#151

I think kids need to be protected from exposure to violence and sex, or, years later, someone will have to make a movie about them in which Morgan Freeman tracks them down via a trail of grisly murder scenes. The younger they are, the more impressionable they are, so we'll start by banning natural childbirth and mandating cesarean sections for all. We'll curb the early start on child abuse by putting a halt to the barbaric practice of doctors spanking them right when they come out. Bottle feeding only! And put one of those cone collar things around their necks -- you know, like they put on dogs so they don't lick their stitches off after a surgical procedure -- so they can't see any parts of themselves that they shouldn't be allowed to see until they're eighteen. Instruments of violence at school should be banned. That's right, no more pencils, elastic bands, books, or rulers, and their arms and legs should be permanently encased in triple ply bubble wrap. Parents probably shouldn't live together or even see each other except when the kids are away; otherwise they might be tempted to sneak a kiss and not be careful enough about it. Video games? No way! Even Pac-Man glorifies cannibalism and aberrant spirituality by depicting the consumption of the undead.

#152

If you ever need to get a good sense of how unoriginal the general public is, just drive around suburban neighborhoods on a December evening and look at all the Christmas light displays. One house has strings of white lights around bushes and trees, another has colored lights hanging down from the drainpipes, and still another has a gaudy house outline thing going on. Every year there's a rush to put more lights up. The logical end to it all, of course, is to light up your neighborhood enough so that when the sun goes down in the evening, you don't notice. But how unrefined! It's not how many lights you have but how you use them that counts. Because I am a creative idealist (and not because I am poor and can only afford a limited number of lights), my Christmas light displays will be designed to employ lights in new ways rather than brainlessly piling more and more onto the pine out front until it starts photosynthesizing at night. For example, I think it would be neat to loop strings of lights around the car, plug them into the cigarette lighter, and drive around town really fast. To give equal time to our compatriots that live underground, I'd bury a string of lights in the yard, leaving only just enough for the end to plug in. The lonely power lines in the street go sadly unadorned, year after year. The best justification for hosting a Christmas party, besides to creep up behind the guests and suddenly blow party whistles in their ears, would be to booby trap the house with 200 watt Christmas lights and flip them on at opportune moments. "Why, Mr. Host, I never knew you had such a beautiful painting." "Why yes, Mr. Guest, and if you look very closely in this corner down here, yes, lean a little closer, that's right, then you can see...A REALLY BRIGHT LIGHT!" "Oh, Mr. Host, heh heh, that's very interesting. Um. My eyes are watering a lot now. I can almost see. Would you mind, very much, if I used your restroom?" "Why no, Mr. Guest, it's the second door on the left." "Thank you, Mr. Host, let's see, ah here, it is...*click*...where's the toilet?...oh, right here...crazy Mr. Host, dunno what asylum he escaped from...oh well, it's just once a y--OH NO, SOMEONE IS SHINING A FLASHLIGHT THROUGH THE WINDOW!"

#153

The Grinch had it all wrong. What's the point of stealing Christmas? Christmas is a cool holiday. Not only do most jobs give you the day off, or at least pay time and a half, you get stuff for no good reason. I think the Grinch should have stolen Groundhog Day, or Presidents' Day, or Valentine's Day. With these holidays out of the way, we would be forced to obtain replacement holidays -- and with any luck, the replacement holidays would be some of the newer models, which come with at least the "day off" feature.

#154

There is no possible rational reason why every animal has to have its own weird word to express the idea of a "group." Herd of cattle. Flock of sheep. Colony of ants. Sleuth of bears. Exaltation of larks. I think, way back when the English language was being invented, the two guys that were supposed to invent words for groups of animals were really drunk. They wrote down all the words they had so far on pieces of paper, threw them into a hat, and named groups of animals by drawing them out. What shall we call a bunch of toads? Draw a piece of paper: "knot." A knot of toads. Great. Hounds? "Mute." A mute of hounds. Great. They picked two words for crows. A group of crows is either a "murder" of crows or a "storytelling" of crows. I'm not kidding. A bunch of boar is intuitively called a "singular" of boar. You know they were drunk. After a while they stopped using words. "What shall we use for geese?" one said, and the other made some drunken cackle complicated by a hiccup, and that's how "gaggle" became a word. "Nide," describing a group of pheasants, was undoubtedly born under similar circumstances. Ah, well. I don't have a problem with a couple of drunk guys making up words. But I think the language scholars that insist on the correct usage of these hat-drawn words should be slapped frequently and hard.

#155

I think the best reason to invent time machines wouldn't be to go to other human civilizations, cheat at gambling, predict the future, or anything like that. No, the best use for time machines would be to knock out time one spends waiting for things. Say it's winter, and you want to go to the grocery store to buy fresh cold cuts. You start up your car and wait for it to warm up. You drive to the grocery store, waiting at 11 traffic lights on the way, because they are all red. You wait in line at the deli counter. You wait for the meat to be cut up. You wait in line at the register. You wait at the traffic lights again. The average human spends 87% of his life waiting for things, give or take a few dozen percentage points. Long waits are the worst. I have to wait sixty-eight years before I'm 95.

#156

Our entire nation is addicted to caffeine. You've heard it before. "I can't function in the morning until I've had my nineteen cups of coffee." I think someday there's going to be a global coffee shortage and the entire nation will fall asleep. For a month. Then we'll wake up, and the Russians will have finally invaded.

#157

We have entered an age of gadgetry. Consumer products are available now that only people who haven't been fighting enough wars or depressions or famines can mention with a straight face. We have motorized playing card shufflers. We have travel corkscrews. We have combination keychain jackknife flashlight entertainment centers. Even plastic coffee mugs now come "loaded" with features like the narrow bottom half, to fit into cup holders, and the cover with a tiny drinking hole and a tinier air hole, to keep the coffee hot. As if soda cans with easy open tabs weren't gadgety enough, now we have openers to open the easy open tabs. I think far too many people have been thinking like me.

#158

A few years ago, New Zealand started making their paper money out of this plasticky stuff that is allegedly better than paper because it doesn't crease properly and will therefore, no matter how much you mash it into a wad, expand in your pocket and consume all available space. Excess pocket space was apparently a big problem down there, but here in America we have the more urgent matter of theft to contend with. I think we should start making our money out of cinder blocks. "Would you like that in small blocks or big blocks?" Nobody would try to steal cinder block money, and if they did they wouldn't be able to outrun the cops. You wouldn't lose money by inadvertently dropping it, because you'd hear the thud, and if dropping some cash damaged someone's property, you'd just leave it there to cover the costs. As an added bonus, we'd create jobs. Previously unemployed individuals could find work lugging money for the elderly and keep a percentage of it for their salary. Banks would save on armored trucks, too. The money could serve as its own armor.

#159

Soft drinks and snacks now routinely come with a free contest. As if opening a candy bar to find a delicious stick of chocolate covered goo wasn't exciting enough, now we can open a candy bar and find a delicious stick of chocolate covered goo and the immortal words, "Sorry, you are not an instant winner." On the inside of soda bottle caps, we may discover a friendly invitation to "please try again." I think the secret code word contests are best. I bought a Sprite the other day that had some random letters and numbers on the cap. I don't know what it meant, because you had to send away for the contest rules (which would come with a free "game piece," which is, I suspect, a cap that says "please try again" on it), but it was exciting anyway. Alas, however, the other day I bought a Pepsi, and all I got was a drink. What a rip-off.

#160

RMI stands for Remote Method Invocation, and it is a toolkit in the Java programming language to allow a program running on one computer to manipulate data on another computer, thereby providing the means to write client/server networked software systems. Well, software is all well and good, but I think we should install RMI on people. Then I could go down to the beach or the mall, blend in with the crowd, and start invoking methods on people and making them do funny things. Like, I'd run some guy's "raise right arm in the air" procedure, and he'd flail all around and wonder what was going on. Or I'd run some woman's "get down to rap music" method and see how much of an amused crowd she could draw. For people I hate, the "slap self in face very hard" procedure would be a good one to call, and of course the "throw your wallet in the general direction of me" would be useful, too.