A little while back, my esteemed employer handed out a few trinkets to us galley slaves. We got hats with the company logo, shirts with the company logo, all sorts of stuff. It could only mean one thing - they had extra stuff left over after the trade show and needed something to do with it. But the most interesting thing we were given was a small laser pointer with the company logo on it. The laser pointer itself was pretty ordinary, but the box it came in is one of the more entertaining things I've seen lately. (That's pretty sad, if you think about it).

While I was certainly glad to see that my new "laser little spirit" was indeed "speical", it's the sides of the box that held my interest. There were four little pictures down each side, apparently intended to illustrate various uses for the enclosed pointer. Let's look over what my new laser pointer is intended to be used for. (Special thanks to John for scanning all this in for me.)

	I am Joe's pancreas.
	I know it's a map of Newfoundland, but if you squint at it, it looks like a triceratops holding a mouse in its mouth by the tail.
	I guess they're trying to break into the enormous sewer-worker market for high-tech geek toys.
	Note that in this image, they DON'T actually show the laser pointer being used with the cat. Perhaps they're afraid of being sued by the guy who patented playing with cats and laser pointers. Note also the mysterious cube shape floating in the background. Perhaps our corporate artist is making a small homage to Magritte?
	Well, this one's pretty straightforward. I mean, what better way of achieving the pinpoint, feather-touch accuracy required of cranes and wrecking balls than with laser guidance?
	Now we get to the REALLY weird stuff. According to this picture, the laser pointer can be used (by trained medical personnel, of course) to remove the head of a small child while his mother looks on, perhaps trying to figure out why she has a crab sitting on her head.
	I don't know what this is SUPPOSED to be, but to me and everyone I've shown it to, it looks like a tank rumbling through a city. Perhaps the artist wishes to take us on a horrible journey through the the Soviet invasion of Budapest in 1956, but with a science-fiction twist - the people hiding in the buildings have laser pointers with which to annoy the tank drivers. Perhaps, if they had only had speical laser little spirits, the plucky Hungarians could have driven out the bullies and avoided half a century of oppression. But alas, it was not to be - the best the weapons research people could do was a large prototype of a laser spirit, but it wasn't little and CERTAINLY wasn't speical, and so the invasion succeeded. A cautionary tale for all time.
	You know, I'm getting tired. Why don't you go ahead and make up your OWN witty comment on this one?

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