Thousands of years from now, long after the Great and Horrible Ice Storm/Locust Invasion/Ragweed Epidemic of 2031, anthropologists will begin scouring the Earth in search of the cultural markers that will explain how we lived and what made us tick.
Loose change, wristwatches and bug spray are what they'll discover on top of the fridge at my inlaws' cottage.
That and a slightly used whoopee cushion.
"What do you think it was for?" the chief anthropologist will ask his colleagues as they rummage through a pile of board games with half the pieces missing.
"It looks medical or something," someone will reply before returning their attention to something called Monopoly, which according to the accompanying instruction manual requires an average of three years to play.
Pinching the flimsy rubber sack between his fingers and holding it aloft for closer inspection, the chief anthropologist will begin chuckling at the shoddy ink graphic printed on one side.
"Phil," he'll say to a colleague, "get a load of this."
Together they'll admire the image of a large-bottomed woman jumping from her chair seat, apparently startled by a sudden explosion of noise.
"I think you were meant to sit on it," he'll say.
"But why?"
"It made them laugh, I guess."
Eyebrows will be raised and shoulders shrugged.
"It says it was made in China."
"Where?"
"China."
"Where's that?"
"Beats me. I'm guessing wherever it was, they had a lot of rubber."
People of the future will never truly know just how devious a device the whoopee cushion was, that its sinister sounds had once led to the downfall of entire societies.
As evidence I would point them to Exhibit A, also known as the Great Whoopie Cushion Conflagration of August 2007.
Records show that it began innocently enough, with a well-meaning father of two young girls stumbling on a treasure trove of discount novelties at a North Bay joke shop slated for closure.
The father was captivated by a spinning display rack loaded with cut-rate joy buzzers, finger-snapping gum and phony ice cubes with bugs in them.
Fake barf was out of the question - rubber vomit being strictly a boy's idea of entertainment - so he returned to the cottage with a gender neutral whoopee cushion.
The girls, having never witnessed one with their own eyes, marveled at its simplicity of design and efficiency of operation.
"You just blow in here until it's good and puffy," the father said as he stretched apart the open end and blew with all his might to inflate the eraser-coloured device.
The girls immediately took turns sitting on the cushion, noting aloud how similar it sounded to their daddy after a third helping of bean salad.
And so it would go for the next three days, the flubbery blasts ripping through the tranquil bay at regular intervals of two to three minutes, causing their parents and grandparents to laugh heartily at first, but less so later.
Warring factions soon formed to debate the merits of such a toy, mainly in that the children thought it greatly hilarious while the grownups mostly frowned when they weren't muttering to themselves about "finding somewhere to bury that cursed thing when the kids aren't looking."
Still, it was better than the locusts.
