Zipper Control

I can assure you that you do not want to go down this road.

I'll agree with all of Lictor's arguments to the positive for having musical zippers... but lets just pause for thought here, shall we?

First, put yourself in your own shoes (or own pants, as it were), the minute you walk out of the store with your new musical pants you're going to be flushed with your new tooting power -- and there's going to be no holding you back. Some of you will brazenly zip-zip-zip that little twanger up and down right outside the store - reveling in your new found orchestral pants. Some of your will have a little bit more dignity and might look both ways to see if anyone will notice you, or maybe you'll just face in towards some anonymous building, seeking the same shelter that saki-gorged 2am salary-men do. Heck, even if you don't go into the musical zipper fetish -- are you willing to live in a world where others do?

Also, don't think that the problems will end when the rush of Goodrichian(1) excitement wears off. Only just this week has the UK announced new advances in fire-engine siren capabilities where approaching claxons can seize control of a car's radio or CD player, in order to play an emergency siren call instead. And although I'm sure there's a non-zero percentage of the population that would appreciate a ululating warning cry for their trouser lighthouse, do we really want to be startled by other people's dockers while we're in the bathroom? And you just know that there's someone out there that's going to start exploiting the stereo-usurping technology for their own capitalistic ends. And although it might amusing to have someone play Mr-microphone with your zipper, it's quite another to have advertisers spamming your cubical from your crotch.

I think when all is said and done, the musical zipper will have to be shelved with all the other monstrous inventions that mankind has yanked out of Pandora's box. It will have to sit there in the annals of infamous history -- next to the atomic bomb, the in-the-shell-egg-scrambler, the French-German dictionary and junk mail. I salute Lictor for his inventiveness... but I must now sadly submit his name to the Mad Scientist Watch organization. You're a dangerous man, Mr. Lictor, a dangerous, musical man.

1) B.F.Goodrich invented the zipper in 1925. Frankly, I always associated them with tires, but it seems they get most of their money now-a-days from aerospace inventions. Heck, even the gargantuan 2100x1500 JPEG image of their CEO doesn't even pan down far enough to show us his zipper. You'd think they were embarrassed about inventing it.