#211

Some states in the United States hold what's known as "open primaries." This means that you don't have to be a member of a political party to go into its primary and screw it up. We should do this in the corporate world. Wouldn't it be cool to have open stockholder meetings? So what if you don't hold any stock? Why should that stop you from attending meetings and voting on things? Besides, it would create jobs. To stay competitive, companies would have to hire a whole slate of Stockholder Meeting Attendees (SMAs for short!) to go to their competitors' meetings and do crazy stuff, like electing weirdos to the board and approving obscene corporate logos. I think the really good professional SMAs could make big money.

#212

I was thinking about speed dating the other day. You know how that works, right? You show up somewhere and go on five-minute dates with a bunch of people. By the time you've introduced yourself and said, "I think we should see other people," you are. We should expand this concept to other rituals in life. Speed Food, definitely. Instead of sitting down and eating one meal, you have a whole line of meals, and you get 10 seconds at each one. Oh, hey -- how about Speed Employment? Why do only one job when you can spent 15 minutes a day on 24 jobs? Speed Sleeping would be cool, too. You get an alarm clock that goes off every 15 minutes, and then you have to move to a different household surface. Then there's Speed Web Surfing, but that's probably the same as the regular kind.

#213

I think it would be cool if bats had deodorant sticks instead of wings, and you could rub them under your arms to smell good. Why? Because this would mean that deodorant would be "organic" and "natural" and "green," and then I could say, "I'm rubbing bats under my arms to save the environment." Of course there would be a faction of people that would get all up in arms about cruelty to bats, because what animal wants to be rubbed under somebody's arm? So I'd say, "We have to abuse bats! The environment depends on it!" and then all the hippies in the world would go, "..." and that would be so awesome -- shutting up hippies -- as to be worth the unpleasantness of rubbing bats under your arms. Besides, it wouldn't really be cruel to bats. If we depended on bats for personal hygiene, we'd spend more money on curing rabies. As things are, there just isn't the market for it. Bat wings being deodrant sticks: Good for you. Good for bats.

#214

If I were to paint a mural on a domed ceiling somewhere, I think I would paint a glamorous portrait of Clara Bow in the summertime, her ivory wings spread wide as she gracefully hovers over a sunny meadow of chocolate bars, 5 1/4 inch floppy disks, and piles of unravelled 35mm nitrite film stock. Meandering through the meadow would be a golden river of Mountain Dew, where spazzy, wild-eyed mermaids would frolic and gambol. They'd be clothed with shells, sheer fabrics, long billowy hair, and braided, beaded eyelash extensions, and they'd use their crisp, lilting Enya-like voices to sing reggae hits in the gentle breeze. Meanwhile, in another part of the meadow, a trenchcoated Humphrey Bogart, standing next to a prop plane, would be bidding a tragic, self-sacrificing farewell to his one true love, the princess Buttercup, or possibly Julia Child. In the background, Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, and the Balrog would be busy whipping each other, and Jacques Tati, back to and absentmindedly scratching his head, would be regarding them all with curious puzzlement. I thought it might be nice to work in a chariot race somehow, but that would be going a bit too far, don't you think?

#215

I think it would be cool to have a zombie movie about zombies that are always fighting for equal rights and to save the environment and all kinds of other sacrosanct causes, but they still basically eat people and cause mass destruction. So the goodguys have to fight them, but they have to qualify every combative move they make by saying things like, "I agree with you that child abuse must stop, but..." lest their motives for slaying the rampaging undead be misconstrued.