Patently Absurd: This Is the Sound of One Motorized Hat Clapping
For when you're appreciative, but you're also holding two beers.
The “Fun Cap with a Motor” is the best way for any sports fan to demonstrate their appreciation for a #greatsportsjob while double-fisting foamy Bud Lights. Well, actually, the beer helmet is the best way. This is the opposite of that — the second best way.
The baseball clap-cap works like this: Perched atop the visor, a spinning motor winds a nylon thread that pulls two floppy fabric hands together. Turn the motor rapidly on and off, and the hat achieves the best clapping impression this side of an aquarium seal.
“Many different sorts of caps are used for promotional purposes, with or without movement,” inventor Vicenta Viega Garcia wrote in his 2004 patent, “but no one has ever heard of a cap incorporating a fully automatic clapping function.”
Consider our minds — the ones underneath our boring non-clapping promotional hats — blown. As he further notes, the moving pieces of fabric on the sides could be “hands (or whatever),” leaving the door wide open for any sort of applauding appendages. Eat your stationary foam cheese hats out, Packers fans.
Viega Garcia gives the briefest of mentions to future plans for a voice-activated fun hat, but he doesn’t include them in this design because there’s a limit on how many times a patent is legally allowed to blow minds. We’re not sure if this YouTube video shows the exact fashion accessory he patented — there’s a notable absence of an actuator in the center of the visor — but it certainly ought to be related, as no Mets fan has ever had as much fun as this guy.
