French people are crazy, right? Right.
So when I heard that some French engineers had designed a pedal-powered submarine, I had to check that shit out. Here it is.
The pros of such a device are as follows:
- you can tell people you have a submarine.
That’s all.
The cons are that if you show them your submarine, they will no longer be friends with you. Let’s take a journey through how moronic this device is.
First of all, the Daily Mail article calls it “hermetically sealed.” This means that either they don’t know what that word means, or they failed to look at the picture or read the description or anything. “Hermetic” means airtight, and this submarine is only airtight in the sense that it’s not airtight in any sense. It’s completely open, which means that you have to be in full scuba gear to use it, so it’s like swimming but more huge and cumbersome. Oh, but it must be faster than swimming, right? Yes, it is. The average swimmer can probably go about two miles an hour, whereas this thing screams along at around [checks website] five. Oh. So not super exciting. Plus, you have to generate all that speed yourself, and you don’t even get the benefit of freedom of motion because your legs are wrapped in a wetsuit and surrounded by water, and you can’t breathe freely because you have a regulator in your mouth. Sounds delightful. Not only that, but you don’t get any pressure protection like, say, a submarine would have, because you’re in an open container. And this thing can’t go below twenty feet.
Seriously. Twenty feet. That’s abysmal. I personally have dived to 57 feet without scuba gear of any kind, so if I’m gonna fork out hundreds of dollars for scuba gear and thousands for a fucking submarine that doesn’t even keep me dry, I damn well expect it to swim better than I do. But it doesn’t. As far as I can tell, literally the only advantage this has over diving is that it’s a little bit faster.
The designer may actually have caught on to how useless his invention is, because he says if it doesn’t take off with rich people (we all know rich people like getting cold and wet and exerting themselves in small spaces), he’ll race it.
Well there’s your solution. If you can’t see the inherent thrill in watching blurry yellow shapes putter around underwater in circles at walking speed, you’re, um, normal.
Best of luck to this guy with his venture, and I hope…fuck it, I can’t do it. I hope this fails so abjectly and humiliatingly that he’s forced to, I don’t know, design something that single person in the world actually wants. So there.
Unreasonably Dangerous Onion Rings 