Alcoholism Inventions 3-1

#3. The Worst Game in the World

Patent Application #US2004/0188942 A1Mark Trokan's invented a "nonalcoholic beer-pong game system," so his other inventions must be a social network for Halo players and a flavorless inhaler with all the health benefits of regular bacon. The only other people to extract the horrible parts of something so precisely are cancer surgeons. The whole point of beer pong is getting drunk enough to engage in unhygienically sticking things into fluid with strangers.

Patenting this game means they want to sell it and are therefore insane. Drink pong is less sanitary than bobbing for apples after the Toxic Avenger.
The patent makes the usual polysyllabic attempts at intelligence, describing "a plurality of colored beer-pong balls" aimed at "frustoconical shapes." They also realize that sober beer pong misses the point of everything so hard it's almost an antimeaning of life, so they write challenges on the balls to add a "degree of edginess." They're the sort of humorless assholes who'd write "zany" in cold blood. When your invention is "something college students do, but stupider," it's not a patent, it's dangerous proof that the nurses let you have something as pointed as a pen.

#2. Beer Bottle Fruit Clip

Patent Application #US2011/0042343 A1

Jeffery Bartucci's patent reads like a dictionary cheating at Scrabble. He wants to patent keeping fruit wedges proximate a bottle spout using the distal end of a cantilevered containment arm, and when he describes his childhood he describes gustatorily investigating domicile coloration fluid.

This guy uses more steps to put fruit in a bottle than the Ghostbusters did to put ghosts in the Ecto-Containment Unit.

If you need mechanical assistance to put fruit in your beer, that's a level of impotence dick doctors don't have a word for yet. They only know that every time you fail to have sex you fade out of old photographs. The clip also has a smaller target market than giraffe leashes for dwarfs, because if you're prepared to make an effort to use special equipment for drinking, you've probably found a beer you can bear the taste of in the first place. Shoving citrus chunks into a bottle is how bartenders say, "We understand you desire our cheapest alcoholic water and have already placed vomit mops on standby."

That's not a clip, that's a kickass Need for Speed level.

A truly terrifying amount of design has gone into this thing. It's got more carefully artificial curves than Cher, and you'd have to drink several beers before considering using either. He's also designed more special-function variants of this equipment than the Batman.

I feel the sudden need to apologize to the inventor. And sleep with my dick in a safety deposit box.

#1. The Beer Belly

Patent Application #US2007/0056998 A1The "system for beverage storage and concealment" is the exact same idea everyone who's ever paid for stadium beer has had. And Lee Tyler Olson is the worst inventor of all of them.

I'm really glad he's designing beer-smuggling equipment or I'd feel bad mocking the child with a newly discovered syndrome who drew this. I don't know if the U.S. Patent Office gives gold stars for effort, but that smiley face radiates such brain-damaged joy at his beer, body armor, carefully drawn abs and huge swinging dong that I'm seriously considering buying one for Brockway. It looks like a child drawing the worst father ever as a superhero, knowing that his parents love beer because that's what he had for amniotic fluid.
Our only proof that it wasn't drawn by a child is that a young boy would have been giggling too hard to finish scribbling a penis on the cover of a patent application. This design is actually a cunning strategy: By not threading the tube through the bag, and instead having you hunch over to suck on your own crotch, you gain several minutes of drinking time as security guards wait for police backup before even attempting to stop you.
There may be a few problems with prior art, but as we've seen, art is Olson's fatal weakness. The way this exact device was used in several comedies in the '80s and was already for sale before 2007 might also be an issue.

thebeerbelly.com
I often find that it's chiseled-jaw hunks who need to sneak drinks in public places. In the mirror.

The provisional application was made in 2005. Olson was working on this for over a year, and this was still the best he could do. Babies improve at drawing faster than that. He didn't even use a ruler. This may be the only patent application completed during product testing.

It's a tragedy, because the basic idea of body armor made with alcohol instead of Kevlar is sound: We've been threatened by sobriety far more often than by bullets.