Don't leave home without these

ITHACA, N.Y., the Patent Office — Dog days of summer. I write “Ithaca” by force of habit, but this week’s dispatch actually reaches you from an undisclosed location in rural Italy. Even visionaries need time off from visions, and coming here, I thought I’d have it.

Alas, the muse got hold of my travel plans and adjusted hers accordingly. Accustomed to courtship, it seems, when rebuffed, she grows brazen. Her first blaze of unsolicited inspiration torched me practically on touchdown in Rome, and there’s been barely a refractory period between bold visitations since.

But this man’s loss of R&R is mankind’s gain in R&D. For a single smuggled spark smuggled down from Olympus, Prometheus received immortality in epic verse. My sacks are bulging with more useful holiday inventions and in dumping them at your feet I ask nothing more than a simple thank you.

World Citizen® Biometric Plasticuff EZ-Pass

We are some 20 years into the largest information revolution in modern human history, but word of it seems not to have reached passport control. When I send something by FedEx, I can stare at my screen and watch it creep across the country. My cat Harry has a chip in his neck that can be scanned like a barcode to reveal his CV, medical history and travel plans. But it seems as though the global movement of persons is still tracked by way of little books and stamps and armies of overpaid civil servants fluttering somnolently through pages any ass can see tell them nada.

Thus the vision: a revolutionary biometric bracelet issued and firmly attached at birth, enabling a lifetime of cloud-based border crossings. Everything on Harry’s microchip plus your tax returns, blood type, social media data, DNA markers, credit history, Social Security number, bank details, Amazon profile and — crucially — the status of your driver’s license in real time are all packed into a 100-gigabyte, 60-hertz silicon ring encased in the same stuff out of which they make those Kryptonite bike locks. Attempting to cut it off triggers a siren, and the wearer is gently tased.

The implications for travelers are staggering. Instead of some distant-looking human making a big empty show of page-flipping and brow-beetling before saying distractedly, “Welcome in Eataly,” only to be followed five minutes later by another officious idiot denying you the rental car you already booked and paid for, on the grounds that your license says it’s expired (even though you renewed it online while standing in the queue and have the confirmation email to prove it), instead of all that, as I was saying, a large, warm, friendly robot not only asks after your family and general well-being but gallantly waves away paperwork produced from your satchel.

“We know you well here, Mr. Brown,” it purrs, and with a debonair if faintly mechanical sweep of the arm indicates the car that awaits you curbside. “Enjoy your stay, and keep up the cardio training.”

Alternatively, these robots might remain seated and impassive, rising and rushing to menace only those travelers who have done something truly wrong in their lives — online or off. Either way, wives needn’t glower, and husbands needn’t curl up in apparent disgrace on a pea-green couch in a fourth floor Roman pensione where every toilet flush seems to cascade from the pipes in the walls through the very ventricles of the brain.

YouFluent® subtitled sportswear

The fact that American style moves upstream instead of down can create culturally interesting effects, such as saggy pants slouching their way from the prison yard to the catwalk over the decades. It can also create personally unsettling ones, like when my dad wore what I think were my junior high school gym clothes, or something very like them, into the Vatican. Whatever else is said about the sartorial decisions of my countrymen abroad, they certainly catch the eye of locals. 

My vision for YouFluent®, a line of holiday sportswear, exploits this fact to bridge rather than deepen cultural misunderstandings. Whatever accoutrement they chance to stare at — fanny pack, tube top, little baseball cap, complicated sneakers, white socks pulled up over calves — features a discreet but unmissable single-line LED screen ticker, on which a continually unfurling text translates into their language whatever it is you are shouting at them in yours. Meanwhile, sponsored content that scrolls during quieter moments creates a revenue stream that furthers your travels, theoretically into perpetuity.

You’re hooked up wirelessly to cloud-based voice-recognition software and to Google Translate, so accuracy is assured. 

Siri-enabled programmed holiday helmets 

It is not fully appreciated how tribal modern travelers are. There are the Let’s Go people, the Rough Guide people and, most important, the Rick Steves people. If you recommend a Rough Guide restaurant to a Rick Steves person, his eyes narrow, his bag unzips and his face is partly replaced by Steves’ own, which adorns the jacket of the book he’s opened and coyly taken cover behind like a geisha her hand fan.

“Hmmmph,” he eventually says, relieved to be dismissing instead of absorbing new information. “Says nothing about that in my book.”

My GPS- and Siri-enabled holiday helmet spells the end of such ridiculous encounters, along with the whole stupid philosophical pretense of an autonomous self. You choose your program, and that’s it; you’re all done choosing. Just sit back, relax and do what you’re told till you’re back in American airspace. It’s pretty Zen, actually. Freed from the pantomime of decision-making, the helmeted traveler begins to truly unwind, even as he bustles through his days at an ever brisker clip.

“Board bus No. 46. Stamp your ticket. Sit down. Stand up. Descend at Viale Vaticano. Walk 100 paces, turn left, enter the door, look up. That’s God on the right, in the nightshirt. Keep moving.” “Emptiness” may be the most misunderstood word in Buddhism, but three weeks of this ought to clear things up.

Anyway, Europe is six hours ahead, not 50 years behind. You shouldn’t be standing around there staring at books in the first place.

Memorease™ custom-cut surveillance video

Travel is about making memories, a wise website once said. Until now, the onus of making them has been on travelers. With the ubiquity of CCTV surveillance — which, like the tourism industry, is more densely concentrated in Europe than anywhere else in the world — it is absurd to go on feeling this pressure to savor the moment. We do that for you, leaving you free to bicker about lodgings and train times. Because with Memorease™, no moment of any kind — from eye contact with a beautiful stranger to a milestone like matrimony — goes unrecorded. Because we know that life’s landmark events are often unforeseen and hiring a videographer in advance can be a pain in the ass when not an outright logical impossibility.

Using our service couldn’t be simpler. Just tell us when and where something special happened, and using footage provided by our partners in the security industry, we will create for you a beautiful, professionally edited and dubbed, tastefully black-and-white and artsy low-res video of the event that you can share with loved ones and grandchildren.

The Memorease team will have its hands full representing this holiday in its proper light. Editing and scoring will be crucial. The man on the pea-green couch, for instance, is not slumped in defeat. Surveillance cameras don’t lie, but they do miss things. Zoom in on him. Cue the music. His eye gleams. Is it a vision or a waking dream?

He sees solar-paneled shirtsleeves, lycra socks with tiny wind turbines, friction-harvesting corduroy shorts, pop-up photovoltaic parasols and garlands of rechargeable batteries linked like sausages and stuffed discreetly into the inseam of an otherwise quite supple pair of linen holiday slacks.

Because seriously, just how were you planning to power all the other stuff if not with a renewable-energy leisure suit?