I Totally Need Stride Management Assist

Welcome back from Easter, campers! Now that you’ve all had a chance to catch up at work and burn off the hangover from your undoubtedly awesome teabagging party, it’s time for us to talk about a serious subject.

If you’re not a vampire or a zombie, that means you’re getting older like me. And that means all those bone breaks and tumbles you’ve taken during the last couple years of lemming-sport weekends – like, since mom quit buttoning up your snowsuit around 1999 – will indeed come back to haunt you. Trust me on this. Mortality sucks. Not always. But eventually.

These days my most nagging physical flashback is an increasingly bad hip, courtesy of a mountain bike fall onto naked slickrock about 20 years ago. Sure, I could shell out the annual GNP of Poland to augment my “full coverage” health insurance and get an artificial hip, something made out of REAL materials like titanium, instead of sooooo old-school calcium deposits.

But I might just hold out a couple more years awaiting the advance of technology, then go straight to the Doctor Who approach and become a Dalek, all brain in a robot body. At present that seems the best option, since those damned Obamalistas have so overregulated human cloning that my replacement won’t be ready for a brain transplant in time to date Megan Fox while she’s still hot, which means all the lab rat hassle just won’t be worth it.



Enter Honda’s cyborg legs, which look a lot smarter and more portable than the ones our military research agencies have been spending millions on. The Honda legs were apparently stolen from Asimo, Honda’s terminally dorky robot, and come in two versions tailored for specific tasks, like “Bodyweight Support Assist” (standing around when you’re too fat) and “Stride Management Assist” (real stuff, like hiking).

Yay! No more squats and hill sprints! Everest speed record here I come! They even work on stairs. Eat trail dust, all you undergrad rec majors!

I so need these things. Time to call my HMO and see if they’re covered. Oh great. I see now that I’ve got to worry about saddle sores while hiking. And a two-hour battery life. Not cool. But tech geeks never really get the battery life thing, do they?

Granted, these they probably wouldn’t help on the dating scene, but I’d still smoke up the peaks and passes. And while busting out my often imitated but seldom equaled suave’, I could just claim I was a Transformer with a boot-up glitch, which sounds totally plausible to anyone who works on a Windows-based PC. Then I’d paint ’em to look like I was wearing lederhosen and knee socks. That’d be so cool. –Steve Howe

Via Gizmodo