Another Great Invention

I’m starting to wonder if I’m a reincarnation of Benjamin Franklin or maybe Thomas Edison, because I keep coming up with awesome inventions. My latest one will surely appeal to outdoorsmen who wish to keep the skin on their backs intact.

Over the holidays I was talking to a friend who fishes for salmon in Alaska. Once each year he gets in his boat and heads to a very remote stream that empties into a bay. It’s teeming with fish, which is great for fishermen. But it’s also great for bears.

These suckers are big and fast. If you’ve been to Alaska you know that the animals there are huge. The salmon are mighty, the elk are towering, etc. I think the wildlife up there laughs at the wildlife in the Lower 48 the same way Pac-10 players laugh at football players from small liberal-arts colleges.

So, to stay safe, my friend has to bring along a second person. That person stands facing away from the stream and uses a gun to scare off any bear that might try to steal the fish my friend has caught. If he’s fishing alone, my friend has to risk using bear spray, which is dicey — it might not work on a bear sneaking up from behind.

But my friend told me a story about visiting the stream with his four pre-teen daughters. He pointed out a bear, at which point the girls screamed in a shrill, high-pitched unison. My friend said he’d never seen a bear run away so fast.

So here’s my invention: You take one of those hand-held foghorn things. You strip out the device that makes the foghorn noise and replace it with a recording of the crowd at a Justin Beiber concert. And you call it “Bei-Bear Spray.”

The bear might go deaf, but you get to keep your skin. This is a total winner.