Lowell Bizentine
From JUOD
Lowell Bizentine (May 12, 1817 - Present) is the founder of the religious science sect of Mathewsonism known as Joinology. A noted but controversial inventor, Bizentine lives somewhere near the North Pole in an ice palace of his own creation, together with his team of scientists who comprise the Extension of Life Forever Society, commonly known as ELFS. Through his own experiments with cryogenics, he has extended his life tremendously.
Biography
Bizentine fashions himself as a rocket scientist and inventor. Many scholars contend that he has never actually invented anything and accuse him of being a pathological liar—however, Bizentine maintains that he is "a step ahead of the feeble-minded masses and three steps behind every marketing firm on Earth." Bizentine suffered a stroke on July 3, 1972 resulting in some memory loss. He has since made a full recovery.
Bizentine's "Inventions"
Bizentine claims that many of his best inventions have been stolen from him and repackaged with greater success. Below are a few of his "noteworthy" inventions.
- Fork-U was an early version of the now popular spork. Bizentine originally named the eating utensil the Fork-Spoon, but later changed the name to reflect the u shape of the spoon portion of the device. Unfortunately the 'o' and 'r' in the font he selected for the packaging and advertisements were nearly indistinguishable from a 'u' and a 'c'.
- The Radio Cooker was the first microwave oven to market. It's manual boasted of its simplified interface of a single button that turned the oven on and off. Bizentine was nearly forced to shut down production of his radio cooker when faced with a law suit from a customer who, while intoxicated, used the cooker to pop a bag of popcorn. The customer reportedly then left the cooker running and passed out in the adjacent room while the popcorn and eventually the kitchen caught fire. Six months later a competing oven was released with a timer. Shortly thereafter, Bizentine left the microwave oven business, citing competing models with timers as his the cause of declining sales.
- The controversial "Baby Shaker" iPhone app, which was pulled in April 2009, was possibly inspired by the Daddy's Little Non-Joiner game originally produced in 1983 for the Commodore 64 by Bizentine's game development studio Raster Bastard. This was to be the first in a line of simulation games developed by the studio, but because of its limited commercial success, Daddy's Little Non-Joiner was their only game ever produced. Once the game was loaded the computer would play a series of high-pitched sounds, reminiscent of a baby crying. The object of the game was to figure out the correct key strokes that would stop the sound. Because the game was a simulation it altered the computer to load the game upon start up. The only hint given in the manual is that the correct sequence is 159,243 characters long. To any joiner it would be obvious that this is the proposition repeated 7,583 times. Because the JUOD movement was not widespread during the 1980s, few managed to successfully finish the game. It was not uncommon for the gamer to destroy their Commodore 64s out of frustration. In fact, until the recent joining boom this was thought by many to be the only way to beat the game.
In Pop Culture
- Purportedly, the character of Doc Brown from "Back to the Future" was based on Bizentine.
- Due to the location of Bizentine's laboratory—near the North Pole and decorated perennially for Christmas—and because of his organization's abbreviation, ELFS, his lab often mistaken for Santa's Workshop. Several northern Canadian children have wandered to the lab thinking only to be immensely disappointed.
