The Ultimate Information Filter

By Liz Langley, AlterNet. Posted December 22, 2004.

Masturbation. It's nature's Prozac.

Let me clarify: bad things are always easier to take if you're totally whacked out on endorphins. Since the election (2000 or 2004, pick one) the news has been one long, acrid stream of yuck. One wants to be informed but the news is so odious that it's hard to do it voluntarily. There is, however, a product out there that might make it easier for liberal-leaning ladies to Copper Top their way to educated bliss.

The Audi-Oh is a vibrator that reacts to sound. Music, laughter, the ice-pick-through-the-skull squawking of your neighbor's parrot ... if the microphone can pick it up, it will make the vibrator (a separate component connect by a chord) emit a pleasant buzz. Appropriately placed, this ought to elevate your mood or the mood of a loved one in the time it takes to say "supercalifragalisticexpialidocious," especially if you really enunciate.

"Once upon a time we were desgning accessories for video games for force feedback," says Audi-Oh inventor and electrical engineer for the AOC corporation James Fisher (force feedback, he says, is the technology which would cause a steering wheel to jerk out of your hand if you were playing a driving game and hit something). "We had this chair with surround sound and it shook when you'd shoot guns ... and someone made some comment about this vibrating chair and other possibilities for it. It started as a joke," Fisher says, but they went ahead and made a prototype. The guys had a big laugh over it. "Then someone said 'This will sell.'"

It's not tough to see why. While I've yet to use it for its intended purpose, I did put batteries in my sample Audi-Oh to see if it would work. I said "Hello" at the microphone. It went off like an outboard motor. That made me laugh and it went zzz-zzz-zzz, in an exact imitation of my laugh, which made me laugh harder and made it go off again. I had to drop it to break the spell. "Jesus," said a witness for whom I repeated the test. "Hallelujah," I thought. The possibilities the Audi-Oh presents for making life more wonderful seem endless. If anyone ever says to you "Will you come to my poetry reading?" you can now give an unequivocal "Yes!" without worrying that you'll want to stab yourself with a fork to dull the pain of the evening. Guys, give your girlfriend this gift and see if Monday night football, that song you wrote or the news of your layoff are greeted with a strangely distant smile. Musically, the Audi-Oh may present the first instance in which The Ramones, Slim Whitman and Handel's "Messiah," could be grouped together on a party CD (even if it's a party of one).

And then there's the news. Fisher says that sales of the Audi-Oh have increased since mid-November and while it would be easy to guess that these were holiday gift purchases, I wonder about that timing. Mid-November is when a lot of disappointed women, whose morale hit rock bottom on Nov. 3, were climbing out of their depression. Maybe they heard of this device and got the same idea I did. You could start taking anti-depressants. You could avoid the news entirely, but that would leave you dangerously uninformed about what this administration and its blind followers are up to. Or you could get an Audi-Oh and keep yourself current without every story feeling like a kidney punch.

I haven't filtered any information through the Audi-Oh just yet. It's still a little weird to me. But who wouldn't rather hear it all through a delightful hum? Imagine being able to watch "Hardfire" or "Crossballs," or whatever those gabfests are called and actually wanting to raise the volume instead of mute it. News hasn't been sexy since Clinton skipped out on D.C. This might change that.

After election day the London Daily Mirror ran a headline asking "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" Well, the answer is that being dumb is easy. Being informed is tough, especially if you've had bad news for the past four years and are hollow-eyed at the prospect of four more. You can't change the facts at your finger tips unless you have them, and if getting them can be less distressing, I'm all for it. What do you think, girls? Hands on buzzers.

Liz Langley is a freelance writer who lives in Florida.

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