Imbibe booze through the skull of a fake chest-worn baby
One of the weirdest Kickstarters in recent memory consists of a fake newborn with a beverage insulator inside designed to carry your drinks.
There's a robust market out there for objects that hide alcoholic drinks. There are fake cell phones, Nintendo-style cartridges, hollow binoculars and strap-on beer bellies with beverage reservoirs. The Cool Baby on Kickstarter is more bizarre than all of those combined.
The basic design is pretty simple. It's a semi-realistic baby doll with a hatch on the butt that opens up to accommodate a plastic flask. The flask has a drinking straw that extends out through the baby's neck (yes, you have to pop the head off). Put the head back in place, strap the Cool Baby to your chest and slyly sip away as its noggin hides your drinking activities. If you're eager to pledge, you can still get in on the $30 (about £19, AU$39) package.
The Cool Baby is the brainchild of former professional stand-up comedian Simon Philion, so it's best to accept it as a hybrid art/comedy/crowdfunding project. The surreal video demonstrating how to set up the baby and use it in a variety of situations really brings home how intentionally weird the Cool Baby is.
Philion doesn't actually suggest filling up the 36-ounce container with booze, but he's open to the idea of organizing a faux-baby-wearing cross-country bar crawl if the project hits its goal. There doesn't seem to be any danger of the Cool Baby actually reaching its $70,000 funding goal since it's just over $9,000 with eight days left to go.
The Cool Baby joins a proud legacy of Kickstarter projects that are outside the norm. We've already seen a potato salad earn over $55,000, a giant inflatable Lionel Richie head become reality and the world's largest jockstrap reach its goal. There's no reason a phony-baby-flask shouldn't get a little of the crowdfunding glory.