Beam me up, Jim!
Need some whiskey to ease your carpal tunnel pain, but find it too agonizing to move your wrist to pour a shot? Then there’s good news from Kentucky: The Jim Beam distillery is selling an electronic bourbon decanter that will dispense a jiggerful on voice command.
“JIM,” the unimaginatively named talking decanter (why not “Slick” or “Buddy”?), was put on sale Nov. 29. It not only pours a shot but also answers questions in a charming Kaintuck drawl voiced by seventh-generation Master Distiller Fred Noe.
Don’t expect sagacity: In a promo video, when asked, “Hey, JIM, what’s the weather today?” Noe’s voice replies, “I have no idea. But I do know it’s the perfect weather to enjoy bourbon.” In response to the eternal question, “What’s the best way to drink bourbon?” JIM replies, “Any damn way you please.” In this way, JIM is the equivalent of a Magic 8-Ball for tipplers. No report on whether, after six or seven queries, JIM will slur out, “Reply hazy; try again.”
JIM’s most critical function, however, is that “he” will pour a shot on demand in response to the command “Hey, JIM. Pour me a drink!” Unlike a real bartender, JIM never refuses your request or demands your car keys in return for “just one more.” And, not a judgmental partner, JIM will never make you sleep on the couch when you stagger to bed after Monday Night Football.
The $34.90 smart device sold out in less than two hours after being unveiled on the Beam website. The company promises more will be made available Friday.
Unfortunately for inveterate lazy drinkers, JIM ceases to function electronically after 6 months. After that JIM becomes just another dead soldier. I suspect that such planned obsolescence will make shoppers purchase more than one JIM. And I can raise my head from the bar just long enough to wonder why Beam didn’t install a chip to prevent JIM from dispensing another brand of bourbon.
I suppose that JIM is the precursor of the Replicator aboard the Starship Enterprise on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” which Capt. Jean-Luc Picard often asks for “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” Perhaps, logically, Mr. Spock saw the utilitarian possibilities of a decanter that dispenses on demand, then time-traveled to 2017 Kentucky and mind-melded the idea for JIM into the head of Beam’s marketing manager. Or maybe the marketing team drank too much while binging “Next Generation” on Netflix.
As you might expect, Trekkies have an ongoing online discussion about why – having developed warp drive, phaser pistols and photon torpedoes – 24th-century scientists had not yet found a way to make the Replicator respond to less-specific commands. Why couldn’t, for example, Picard order “hot Earl Grey tea”? Some theories:
If asked for “hot Earl Grey tea,” one Trekkie postulated, might the Replicator “produce a reasonable facsimile of the Earl himself, steeped in tea?” For another Trek devotee, Picard’s request was not specific enough:
“I’m kind of curious as to how ‘hot’ said tea would be,” pondered Thomas Jacobs in 2014. “I think that the Replicator cannot make it dangerously hot (say, 8,000 degrees Celsius); but anywhere from 70 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees Celsius (boiling point) is pretty hot and at an undrinkable temperature to me.”
Yet Trekkies find it plausible that Capt. Kirk fights a rock creature that can turn itself into Abraham Lincoln.
If JIM proves popular enough, I suspect a talking decanter for Scotch – SCOTTY, of course – can’t be far behind.
Meanwhile, if JIM tells you his bourbon is superior to SCOTTY’s Scotch, just ignore him.
It’s the liquor talking.