Breaking news: Did you know the Government of Canada once got Dr. Robert Wake of Carleton University, Ottawa, to invent a “Fruit Machine“* to identify homosexual employees?

If you’re thinking of liberating it from whatever government basement it’s rusting in, don’t bother:

This would never work in Toronto now anyway, since every man except my husband and a few of my friends seem like raving queens, machine or no machine…

I gather, for his next PBS series, Niall Ferguson was going to use it on archive footage of 20th-century economists. But apparently that’s in rewrite . . .

*UPDATE: Here’s an actual picture of the official Royal Canadian Mounted Police Fruit Machine.