the Promised Land; Caves and Caverns of France; and Treasure-hunting in Belgium and Switzerland.

You will wonder why, with all this inestimable wealth at their disposal, the editors of this magazine waste the best days of their lives writing instead of setting off for the forests of Brittany. The fact is that the magazine, the books, the detectors, the fins, the rust-cleaners, and all the rest are sold by the same organization, which has a chain of shops virtually covering the continent. So the mystery is quickly elucidated: they have already found their treasure.

What remains to be discovered is the identity of those who enrich these editors, but they are probably the same people who, in Italy, try to find spectacular bargains at televised auctions and rush to exploit the incredible beneficence of wholesale furniture outlets. At least the French enjoy some healthy hikes in the woods.

1986