#131

As anyone who has been through them will tell you, hard times teach you a great deal that you can't learn anywhere else. Failed relationships, the loss of friends and family, near-death experiences -- these things are invaluable experiences that make us stronger individuals, teach us compassion, make us appreciate those things in life we take for granted, and help keep us from becoming preoccupied with things that ultimately don't matter. Why, then, must we travel through life blindly, hitting these ordeals more or less at random, in uncontrolled environments? I think they should teach this stuff in schools. The teachers would put you through emotional trauma, then quiz you on it when you've recovered. It would all be in the curriculum. "Welcome, class, to the eighth grade. This year we'll be studying nasty breakups and mourning. Could you please all pair off with a lab partner and begin a romantic interlude? Meanwhile, I'll go bump off all your mothers."

#132

I'm sick of all these miracle cleaner spray can products that supposedly seek out all the dirt in your home of their own accord and, via loopholes in the physical laws of the universe, make it disappear. It never works, and small wonder: it's not scientific. I think somebody ought to manufacture and sell black holes on a stick. This would be a great cleaning tool, and there's nothing more scientific than a black hole. Rub it on that dirty spot -- it's gone! It would literately suck the dirt away! It would double as a wart remover. A larger version could be sold as an excavation tool or a toxic waste disposal unit. Hey, it's better than what we've got now, right? Of course, you'd need a ton of warning labels on the thing. "Caution: Do not hold the dark end." "Warning: Do not store in pocket." "Caution: Not intended for internal use." It would have to be shipped in a case shaped such that no part of the case comes too close to the end with the black hole on it. Neat feature: the stick would automatically vacuum pack itself every time you closed the lid.

#133

I got a puppy. I'm crate training it. It spends lots of its time in a crate, lined with a big comfy blanket and filled with all kinds of toys to play with. What did this dog do to deserve such luxury? I want to get a big crate for me to live in. I'll fill it with blankets, pillows, books, toys, and stuff and just hang out in there all the time. Better yet, I think I'll boot the dog out of her crate and make her fix me my meals.

#134

I think towels would look really scary if they were about fifty times bigger than they are. There would be all those poor little protrusions, rising up from their anchored feet like they're stretching to break free. Like that people garden Ursula had in The Little Mermaid.

#135

Teeth are sharp. Sometimes I don't think we appreciate how sharp our teeth are. Wolves and stuff get all the recognition for having sharp teeth. But I think if we laid out human teeth pointed upward on a sidewalk, then, well, that would be really disgusting.

#136

It's not fair that restaurants don't let you take advantage of All You Can Eat deals. The whole point of All You Can Eat is that you get to pay a flat rate for enormous quantities of food, enough to put you in extreme discomfort just because you can. Where does it say the "you" is singular, anyway? What if I want to celebrate and buy everybody in town an All We Can Eat meal? I think All You Can Eat To Go would be pretty cool. "No, I can eat more of this. . . . Nope, keep scooping it in. No, I'm pretty sure I can still eat more of that."

#137

The battle against insects wages eternally. We buy vast quantities of toxic chemicals, slather them everywhere, and hope the ants, flies, mosquitoes, roaches, moths, and other insects that have invaded our privacy keel over and die. The trouble is, insects possess the mystical ability to mutate and develop immunities to these chemicals before they're all dead. So the world's top biochemists are paid millions of dollars to discover new, as yet unexploited toxic chemicals that insects can develop new immunities to. Hello? DUH! It doesn't take a genius to figure out we're losing! I think we need to take a wholly different approach. Instead of jumping right into bloodshed, let's try what people often do to get irritating neighbors to move out, or unproductive employees to leave their jobs. Bother them. Somebody manufacture these little tiny radios that don't turn off. You buy these by the bag, tune them all to heavy metal stations, crank the volume, and drop them down ant holes, stuff them under the refrigerator, hide them beneath the floorboards, and wedge them in the cracks in the basement. Wherever insects invade your home with theirs, force them to listen to loud music all day and all night long. Lacking the engineering skills to deconstruct the radios and turn them off, they'll have no choice but to go away or lose so much sleep they fall into a semi-conscious daze and wander carelessly out into the open, where the family dog will lick them up.

#138

Speaking of bugs, I just smooshed one of those really tiny, small, nearly microscopic white bugs that don't seem to exist except when they're walking across the page of a book you're reading. They're almost impossible to detect -- you don't notice them by their color but by their movement. Where do these truly ridiculous bugs come from? How did they survive before they had book pages to walk across? I think they are actually human life forces encapsulated in little gunk particles. You smoosh one, and somewhere in the world, somebody dies. Somebody dies; somebody smooshed one. If we recognized this phenomenon, we could end all death in the world. So, whoever I just killed, I am truly sorry. My sincere condolences to your family.

#139

Fast food restaurants are prejudiced discriminating favoritists. You get a kid's meal, you get a toy. You get a grown-up meal, you get nothing. What's with the double standard? Do kids make up such a predominant percentage of the world's food-eating population that they have to be catered to to the exclusion of me? I think I'll open a fast food joint that gives away CDs, desk supplies, firecrackers, and stuff with each regular meal deal and nothing with the kids' meals. Parents everywhere will flock to me, because they'll say, "Hey, a restaurant that won't give my kids things I will step on!"

#140

I'm so mad. I was bored this morning, and I was absent-mindedly toying with a pair of scissors. I had the blades open, and I had my thumb between the blades, and I was kind of pushing into the center and oscillating the blades a bit. And I cut myself. I think desk supply manufacturers should be a little more safety-conscious and not make their products so sharp. People can get hurt.