Recently, Time magazine published their online list of the fifty best inventions of 2009. Of course, lists such as these are always utterly pointless and arbitrary, but they inevitably contain some ridiculous ordering and consequently make superb lampooning material for an equally pointless and arbitrary column like the one you’re reading right now.
Heading the list was NASA’s Ares I rocket, the revolutionary new spacecraft designed to take astronauts to the moon and possibly beyond. Did I say revolutionary? I do apologise, I of course meant “regurgitation of a thirty-year-old design,” since Ares I is pretty much an anorexic version of the seventies’s interstellar headliner Saturn V, which makes it a bizarre choice for the No. 1 spot.
Further controversy was to be had as Microsoft’s Project Natal technology, which allows computer games to be controlled entirely by human voice and action, was several places above a new AIDS vaccine that actually works (albeit only 31% of the time). Surely, though, that’s a more important invention than being able to seduce a weird-looking virtual child called Milo without the dubious aid of a Wii wand.
However, I’m willing to forgive Time’s questionable charting abilities, simply because they included a robotic penguin on the list, which, frankly, makes them awesome.
