With the first days of unequivocally nice weather upon us, here’s an idea to make your summer a touch more tolerable.
I first had this one about 15 years ago, when I was living in Japan. I suppose it could be the ur-Idea Free to a Good Home, as I’ve been lobbying for someone else to make it ever since. Two things are chiefly responsible for this idea:
1. I was teaching English to a small company that developed and manufactured, among other things, microspheres and microcapsules which are just what they sound like. Tiny spheres or capsules you can embed in textiles or paper. Embed thermally-expanding ones in a pattern inside wallpaper, apply heat, and you’ve got textured wallpaper, for instance. Apparently they can also contain liquid, which is important. In Korea, for instance, you can buy a suit made with perfume-containing microcapsules that cover the scent of your post-work boozing.
2. Japan is fucking hot in the summer. Really fucking hot. People are often surprised to hear this, not realizing that Osaka is at same latitude as Mobile, Alabama.
My apartment was nine minutes from the train station. (Real estate listings in Japan, as you might expect, give the precise number of minutes’ walk from the station.) Nine minutes is just enough time, I discovered, for the air conditioning in my apartment to wear off and for me to start sweating through the suit I had to wear to work. (Suit-wearing, thankfully, has become less common during the summer in Japan.) I also discovered that if I put a T-shirt and undershorts in the freezer for about an hour, I created an insulating, frosty bridge to carry me from the cool of my apartment to the cool of the train. But it only lasted about 10 minutes, so my walk from train to office still rendered me a sweaty mess. As did the trip home, since my co-workers would have frowned on my giving my underthings a quick recharge in the break-room fridge.
But what if someone filled microcapsules with the blue stuff in ice packs and then wove them into cotton and made various dainties? You could go on a picnic and stay cool the whole time. And possibly have some extra space to store a sandwich or two.
Ideas Free to a Good Home is a clearinghouse of ideas we’re too lazy to develop ourselves.
