Exercise Sombrero

He had a propensity to tell stories that ended just as they might get interesting.
“Me and James, we were walking in the woods, and we came to a river.”
My interest piqued, I’d say, “Well, what did you do?”
“We came to a river.”
“Did you find a place where you could wade across? Did you take all your clothes off and hold them over your head while swimming across? Did you walk along it until you found a bridge? Did you have a picnic or look for snakes? Did you turn back?”
“No!” He’d say, and stamp his foot, and retreat.
I got the feeling he had never been in a woods, or had come to a river, at all, ever.

I will not lie for him: The handcrafted acrylic knit exercise poncho is not his invention but prior art that he and I both witnessed with our own eyes. I could tell the idea shook him to his foundation, and he’d never be able to get it out of his mind. That’s more his thing than mine.
However, together we did develop the idea of the exercise sombrero. I animated its use on a stack of his business cards, stapled together, which he proudly showed everybody. He wanted to make an accompanying video of its use, and I tried to persuade him to do a simple WAP version for mobile phone and PDA, as the mobile phone companies were gaining an appetite for marketing this type of thing for amazing profit. We’d need only make one sale, and they could market and distribute it right through people’s phone bills.

But I don’t want to talk about it. He was a fine subject for observation, but obviously, being highly prone to false negatives, and to jumping or abandoning the script, he was not the best subject for my controlled scientific experimentation. It wasn’t helping matters at all.