Most people wear face masks in an attempt to avoid catching a sickness.  For example, the resurgence of the paper hospital mask thanks to the swine flu outbreak has brought a trend normally associated with Japan internationally.  However, some people aren’t afraid of the H1N1; in fact, some people are looking to get their bout of swine flu over and done with as soon as possible.  For you, there’s the INFLU mask, which is designed to get you sick.

The brainchild of designers Michel Bussien and Erik Sjödin, the INFLU mask boasts that it improves your chances of catching the flu by several hundred percent.  It does this by collecting the air around you and forcing it into the mask via fan system, thereby making you breathe the sneezes and coughs of everyone around you.  It’s kind of like the grown-up version of chicken pox parties, since once you have the flu for that season, you won’t get it again.

If everyone is going to catch swine flu, and they say we are, you may as well dictate the terms of your own illness, right?  If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, could you call this a gram of provocation?

Tags: INFLU, flu collector, flu collecting mask, outbreaks, pandemics, flu pandemic, H1N1, Michel Bussien, Erik Sjödin, deliberate sickness, swine flu, seasonal flu

I thought I was the only one bemused by the Census 2010 ad campaign.  There’s been a constant bombardment of ads of all types reminding me that in a few weeks I’ll be getting a big piece of paper in the mail from the US Census Bureau, and that they want all my identifying information.  […]

There are Apple fans and there are Apple fans.  For instance, when an Apple fanatic and food blogger Ken at The Cooks’ Den wanted to pay tribute to Macintosh’s head cheese he did what came natural.  He put his foodie skills to good use and made a bust of Steve Jobs out of cheese!  He […]

For one Mt. Washington, Pennsylvania, resident, it was the weirdest night of his life.  For Michael Karanja Kamau, it was just a really cold, drunk night.  Police say the 33-year-old Kamau, from nearby Cranberry, broke into someone’s apartment and, in an attempt to get warm, crawled into bed with a strange man.  The sleeping man, […]

If you’ve ever watched professional wrestling, you know one thing intimately well.  at some point in the evening, a wrestler will roll out of the ring, shove the ring announcer or some other ringside official aside, and grab a metal folding chair.  He may just menace his opponent with it, but oftentimes someone’s gonna get […]

If you want to feel ashamed of yourself, then I suggest you read this story about parachute-jumping, bomb-sniffing, special forces dogs.  Seriously, these dogs are more accomplished than anyone I know, and they doesn’t even have thumbs!  The dogs earned theirwings as part of Operation Cold Response, Europe’s biggest war games operation in Norway.  The […]

For years, frogs have been held up as a prime example of what can happen to a species when its environment was polluted.  Frogs with no legs, frogs with extra legs, frogs with all manner of deformities were plucked from ponds and held up as examples:  “See?  This is why we need to clean up […]

Farmer Ken Jones knew something was wrong when his pregnant ewe, Daisy, kept getting bigger and bigger.  He assumed, reasonably, that she was carrying twins, or maybe even triplets.  While she was carrying three times the baby, it wasn’t multiples.  Instead, Daisy gave birth to a single lamb that was three times the size of […]