I want to go fishing so bad it hurts. The only thing holding me back is I don't want to touch the slimy bait to bait the hook, and I wouldn't know what in the hell I would do if I actually caught a fish. I'd probably be so disgusted at the notion of touching it that I'd just drop the whole pole in the lake, fish attached, and run off screaming.
Case and point: a few years back my pops hooked me up with a fishing license and sent me on my way up to the cabin. "Go forth and be a man, son!" I attempted to fish and almost wet my pants when I felt a tug on the line. Oh yeah... what the f*&k do I do if I actually catch something? I ain't cleaned or caught a fish since the late 1980s, and I was looking forward to eating one, but to Hell with having to touch it, much less slice it open while it's flopping around on a table.
I reeled in and thankfully it was only an aquatic plant that had snagged the line - something I've always been good at catching and de-hooking. Actually, I've always managed to catch more plants than fish. That leads me to the hypothesis that certain lake plants must thrive on floating worms.
I digress - back to freaking out thinking I had a fish on the line. After such a close call, I did what any sportsman would do out in the middle of the woods: I went back into the cabin for some Playstation 2.
When we were kids my brother had this fishbowl toy with a plastic angelfish in it. It had a magnet in its body and when you pressed a button, another magnet would move around beneath the bowl's surface and cause the angelfish to move around creating the illusion that it was swimming.
With that in mind, I want to set out to breed a new kind of fish. A fish of the future. This fish would have a super powerful magnet in its nose and body so all you'd have to do to catch one is drop a line with a strong magnetic substance on the end and let the powers of magnetism do the rest of the work. When you caught one, all you'd have to do is pull it off the hook without any of the tedious twisting and surgical accuracy required to take a fish off of a traditional hook.
When I mentioned this idea to Kimb, she brought up the fact that these fish would likely have a lot of garbage from the bottom of the lake adhered to them such as nails, hooks, cans, and who knows what else. Good point, although this could be a good thing. There's also things like jewelry and coins at the bottom of lakes - it would basically be like catching a live aquatic metal detector!
Instead of one of those basket thingies you plop your "keepers" in and hang off the side of the boat, you could just tie a refrigerator door off the side of the boat. I assume that refrigerator doors are buoyant, and we all know that they're the ultimate surface for magnets to live on. Just throw the fish at it from across the boat Shhhhhhhhhhwck! and watch it stick on and try to flop around until you got back to shore to slice it open. And better yet, if any magnetic fish happened to swim too close to the door they'd be sucked on for you to either pull off and let go or keep and clean.
This brings me to the next improvement. Magnetic fish would require no fillet knives or cutting. Imagine if you will the bone of the fish possessing an intense magnetic attraction which would hold the left and right sides of the body on. The fish will be built in 3 distinct parts: the head/bone (like you see in cartoons) and the two magnetic body halves. In theory, all you'd have to do is knock it on a hard surface and break the sides off, sort of like those chocolate oranges in foil that you whack on a table to break it into slices. As far as the skin goes, maybe it could be hand peeled like a banana or something.
I have so many ideas, but such little regard to reality... on that note, in just a few minutes I'm off to job interview #345. If they only knew that just minutes before talking to me, I was writing to the world about developing a magnetic fish... yeah, they would find that real interesting, I bet.
