Friday, January 06, 2006

Perceiving

Yesterday I received a late Christmas present from a friend who apparently understands me far, far too well.


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X-RAY SPECS! Or rather X-RAY GOGS, presumably because X-RAY SPEC technology is copyrighted and jealously guarded by the good people at Acme Fraudulent Novelties.


As you can see from the packaging, X-RAY GOGS not only give you the power of X-ray vision, but also make you look like Dick York. Or Dick Sargent. One of the two, anyway.


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And why would one need X-ray vision?


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Busty but nervous brunettes, that's why! The whole point of X-ray glasses is to surreptitiously look through the clothes of attractive ladies, and so it has been ever since Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen perved on Marie Curie through her white lab coat and bakelite corsetry in 1895.


Given that fact, the design of these particular X-ray glasses leaves something to be desired. Frankly, having the words X-RAY GOGS spelled out in large letters across the lenses rather gives the game away. If an attractive lady notices you staring at her and salivating while wearing ordinary-looking glasses, she may simply assume that you are just a drooling halfwit and go about her business. However, if she sees you staring at her and salivating while wearing glasses clearly labelled X-RAY GOGS, she will no doubt conclude that you are a colossal pervert and contact the authorities. And who needs that kind of grief?


However, in the name of science, I was willing to risk legal proceedings and give these glasses a try. I put them on, and this is what I saw:


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No one, in the history of human eyesight, ever bought X-ray glasses to look at hand bones. However this is merely misdirection, not outright fraud. I decided to humour them and do as they suggested.


Dim cardboard. Blurriness. The great white rectangle of my office's fluorescent light. A vague shape that was either my spread hand or a spider crawling across the lenses. Then I noticed that I could in fact sort of see darker bits of red in the middles of my fingers, and lighter bits of red on the sides. Wow! It really works! Time to find a busty but nervous brunette!


Although it's funny how X-ray vision looks a lot like an optical illusion utilising the principle of diffraction and the stereoscopic nature of human vision.

1 Comments:

Blogger Cookster said...

Blimey, I was only talking about these things in a post yesterday, so I just had to give my viewers a link to the source of the font... font of the source??? Ah, who cares! You are, however, the only person I know to have actually received and lab tested this product of such mythical proportion. How are those busty brunette's coming along?

5:28 PM  

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