Covert Exercise Furniture

This Friday’s Museum of Possibilities employs several themes that are found in many of my pseudo-inventions: Hiding, duplicity, pretending and concealing. Today's ideas are offered as solutions to the problem of storing and using exercise equipment in a small home or apartment. Some of these concepts will seem coy and cute, but at the same time odd. Who in their right mind jumps on a trampoline inside a fake China closet in the dark, while listening to headphones? Who would not worry that a fine living room lounge chair that contained a hidden rowing machine might eventually become grimy with sweat? Yet I can imagine some – though perhaps few – situations in which such concealed exercise equipment might be just what is needed!

Visit Steven M. Johnson at his website.


Noelegy: I would like one too. But imagine what it would be like using the inversion therapy feature after having come home from work (an old concept, I realize) and having tossed down a few drinks.
I like to amuse myself creating these things!
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Edward: I try my hardest to make these things flawed, useless and laughable but on occasion I come up with something workable by mistake.
I have a fan from many years ago who emails me telling me of my ideas that became real products. I would say that there is not much wrong with the wifi/TV/cam/Facebook/Skype accessible foldup treadmill furniture concept. I guess I failed by making it functional. LOL
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Cary: Because Al Jaffee was a cartoonist, well known for his work on MAD magazine? No one wears a hat anymore, and tipping one's hat is a very old custom that was dying out when I was a teenager in the 1950s. It was still a viable cultural habit during Al's time, though. I would love to know why I should be tipping my hat to him, unless he invented crazy furniture. :) Hmmm.....
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No, because your cartoons are a direct descendant of 'Al Jaffee's Stupid Inventions' book series. And you might want to lighten up on taking metaphors literally, or you may go MAD.
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Cary: You give me WAY too much credit for "keeping up" and being aware of other's work! Indeed I did read MAD magazine around the time it first appeared when I was age 14 but doubt I ever looked at a copy since the fifties. So, to my detriment, I had never seen, or perhaps never remembered seeing, his inventions!
I started creating comical inventions after I turned 36!
Thanks for pointing his work out to me, or reacquainting me with it!
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Cary: But speaking of cartoonists who like to think up inventions, I was aware of and DID greatly admire the work of Philip Garner, whose work coincidentally appeared on the same pages as mine in the PEOPLE & PLACES section of Road & Track magazine in the mid-1980s.
I used to have his BETTER LIVING CATALOG paperback. Very funny stuff.
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I guess quirky, inventive minds think alike! I was a rabid collector of Jaffe's books as a kid. I'm still grateful to my mom, who kept her promise to get me a MAD subscription for straight A's. I looked at some of the other stuff in your museum, and it's a lot of fun. I bet Al would get a kick out of it.
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Thanks, Cary: your mom was a wise lady.
You refer to "quirky" minds. My quirky mind long ago concluded that words can often suggest similar concepts when you tally them by their first letters. My thinking is quirky, queer, querulous, quizzical, quarrelsome, quibbling, questionable; at times it is like a quagmire where normal thoughts sink as if into quicksand. If I were a doctor I would be labeled a quack. My mind at times can quiver or quaver.
I left out a few qu words that didn't fit my theory. :)
Anyway, I hope to look up Jaffee's work and maybe find an affordable copy of one or more of books in his Stupid Inventions series as a used book on Amazon.
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