My Next Invention

In the past, I have come up with a few great inventions, only to have them stolen by Japanese entrepreneurs. Apparently I was being too vocal about my ideas before I had a chance to get anything patented or copyrighted or whatever the heck I was supposed to do before these great thoughts were put to good use by someone else.

This time, I am going to share my next invention by putting it somewhere I can be sure that virtually no one will ever see it: my blog.

So anyway, here's the idea.

Back at the beginning of 2009, Pennsylvania adopted a new law that prohibits smoking in most public places. As a non-smoker, I have been quite happy about this development, since "no smoking areas" in restaurants have always been rather ridiculous. We always had a knack for being seated in "no smoking areas" that were carefully situated right beside the smoking area. So basically this meant that we weren't personally allowed to smoke, but we were more than welcome to inhale the fumes from the next table.

So nowadays people can't smoke at work, or in most restaurants, etc. Since they can't smoke anywhere else, they now smoke in their cars. Constantly. Every single other car I see on the road features an arm sticking out the window, attached to a cigarette. I'm barely exaggerating. And being a non-smoker, it actually irks me to have to smell the fumes from the people in the cars in front of me.

I have come up with a great solution for this problem, which will be helpful to me personally, as well as for the smokers, particularly as we're heading into the midst of colder weather very soon. The answer is: Hank's Super Duper Car Chimney (see artist rendering, above).

My idea is to install a chimney on cars so the smoke can be funneled through it and safely up into the atmosphere. Smokers will like it because they won't need to have their arms hanging out the window on freezing winter days. And the chimney will be high enough that the smoke won't seep into the air of surrounding vehicles.

Granted, no one driving a chimney-enhanced car will be able to drive under a bridge or through a tunnel ever again due to the new height of the vehicle, but that's a minor detail.