"The Cold Fusion Yo-Yo"

"The Cold Fusion Yo-Yo"

"by Duncan, a high-tech precision 62g aircraft aluminum yo-yo with steel ballbearigs. World record 7 minute spins. Red and black special edition limited to 1600 pieces. $90 plus $6.00 S&H."
www.yoyoguy.com
"Infinite Illusions"

This page did not go looking for the above. As with "Dead Sparrow Overshadows Domino World" it simply appeared in perusal of mainstream pubs.

(ASIDE: perusal has to be the only word in the English language with two opposite meanings. The first, preferred, usage is to read thoroughly. The second, discouraged, but much more common, is to skim.)

"Cold Fusion Yo-Yo" was encountered in a quick thumbing of a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine.

Even moreso than with "Dead Sparrow" the mind cracked when stumbling across "Cold Fusion Yo-Yo."

"Cold Fusion" is as synonymous with scientific quackery as perpetual motion machines. When conjoined with "Yo-Yo," itself a substitute for daft-ness, the implication is of something with the gravitas of the pet rock, or a spoof in the spirit of Orson Welles.

Perhaps it is, since the undersigned will not be paying $90 + S&H to find out.

Perhaps it is a goof on the middle-brow readership of The New Yorker, or a hermeneutic for that ethnological subgroup.

It says here though that it is not a goof. However, there is cultural meaning.

The undersigned believes that if you send the money to "Yo-Yo guy" at "Infinite Illusions" you will get the objet d'art pictured in the ad. I believe that the object is truly manufactured by Duncan, which is to the manufacture of Yo-Yo's what Apple is to the manufacture of personal computers.

In the undersigned's (childhood) experience, a Yo-Yo by other than Duncan was the equivalent of wearing "sneakers" by other than Converse, that is, an irrebuttable presumption that you ate paste made of nose dirt and still slept with your mommy.

It is inconceivable to the undersigned that Duncan would lend itself to a goof like this here.

Too, the specs of this object, "62 g aircraft aluminum," and "steel ball-bearings" has the ring of validity, as appealing to those of normal I.Q. but super-normal bank balances and super-super-normal social ambition,; to those who want "the best," who get their gifts and their gift-giving ideas from The Sharper Image, who pay super-normal prices to buy their normal I.Q.'d children admission to The Dalton School and like that.

In short, this object seems to have been marketed to it's perfect target audience.

All of this still seems to leave unexplained the object's description. A "cold fusion yo-yo" would seem to raise red flags with even non-Mensa members but even the undersigned (who is NOT eligible for Mensa membership) knows of the snake-oil reputation of cold fusion.

The description is alerting enough that the undersigned can imagine questions of the type, "Geoff dear, what is cold fusion?," but the undersigned cannot imagine even know-it-all men like Geoff replying with, "Why, it's the newest advance in Yo-Yo's Heather, you dumb-ass. I read about it last month in Men's Health."

But it must be so because Duncan is the manufacturer and a journal with the social standing and ambition of The New Yorker would not allow itself to be so hood-winked.

The undersigned has to believe that there is such a critical mass of dumb-asses out there, and that they read The New Yorker in such numbers, as to make the cold-fusion yo-yo the perfect holiday gift for the likes of Geoff and Heather.

Which is why the undersigned is reconsidering his opposition to the death penalty, nay to mass murder.

-The Undersigned