Patently Odd is my June Web Watch column for Law Technology News (free registration required). It is a guide to sites that compile offbeat patents. Here is the first graf:
“Necessity, it is said, is the mother of invention. Sometimes, however, invention appears to come first. How else do you explain U.S. patent 3984595, an inflatable rug? Or U.S. patent 05356330, an apparatus for simulating a ‘high five’? As Rutherford Hayes, 19th U.S. president, is reported to have said after first seeing a telephone in 1876: ‘An amazing invention — but who would ever want to use one?'”