Fuel!

Imagine you could make fuel out of poor people. The only downside is that the poor people have to be converted to a combustible liquid in the process. Imagine that although there are many alternatives to using poor people as fuel, those alternatives cost way more. In fact, the alternatives are so much more expensive, widespread use would impact your standard of living by about twenty percent.

Obviously using humans for fuel would be wrong and you wouldn’t do it. But I’m not done confusing your moral compass.

Now let’s say the people who are used as fuel are volunteers, of a sort. For every twenty people who volunteer to become SUV fuel, only one will be randomly selected. The other nineteen get a host of benefits including pensions and paid educations. Let’s say human fuel is so economical that one human converted to fuel pays for the benefits to the other nineteen. And the one poor person fuels an entire town’s energy needs for a year.

In this scenario, you’d be powering your car with liquefied poor people, but your conscience would be cleared by the knowledge they all volunteered. It’s a free country. They took the chance of being one of the nineteen lucky ones, but it didn’t work out. Some volunteered because they thought it was their best chance for upward mobility. Some thought it was their patriotic duty. But it was their decision. No one forced them.

Let’s say the politicians argue that in the long run, this policy of using poor people for fuel will save lives. The thinking is that we’ll eventually develop other fuel sources, but for now we need the strong economy to pay for health care and a strong national defense against terrorists and whatnot. All of the volunteers are hailed as heroes.

Under those conditions would you use poor people to fuel your car?

Bonus question: Are you already doing something close to that?

Million Dollar Idea...!

Have you heard of an online service for kids called Webkinz? It’s like a cross between cocaine and puppies. Kids can’t resist it. It’s frickin’ brilliant.

Before you use the Webkinz service, you have to buy a stuffed animal that comes with a code. You use that code to activate an animated character in an online world that looks like your stuffed animal. The brilliant part is that your online critter will become sick if you don’t regularly visit and care for it. Somehow this makes kids emotionally invested.

Kids can earn fake money by playing games on the system. That money goes toward caring for their online creatures, including buying furniture and so on. Kids love it. But I think kids aren’t the biggest market for this sort of thing.

I think single women would want an online boyfriend they could totally control. But here’s the hook: The online boyfriend is a “project.” If you don’t sign into the system regularly, your online boyfriend will start dressing with clothes from the 80’s, smoking, gambling, staying out late, and flirting with other women.

It’s the “owner’s” job to make the virtual boyfriend eat right, exercise, look for a job, and trim his nose hair. If he scratches his crotch or passes gas during an online dinner party, he gets no virtual sex for a week.

The women could earn fake online money by playing games just like in the Webkinz model. For example, imagine a Tetris-type game where articles of clothing fall from above and you have to assemble them into coordinated outfits before they reach the ground. You can’t tell me that wouldn’t be a hit.

Here are some more online game ideas for the virtual boyfriend site:

- Quickly identify which movie at the Cineplex would make a human feel the worst. Send the online boyfriend to watch it.

- Send the online boyfriend to the drugstore for you and try to assemble a basket of items that is the most embarrassing.

- Make the online boyfriend carry a purse through a tough neighborhood without being beaten to death.

- How about a game set in a Mexican restaurant where all the tables have candles? The object is to navigate your online boyfriend around the tables and to the Men’s room without him tooting too near the candles and setting the other diners aflame.

Do you have any more game ideas?

General Nonsense

Flying Dinosaurs

Once upon a time there were dinosaurs. They died and decomposed and turned into oil. Millions of years later, humans turned that oil into plastic. Recently, plastic became the major building material for the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner. There’s your proof that dinosaurs can fly.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19421415/

This got me wondering if the 787 is a new form of life. After all, it’s carbon-based, i.e. mostly plastic, and more intelligent than most people I know. And it reproduces, in the sense that more 787s are being built. But is that enough? I turned to Wikipedia to find out the definition of “life.”

According to some stranger with no credibility, life is characterized by “growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally.” Luckily, intelligence is not part of the definition. So we can skirt that argument.

Metabolism is essentially the chemical reactions in a living thing. The 787 has plenty of chemical reactions. If it didn’t, the engines and the air conditioning wouldn’t work. You might argue that the majority of the plane has no chemical reactions. Luckily, the definition of life doesn’t require a minimum percentage of chemical reactions. It just has to have some. Check.

The 787 also eats and poops. Its food is people. And its poop is people who are a few hours older and slightly more decomposed. People enter the 787s stomach, stay there for a few hours decomposing, and exit through the rear (I’m hoping, because it makes the analogy more spiffy). The passengers pay money for this trip, which goes into the financial bloodstream and results in fuel and replacement parts being added to the plane. It’s not a perfect analogy, I grant you that, but some bugs have their skeletons on the outside and no one complains about that.

The 787 obviously reproduces, with help from humans. There will be more 787s next year than this year. You could argue that the plane can’t reproduce on its own, but neither can some flowers. They need bees to pollinate them. Technically, no animal could reproduce without the help of other plants and/or animals, because you can’t procreate if you have nothing to eat. Most life depends on other life, directly or indirectly, in order to reproduce.

To qualify as life, the 787 must also adapt to its environment through changes originating internally. It’s designed to do just that. If the plane senses a drop in cabin pressure, it releases the oxygen masks. If it’s on autopilot, it continuously adjusts its path to compensate for wind. Clearly it adapts to its environment.

So there you have it. The 787 Dreamliner is alive. And you are jet poop. Deal with it.

World's Tallest Man Marries!

In the news, a 7-foot-9 Mongolian herdsman (there’s only one of them) married a woman who is 5-foot-6.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19727485/?GT1=10150

This is the sort of story that raises all sorts of inappropriate questions. Not more questions than, say, the conjoined twins with two heads and one vagina, but lots of questions.

You were all thinking it, so let me just say it. Does the tallest man on earth have a trouser snake the size of Ryan Seacrest on Thanksgiving? Inquiring minds want to know. And if so, how does the tallest man’s diminutive wife explore her passion without dying in a Shish Kabob-type accident?

The tallest man recently made headlines for helping with some dolphins that had swallowed plastic. He used his long arms to reach all the way inside them and remove it. This makes me wonder what other uses he could have, especially if he is, you know, proportionate. For example, if someone dropped an iPod down a storm drain, could he attach gum to the end of his python, leaf through a Victoria’s Secret catalog, and retrieve it?

I don’t know the Mongolian translation for Johnson, but let’s say it’s Ganbaatar. When the world’s tallest man walks to the shower, does his Ganbaatar slap his thighs and make a noise like a king salmon that jumped in a canoe?

Oh, you can say you’re above this kind of humor. But I don’t think you’d be reading this blog if that were true, Ganbaatar breath.