#1

Commercials for hygiene products are destructive to our popular culture, and they have to be stopped. They brainwash you into thinking your skin is smelly and scaly and utterly hideous and the only remedy is the use of their particular skin care product. They make you think your hair is a gnarled mass of dried spaghetti unless you use their particular conditioner. These ads cause mass insecurity to permeate the nation which is why, I think, television shows about stupid people -- court TV, police shows, etc -- are so popular. We need to feel superior to something after watching those commercials that make us feel so inadequate. The clincher is that the sponsors of these stupid people shows are skin care products. So it's a vicious cycle. The upshot of all this is that the nation's declining literacy rate can be blamed entirely on moisturizing cream.

#2

I think you can take over any company if you commandeer enough desk supplies. "Victory Through Desk Supplies" is my new motto. All you do is gradually clean out the desk supply cabinets as they are stocked. The company will eventually be spending so much money on desk supplies, it'll go under. Then you take the huge quantities of desk supplies you've got, sell them, and use the money to buy the company at a bargain price. There should even be enough money left over to get it going again. I don't see how this plan could fail.

#3

I think these Veronica Lake hairstyles need to stop. You know the type -- long hair combed all over one eye, head tilted to the side (either to maintain the hairstyle or because the neck buckles under the weight). These women always chew gum. One mandates the other. You have a Veronica Lake hairdo, you chew gum, and vice versa. I guess they figure that since they don't have any depth perception anyway, then chewing gum won't do anything further to hinder their walking.

#4

I think I'm going to build a big parallel computer that operates on quantum physics principles. It could solve an infinite number of problems at the same time by solving each in one of an infinite number of dimensions. Parallel programming would be simplified -- each instruction would have its own thread. Actually it would have as many threads as possibilities for its input data. That would be great. Then NP-hard problems could be solved in constant time. Of course, you'd need to attach a wormhole to a serial port on the back of the computer to get the results back, but that's just an engineering detail. I'd be the richest, most famous person in the world if I built such a machine. Computer scholars would put a contract out on my life for singlehandedly obsoleting the entire field of algorithm analysis, while major hardware companies would camp out on my lawn waiting for me to sign their nine figure salary job offers.

#5

I think health foods are a bad idea. Eating is healthy for us not just physically but psychologically as well. If all we eat are low fat cupcakes, we're not going to get the required level of satisfaction from eating them, and each time we take a bite, the subconscious irritation builds a little more until finally we suffer nervous breakdowns and open fire in school yards. The synthetic fat product Olestra is ushering in a whole new danger. Olestra is kind of an inverse fat -- since its molecular structure is the inverse of that of regular fat, your taste buds can't detect much of a difference, but your body can't ingest it, and it comes out pretty much the same way it went in. Is this the start of a new trend? Are we going to see products on the shelves with all sorts of inverse proteins in them? If so, I predict everyone will starve to death. We'll be eating all these things, but our bodies won't absorb them. We'll get no nourishment from eating. We'll die. But it won't be a painful death -- our stomachs will have inverse food in them. We'll drop dead from starvation without even realizing we were hungry.

#6

Aquafresh toothpaste has three colors -- it squirts out, and there's a red strip, white strip, and blue strip of toothpaste. I think they have the right idea. I think we should employ this multi-colored chemical substance angle to every squirtable consumer product on the market in the hopes it would enrich the excitement of our environment. Shampoo could be purple, yellow, and pastel green. Red, mauve, and chartreuse ketchup would add more than spice to our hamburgers. Brown, orange, and wintergreen hand cream would add color to the lightest of skins. Gray, black, and vermilion lipstick would lend a first date some extra pizazz. Yellow, coral, and burnt sienna caulk would give a drab house some eye-catching highlights. I think burnt sienna is a silly name for a color.

#7

I think candy should be free. The state should fund free candy dispensers which would be attached to all street lights, signposts, and parking meters in the nation. In fact, a dumptruck full of sugar products should be plunked on each person's front lawn on a daily basis. They should supply so much free candy that people wouldn't want to steal any -- there wouldn't be the need. This could only help the economy, as the state would maintain a constant flow of money into the candy business, which would mean scads of new jobs. And it would mean fewer medical emergencies for diabetics who abruptly realize their blood-sugar level is dangerously low -- there would always be a confectionary remedy on hand. I don't see how this could go wrong.

#8

I saw a movie the other day. It was a movie about a cop and a scared witness who was scheduled to testify against the mob. The cop visited the witness' place of residence and knocked on the door. The door swung gently inward at his touch. Right then, I knew the witness was dead. See, if you knock on a door in the movies, and it turns out that the door was left ajar, it means somebody was killed. I think the next movie director who shoots a scene like this should be taken out and shot.

#9

First somebody had the bright idea of transmitting computer data over a phone line. Then someone decided it might be a good idea to transmit computer data over cable TV lines. I agree that it's a good idea to avoid having more application-specific lines come into the average American home, but I don't think the developers of these technologies are being creative enough. I think we should transmit computer data through the plumbing. Think about it. We've already got this elaborate, tree-structured plumbing system in place that connects every home to local centralized plants. If we connect all the local plants together by satellite or something, we would effectively have a network topologically similar to the Internet, but simpler and more geographically intuitive. I say we do it. We could transmit the data via recyclable immersible flotation capsules, or perhaps with timed flushing sequences. Of course, excess rain could cause some line noise, but these are the types of problems civil engineers are paid to solve.

#10

I think the person who thought up the concept of the "gift certificate" was a devilish prankster. Gift certificate: money you can only spend in one place. I fail to see how this idea improves our quality of life.