"Eat this!" Hang on, let me pass your biscuits through the scanner

Today is National Sex Toy Day. Oh come on, as if you didn’t know.

I booked a dental appointment for this morning, especially to celebrate. Dentists have loads of electrically powered buzzy contraptions with which to entertain their customers, and I wanted to see if mine had added anything new since my last visit.

It was to be a slightly disappointing rendez-vous. There I was, looking forward to a quarter-hour of thrashing about on his Lazy Boy while repeating “Nnnnngggg” in an increasingly insistent manner. Instead, all I got was the usual fingernails-down-a-blackboard whistling drill and the boring old freezing cold sucky thing. He didn’t seem to be getting into the groove of National Sex Toy Day at all, no doubt on the pretext that it would be unprofessional to use technology in ways that were not originally intended.

Fair enough. You wouldn’t want people to get the wrong idea about dentists. Their spotless reputation could be tarnished.

On the other hand, the radiographer at the dental centre was much more promising. She had loads of fancy new robotic kit in her hi-tech cupboard. How things have advanced in the field since the last time my gob was X-rayed!

Mind you, the last time was back in Britain. Everyday health services such as routine dentistry in the United Kingdom can be somewhat rudimentary. My last dental X-ray involved me having to shove a plastic-and-cardboard gag-inducer about the same size as my entire head into my mouth and resting my cheek against a hole in a gigantic machine encased in brown bakelite while everyone else took cover behind sandbags.

Here in France, everything from an X-ray to getting a sight test involves elaborate, swivelly white machinery that whispers into position before gently humming as it rotates around you. This one played hi-fi audio too: a soft recorded voice invited me to close my eyes, whereupon some appealing classical music swirled out of nowhere as an orbiting camera captured my jaw in bullet-time.

Afterwards, my dentist asked if I had enjoyed the music. We then wasted the next five minutes while I failed to express in my inadequate French how the experience had been more like that of Edward G Robinson in Soylent Green.

This produced a blank stare. I had forgotten that the French title of the film is Soleil Vert (‘Green Sun’), which makes you wonder if they’d cocked up the translation for the French over-dubbing too. Maybe in French it’s an oddball buddy-buddy comedy with surreal 1970s slapstick involving digger trucks.

That would have been a serious misrepresentation of the story and definitely not what was intended. This would explain my dentist’s inability to understand what on Earth I was on about. I was only trying to make a joke but, well, there is nothing funny about the euthanasia scene in Soylent Green. Nobody would ever dream of playing it for cartoonish laughs.

Mind you, down here in the gloriously sunny south of France, people do make a habit of using tech in ways in which it wasn’t intended. I think this devil-may-care attitude to misuse, or wilful misunderstanding if you prefer, is brilliant and should be encouraged everywhere. It’s a bit like “move quickly and break things”, except by moving slowly and not breaking anything. It’s all about entertainment.

It’s much the same oop North, I’m told. The mayor of Calais very recently told residents during a town meeting that she wanted to issue a fine to the owner of a badly parked white van that she’d noticed in some photos being projected on-screen by a colleague who was presenting a traffic project. Apparently there was silence in the hall for a few seconds, followed by an eruption of laughter. “I’m not joking!” she shouted over the din, as an aide tried to explain to her what Google Street View was.

Who needs live CCTV when you can clean up Dodge by poring over three-year-old snapshots taken by a 360-degree camera shoved through the roof of a Google car that’s permanently stuck behind a bus?

It’s not just technology, either. One of my neighbours takes her cat for a walk twice a day; the dog sometimes comes along too. “So what if cats are independent? I can bloody well take the cat for a walk if I want!”

I even spotted a guy taking his parrot for a walk. Admittedly, he did all the walking, but still. Gotta love that “do it wrong” attitude. Inessentiality is the cater-cousin of invention.

Talking of sex toys – you thought I’d forgotten, eh? – there was that time back when I was a student when someone at the coven had the bright idea of casting spells inside home-baked biscuits.

Normally, you tend to write spells down or speak them aloud as part of a ritual. Oh but no, she decided to put an attraction spell inside a batch of cookies she was going to bake as a gift for a (so far, unrequited) love interest.

Unfortunately, she added one egg too many in the mixture. As a result the cookies rose a bit during baking, absorbing the inky food colouring that she’d used to write the secret spells inside the dough. Her beau was a little surprised to be presented with a box of what she told him were “traditional celtic sponge cookies” – all completely blue, or “woad-infused” as she claimed.

In principle, she knew what she’d originally written in the cookies so it shouldn’t matter that the edible ink had run; the spell would still work. And as she recounted some weeks later, it did.

Now if only we’d had the technology back then, she could have industrialised her shagtastic alimentary invention. Some boffin dudes at Osaka University have been using a 3D printer to put QR codes inside – yup, you guessed it – cookies. With the right thickness, the code remains invisible under normal conditions. Pass the cookie over a lightbox, however, and it reveals itself in all its randy QR square-block thrusting glory; any half-decent camera or smartphone can then read the code inside.

So far the codes remain lo-res. You can’t pack much rumpy-pumpy detail in a spell that small. But maybe “crude and to-the-point” is what you’re after.

Cast a look around and see how much fun stuff has arisen from misusing great ideas that were intended to do something else entirely. I dunno… LED lightbulbs? Electric bicycles?

My current favourite example of not using things as they were originally intended is the increasing popularity of Bitcoin ATMs, of which 500 were installed around the world every month during 2022. You’re supposed to use them to convert legal tender into Bitcoin. But I rather imagine the big demand is among people who need to do it in reverse, i.e. ditch their ununoctium toy money for hard cash without having to walk too far from their front doors.

Oh, remember that guy with the parrot? I think I found his car.

It’s the disruptor’s charter, isn’t it?

“Move quickly, break things and walk away while everything gets covered in shit.”