#11

Someday, somewhere, the owner of a rock garden is going to wake up and realize rocks don't grow. I know. I tried raising a boulder once, but I didn't even get any buds. I think someone should invent a special chemical that could be mixed into clay and cause it to harden into a rock and expand slowly when exposed to water and sunlight. This would be a great boon to gardeners who can't keep things alive. With chemically treated rocks, you start out with stuff that's already dead, and it'll grow anyway. Of course, disposing of rocks that get too big for the garden would be a problem, because, well, you can't exactly chop a rock up and dump it into a beef stew. I think what I would do, since their volume would always be increasing but their total mass would stay the same, is let them grow until the wind blew them away.

#12

I'm getting tired of art. Somebody makes a painting. Somebody carves a sculpture. Somebody writes a book. Somebody directs a movie. Somebody composes a song. Blah blah blah. It's all the same. You see stuff. You hear stuff. Big deal. I think someone should invent a new artistic medium that caters to the other senses. Somebody ought to compose a smellphony, where an assortment of smells are emitted at preplanned, measured intervals, which together form an aesthetically enlighting piece of performance art that is experienced by the sense of smell. Or how about an orchestrated feelphony, where your sense of touch is stimulated in preplanned, measured ways that together are an artistic whole? Extending the idea further, I think it would be particularly exhilarating to see an artist create something that plays off people's sense of direction.

#13

If you take a magazine, hold it by the binding, and shake it around, more pages will fall out of it than not. This is because these pages are "inserts." Once upon a time, somebody thought it would be a good idea if certain parts of a magazine weren't physically attached to the rest of it. I think I going to pay this person a visit with a razor blade in the middle of the night and turn all the pages in all his books into "inserts" and see how he likes it.

#14

I never understood the concept of the "front door." The front door is the most prominent door on a house. It's the one most decorated. It's the one that enters the home via the entry way, an area specifically designed for people entering or exiting the home. It's the main door. The front door. The number one door. And no one uses it. Most homeowners have forgotten whether their front doors even still open anymore. People use the "back door" to enter the home, or the "side door" or the "door that comes in from the garage." These doors are put in as afterthoughts, awkwardly stuck on the side of houses, and lead into whatever room happened to be there at the time. All the elaborate planning made for the front door with its decor and its entry way and the cute little sidewalk leading up to it -- it's all for naught. I think this is very silly. I'm not exactly sure what point I'm making, but I know there's one here somewhere.

#15

Social conventions are all right in their place, but I think the ones that dictate how we act around people we aren't even interacting with are annoyingly arbitrary. Consider this. You're walking down a populated hallway at your regular place of work or school or down the main street of your home town. You realize that you forgot something and must turn around to go get it. You are not allowed simply to turn around and walk in the other direction, because this appears stupid to everyone else (none of whom care what you do in the least). Instead, you must give some visual indication of why you are deciding to change directions. An eye roll accompanied by a frustrated grunt is acceptable, for instance, for this indicates that you have forgotten something and are perturbed that you have to hike it all the way back from whence you came. A forehead slap is an alternative that conveys the same information. I'm going to rebel against this ridiculousness. I'm going find a populated hallway or street and walk down it in alternating directions repeatedly, never once acting out the part of forgetfulness, just to spite that silly unspoken social convention. People who see me do it will then be more comfortable doing it themselves. And when my little revolution is won, I'll be heralded as the champion of the new world order.

#16

I think "Off" should be the Official Bug Repellent of the next Olympic Games.

#17

I can't tell you how many times I've read a book or watched a movie about war, then read criticism on it that touted it as "one of the greatest anti-war pieces of our time," then wondered why I never noticed the underlying anti-war message in the first place. Sometimes the anti-war sentiment is there, of course. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes the book or movie is simply about war and is too involved with the more compelling dilemmas of its characters under extreme circumstances to be concerned about making trite political statements such as, "War is bad." But to any critical analysis of these works, any narrative about war is one of the greatest anti-war pieces of our time. I'm going to write a pro-war novel someday where war is portrayed as a glamorous thing, and all the soldiers run around saying, "Yes! War rules!" and the teenagers back home lament that their friends got drafted and they didn't. When I do that, I think every critic in the country would hail it as, by its satire and sarcasm, one of the greatest anti-war pieces of our time. It's all a conspiracy. Somewhere out there, there's a Secret Organization Of Critics Of Literature And Cinema Whose Purpose Is To Call Other People's Art Anti-War Whether It Really Applies Or Not whose members worm their way into influential positions at newspapers and magazines and literary conventions to promote their cause. I think this is a pretty good idea, but their organization is too chicken. They should call stuff like "Green Eggs and Ham" one of the greatest anti-war pieces of our time, but they don't make observations quite that far off the wall because they fear they might be found out. But I have no such fears. I'm all for it, for reasons that will come to me.

#18

According to Einstein, time slows down as you approach the speed of light. In other words, if you ride around on a beam of light, you could get anywhere in the universe instantaneously -- but when you arrived, everyone you ever knew on Earth would probably be long dead. I find it curious that the speed of light is a universal constant. You can't travel faster than light. If two cars are zooming along at different speeds and both have their headlights on, the light travels from their headlights at the same speed. In other words, velocity can't be precisely defined relative to that of other objects but rather to an unknown but fixed, absolute point that is "standing still." In short, I think "Einstein's Theory of Relativity" is a stupid name for this theory.

#19

I think cafeterias serve bad food on purpose. It's all part of their sinister plot to destroy the human race. I think there's one guy with a name like "Pilford J. Spruts" -- all important rich people have 'J' for a middle initial -- who discovered that if he sold food that cost thirty cents less than anybody else's, people wouldn't care if it tasted like muddy socks, and they'd buy it anyway. So he started selling cheap, yucky food to captive audiences at schools and hospitals and so forth in the hopes that, given enough time, the food would wear away at our enthusiasm for eating, effectively reverse training our instinctive drive to eat via negative reinforcement. Sometime in the near future, he's going to blow up every fast food joint on the planet, and the heck if we're going to feel like working any harder for sustenance. We'll all starve to death with apathetic expressions on our faces.

#20

By convention, the symbol ":-)" is a "smiley face" (or "smiley" for short) which is used rampantly on email, newsgroups, online chat rooms, and web pages to denote that the preceeding statement was meant to be humorous. I think it's high time we started thinking about the severe environmental ramifications of this practice. To use the smiley symbol, a ")" is required. It's part of a matched set of characters, the other being the "(". As technophiles are no doubt aware, these things are manufactured in pairs, as they were intended to be used. But when you use a smiley symbol, you only use the ")" which means the "(" has to be thrown away. Somewhere, there's a huge stockpile of unused "("s that are going to end up in a landfill unless we act more responsibly. I say we pass a law requiring all smileys to be upside down for a few years, then enforce strict alternation thereafter. Don't even get me started on the use of the ">" symbol to denote quoted text.