Hot Line

While some of us get a warm, tingly feeling when certain people call us (or, more often, a sick, retching feeling), now we can always get the warm fuzzies, thanks to a BlueTooth-enabled jacket:

Flame 5 (F5) allows to notify a remote person via heat. If a person sends an SMS to a remote person wearing Flame 5, the clothing heats up depending on the personal message. Embedded in the jacket is light-weight technology that allows the mobile device of the wearer to connect to the jacket via Bluetooth and to heat different parts of the clothing. Today’s mobile phones use sound, vibration and light to interact with the user and use rather alerting mechanisms. Flame 5 offers mobile phones a more sensual and calm communication via heat. Heat has been chosen since it is often associated with emotional connectedness. Moreover heat can be felt unobtrusively and in the periphery of a wearer’s attention.

This is perfect for 100+-degree weather, but much better than the Vibrate mode on my mobile, which is hard to detect when I've had too much coffee.

However, reading the above passage, one wonders if constant exposure to this jacket causes the wearer to randomly lose contact with the English language. Which would be ironic if it did--you know, a communication device that results in the breakdown of communication. Hm. Kind of like a cellphone, now that I think about it. Perhaps we should start to talk to non-communication devices to properly communicate with people. For example, I frequently speak into the heads of marble statues, but it never occurred to me while doing to that I could actually be communicating with someone completely unintended. (I never took art class as a child and do not understand the concept of sculpture so I remain convinced that statues have actual people trapped inside them and figure they might need to hear a friendly voice--although I usually end up screaming profanity at them. It has yet to be explained why I walk about shouting profanity into the heads of marble statues. I should probably look into that; I get kicked out of too many museums.)

I'm not sure I like the idea of a jacket that heats up when someone calls me. I think I'll wait for a pair of BlueTooth-enabled tube socks that turn cold and wet when the phone rings.