Necessity’s child

Necessity’s child

For the past two-plus decades, a professor has discovered more than 25,000 inventions created by ordinary people in rural India. He believes the best ideas for making life a little easier in the developing world won’t come from corporate research labs in Silicon Valley, but from people struggling to survive.

That being said, we do hear the upgraded case on the new iPad can double as an areca-nut cracker.

Let’s get busy: Concerned about an aging population and low birth rate, the clerics who run Iran have ordered their subjects to start making more babies.

To give the effort a much-needed boost, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered every married Iranian couple of childbearing age to be issued a copy of Barry White’s 1974 album “Can’t Get Enough.”

Don’t know much about history: On this day in 1956, at the height of the Cold War with the atheistic Soviet Union, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a measure making In God We Trust the national motto, replacing E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one).

In today’s credit crunch, a more apt motto might be Jean Sheppard’s: In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash.

— Mark Carlson, Herald staff