I’ve always wanted to be an inventor and hold Intellectual Property.
My greatest invention is “Write Your Name In Chicken”. The chicken that eventually becomes a chicken morsel snack from a fast food restaurant starts out as a live chicken.
The live chickens come in the back door of an industrial food plant. Once the chicken is slaughtered and cleaned of innards, feathers, beaks, claws and arsehole, the whole bird is tossed into what is basically a four-storey Cuisinart.
Blades pulverize the bird, adding the right amount of water, liquid egg, unpronounceable chemical preservatives and spices. Artificial chicken-flavor powder is shoveled in by sweaty workers paid minimum wage and the technology spins ferociously to create Universal Chicken Paste.
Depending on how much water they add, the Universal Chicken Paste can be extruded, rolled into sheets like cookie dough or formed around skewers for instant kebabs. To make a certain brand of chicken morsel, the factory extrudes a sheet of UCP then cuts out the chicken morsel. Look closely the next time you are at a fast food joint and you will see there are nine to twelve shapes that look almost, but not quite, natural.
The cut out lumps are battered, partially fried and flash frozen. At the fast food restaurant the high school student with audible acne fries them one last time until the beeper goes off. A counter monkey serves them to you under hundreds of brand names. Or, if you really hate your children, you could feed them home-reheated dinosaur shaped breaded chicken morsels.
What Write Your Name In Chicken does is intercept that Universal Chicken Paste before it is made into a fast food snack. I want it packed into a disposable, food-grade caulking gun tube form.
The next step is as elegant as it is simple. Rent a booth at as many state and local fairs as possible. There must be a traveling midway present. There must be carny-based games of chance. I don’t want to go to Book Fairs or Renaissance Faires. I want the Great Unwashed Masses: Polyester pants, sandals, tube tops, T-shirts that profess a deep love of tractor pulls and Budweiser gimme hats.
Set up the booth with the most garish colours you can find and a cheap PA system. Rent two deep fryers, a couple of tables and some fry baskets. You put the caulking gun tubes of UCP in a caulking gun handle. Spell out the persons’ name using the UCP as ink on a deep fryer screen. Penmanship counts so don’t hire obvious junkies. Dip the whole mess into a batter mix, perhaps the same batter as corn dogs.
Then, into the hot grease in the fryer. About one minute later, out comes Your Name Written In Chicken. Offer various dipping sauces, which are packaged in little restaurant packs. You are handed your name in chicken and offered one or two sauces. It is a Buck a Letter. Alexandria pays more than Bob.
Hire a carny talker to build a tip for your booth. He must have a throat that sounds like he has been freshly strangled and gargles with battery acid. Let him do his thing.
I still remember one high talker from the Central Canada Ex in the early 70’s. Its Real, Its Alive, the Incredible Monster Boy of Borneo here today. You must see the Incredible Monster Boy of Borneo today. It is Real. It is Alive. Today in Your Town. The Incredible Monster Boy of Borneo. For twelve hours a day, a carny did that rap in front of a trailer that mostly featured what were called pickled punks, or medical oddities in formaldehyde: Don’t ask.
The Incredible Monster Boy of Borneo was a middle aged man with too much hair all over his face, arms and body due to a genetic defect. He’d sit there in a pair of tiger-print wrestling shorts and let you look at him, while he chain-smoked. Every hour, he’d get up, growl a bit and shake the bars of his cage. It’s real. It’s alive…
Into this milieu, Write Your Name In Chicken is only the biggest winner since the BlackBerry.
That is my Intellectual Property. © 1998 David Smith. All licensing inquiries can be sent to me, c/o this page. I’ll sell for money.
RoadDave 