I think candy should be free. The state should fund free candy dispensers which would be attached to all street lights, signposts, and parking meters in the nation. In fact, a dumptruck full of sugar products should be plunked on each person's front lawn on a daily basis. They should supply so much free candy that people wouldn't want to steal any -- there wouldn't be the need. This could only help the economy, as the state would maintain a constant flow of money into the candy business, which would mean scads of new jobs. And it would mean fewer medical emergencies for diabetics who abruptly realize their blood-sugar level is dangerously low -- there would always be a confectionary remedy on hand. I don't see how this could go wrong.

I think the person who thought up the concept of the "gift certificate" was a devilish prankster. Gift certificate: money you can only spend in one place. I fail to see how this idea improves our quality of life.

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.

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.

Feet must get awfully bored. Take hands, for example. They write. They type. They twiddle. They carry things. They stuff things in mouths. They shake other hands. There's always something different going on with hands. Feet, however, are pretty much limited to two basic tasks: walking and kicking. I think this is a tremendous waste of resources. Granted, feet don't quite have the manual dexterity required for tying knots and cross-stiching, but there must be all kinds of everyday activities they can perform to make them more efficient. Cars, pianos, and sewing machines have the idea, as do those trash cans where you push on the peddle to flip the lid up. But how about this? You're walking home from the grocery store with gargantuan paper bags in both arms, obscuring every part of your body from your waist to your forehead. You don't have a free hand to pull out the house keys and fiddle with the lock. But if you had pressure sensitive plates under the doormat, you could tap out an entry code with your feet, and the door would open automatically. Of course, you'd look a little silly doing a softshoe every time you wanted to get into the house, but this is the price of progress.

Is it some sort of law that cashiers at department stores take upwards of three weeks to service each individual customer ahead of me in line? Sooner or later you have to wait in line forever in any type of store, but department stores -- you know the type, the ones that function as gigantic cornerstones of malls -- make this a matter of routine. If there is one person in line ahead of you, you'll be late for work the next day. I think federal laws, enforced by babillion dollar fines per violation, should be passed to stop this. Firstly, department stores should not be allowed to have their own charge cards, or if they are, they should not be allowed to ask every individual person in line if they want to sign up for one, or if they are, it should not require 284,377 keystrokes (entered at the rate of one keystroke per hour) to start up the card. Secondly, each item should have its price on it (on stickers, not those unbreakable string tags) in at least four places per square inch of item surface area so the cashier does not have to rummage through the labyrinthine folds of articles of clothing for two and a half eons before finding it. Thirdly, the cash registers should be lined up at the exit, as in any other sane retail store, so customers do not have to walk the equivalent of a Volksmarch around the stupid store trying to find a cash register that someone is actually attending.

There's nothing fun about "fun size" candy bars. Chomp, gone. What could be less fun? I think they should rename the little candy bars to "person who is not hungry size" and make a totally new -- big -- size of candy bar they could call "fun." We're talking a Twix the size of a loaf of bread, here. That is a fun size.

All spoken or written communication should be conducted in similes and metaphors. You wouldn't be able to say, "I'm dead tired from lack of sleep." You'd say, "I feel like moonshine is pouring out of my gullet." Instead of saying, "This is the happiest day of my life," you'd say, "I'm a pink bunny, frolicking on a grassy hillside in the morning sun." Human interaction would be a whole lot more fun this way, and there's the added bonus that no one would know what anyone else was saying. Rarely is anybody else worth listening to anyway

I straightened out a paper clip today. It's not easy, because when you get to the last bend, the wire likes to swivel around between your fingers causing you to bend it further rather than straighten it out. But I did it. I'm the straightener. I found a use for my straightened out paper clip. I slipped it inside my ring so my palm and ring finger conceal it. Now I can walk up to someone, yank it out with my other hand, and say something like, "HA!" and it would be terrifying. I told my sister about this, and she said it didn't sound all that threatening. So I figure I could tie a match stick to the end and glue sandpaper to my palm. Then when I pull it out, it flares up. "HA!" I would say, and it would be scary because I could set people on fire, at least until the wire got too hot to hold. My sister wasn't daunted by this idea either. She suggested I put poison on the end of it, but I think that's stupid, because it doesn't sound very threatening to pull out a wire and say, "HA! ... and you better be scared or I'll make you eat this, and it's got poison on the end of it, so you'd die." Maybe there really isn't a use for my paper clip.

Something very scary happens to grown adults when they get around babies. They talk funny. Suddenly they have to refer to themselves in the third person. "Mommy's going to go fix dinner now," Mommy says. "Yeah, and Baby'll chew on this doorknob until you get back," Baby thinks. Small wonder this nation's literacy rate is so low. Parents take awkward yet deliberate steps to avoid teaching their children what a pronoun is. I think a new law should be created to regulate this. All new parents should have to wear collars rigged with electrical devices. Whenever Mommy says "Mommy" or Daddy says "Daddy," the collar detects it and administers a friendly corrective action consisting of a few hundred volts. That should do the trick.

The usual size of soft drinks served at concession stands in movie theaters is approximately one gallon. The movie Titanic is almost four hours long, and the sound of running water is present in almost every scene. Call me crazy, but I think there's a conspiracy at work here.

The utilities necessary for normal domestic life are electricity, water, telephone, and gas or oil services, and optionally cable or satellite TV. I think there should be another: the fruit punch dispenser. In the kitchen, next to the water faucet, there should be a faucet for fruit punch. You want a glass of punch? Turn on the faucet. It saves trips to the store, which, for all you know, might be closed the next time you have a craving. Every month, you pay the fruit punch bill, which would be one low rate for the "standard" service or one slightly less low rate for the "extra fruity" service. Of course, there would be some initial fees involved in getting the punch pipes installed in your home, but I'm sure it'll be cheaper in the long run.

Appetizers should not be so huge. You go in to a restaurant, order some potato skins to pass the time before the meal comes, and they bring out a tray the size of a large pizza. And it's crammed with potato skins sopping in mozzarella cheese coated with a glistening sheen of fat. Here's a hint, restaurants: if most people can't eat a whole large pizza as their entire meal, even fewer are going to be able to eat an equivalent amount of potato skins and still have room to eat a fully-fledged dinner afterward. I think restaurants should be required to bill you just on what you eat rather than what you are served. The waiter weighs the food before bringing it out, weighs it when you're done, and you pay for the difference. I propose this partly I've already come up with a great scam. I'd conceal a container of yesterday's dried-up homemade lasagna on my person, eat my fill of restaurant food, then dump out the lasagna afterward. The waiter would determine that I had eaten almost nothing, and presto -- a nice big meal for 32 cents. If I do it right, they might even pay me.

I think a new law should be passed barring short cars from pulling too far into parking spaces, thus causing the optical illusion of a free parking space for people cruising down the lot looking for them

The problem with birthday cake is, other people eat it. I think I'd rather have a birthday eggplant, because then I'd have it all to myself.

I think it would be funny if viruses were on WWF wrestling. "In this corner, weighing 253 pounds, SNAKE, THE MASKED PULVERIZING FIST CRUSHER!!! And in this corner, weighing 0.000000000000000001 pounds, EBOLA, THE ORGAN LIQUIFIER!!!" And in spite of all of Snake's grunting and sweating and body slamming, Ebola would win.

If I ever invent a snack food, I think my advertising angle will go like this: it's the snack food that doesn't cause a sonic boom when you eat it, dance coolly over other jealous snack foods, make you jump wildly around the room, incite you to wrestle the box away from your great grandmother, or inspire inanimate objects such as your house to shriek with ecstasy. It just tastes good.

Polite manners regarding the consumption of soup is ridiculous. You have to put the spoon in the soup by sliding it away from you. You can't put the spoon in your mouth; you have to put one side of it on your lips and pour the soup in with a slight, genteel slurp. It's absurd. You can't even lick the bowl.If I ever get invited to a posh, upper-class dinner, I'm not only going to eat the soup this way, I'm going to eat everything else this way, too. Everyone will watch me take my spoon, fill it with peas, put the side of the spoon to my lips, and pour them in with a genteel slurp. I'll do that with the salmon hollandaise and angel food cake, too. I'll feel like an idiot, but everybody will marvel at how unfailingly polite I am. Then I'll burp really loud to make my point.

I know what causes weight gain. There's a worldwide panic about weight control, and everybody is trying to come up with a new way to eat less, and food producers are trying to manufacture stuff that looks and tastes like food but doesn't contain any actual food substances. They got it all wrong. You don't get thin by eating less. You get thin by eating more. We all know that practice makes perfect, right? Well the only way your digestive system is going to get good at flushing fat from your body is if you provide it with numerous opportunities to get good at it. If you diet, your system gets rusty, and then whatever fat you do put into it is absorbed on the spot. Birds eat five times their weight every day, but you don't see birds suffering from obesity very often, do you? I think I've made my point.

I've had it with video rentals. Renting the tapes isn't so bad; it's returning them afterward that's the downer. What a waste of time. Video rentals should have free delivery and pickup services. But then I wouldn't be able to browse through the aisles of video boxes and rent whatever movie had the most effective graphic artist for the box cover, which is how nature intended videos to be selected. So video rentals should actually be these huge trucks. You want a video? The truck drives to your house, you climb in the back, browse the selection, and rent something right there. They come pick it up when you're done with it. I think a great way to kidnap someone would be to pose as a video rental truck, wait till he climbs in the back, then shut the door on him when he's not looking.

In the interests of sanity and kindheartedness, I think we should coordinate huge efforts to remove, in a discreet manner, deceased trees from forests. How would you like to be in a crowded room standing shoulder to shoulder with dead people?

Lions eat stuff like zebras raw -- little baby lion cubs will dig right in and get their faces all red. Crows eat dirty old roadkill right there on the side of the road. Welsh Corgis are ugly. I think nature is really gross

If a restaurant gives free rolls, garlic bread, breadsticks, or whatever, why is it required that they give one more piece of bread than there are people at the table? Would it hurt them to bring out one apiece or two apiece? I think it's a secret research project. There's hidden cameras over every table. They want to see how many people will split the last piece of bread and how many will fight over it. They do this nationwide, I'm sure, so they can study what regions of the country have a natural tendency toward violence. Then they test their new high-tech weaponry by mowing people down on the street in the most angst-ridden areas. The incident gets passed off as just another random act of violence. As for the least violent areas -- they publish them in those lists of "Best U.S. Cities To Live In." Everybody seems to know about those lists, even though nobody ever actually reads the magazines they get published in.

The movie "Jurassic Park" has it all wrong. Tyrannosaurs Rex don't run around like ostriches. In terms of body structure, they are more similar to kangaroos -- thick back legs, skinny forelegs, and a long tail for balance. I think the T-Rex used to get around by bouncing. They'd leap around everywhere and make a lot of noise. They'd catch pterodactyls in mid-flight. They'd take down a Brontosaurus by jumping on its neck. I'm glad those bad boys aren't around anymore.

I think the inventor of those plush dice that people put on their rear view mirrors would best be described as "insane genius."

If it rained oil, I bet there'd be a lot more car accidents. I think we should protect against this eventuality by building giant soap dispensers at regular intervals along the roadside. If it ever rains oil, we could just squirt soap all over and wash the oil away. Then, to keep cars from sliding on the soap, we'd turn on the fire hydrants (placed at regular intervals on the other side of the road) for the "rinse" cycle. You can't be too prepared.

When I become a millionaire and start my own suite of companies, I think I'm going to name each one "Something-O-Rama." "Bookstore" might not be a very exciting name for a bookstore, but you add "-O-Rama" to it and suddenly it becomes Exciting Fantastic World of Books Resort Complex. Even something like "Spittle-O-Rama" doesn't sound wholly unappealing.

For the longest time, people have been saying you need to eat some foods from each of the "Four Food Groups" to stay healthy. You eat a little meat, a little dairy, a little wheat, and a few vegetables, and you're all set. Ha. Corndogs, cheese, cake, and french fries aren't going to get you anywhere. I ought to know. There's a very good reason this type of diet is not healthy. Those foods are all yellow. Don't get me wrong. I believe in the "food group" philosophy of dieting, but they mucked up the classification scheme. Foods should be sorted by color, not origin. The real four food groups are this: the "warm color" food group, the "cold color" food group, the "no color" food group, and the "alkaline earth" food group.For warm color foods, try tomatoes, tangerines, or summer squash. For cold color foods, have broccoli, cabbage, or a plum. For no color foods, eat mashed potatoes, black olives, or drink milk. For alkaline earth foods, chow down on chicken, sirloin steak, or wheat bread. You can't go wrong.

In elementary school, we used to have to cover our school books with ripped up paper bags, presumably because our teachers were under the misconception that paper bags would protect books from the rigors elementary school students put them through. It was a big waste of time. Paper bags are useful for storing things and carrying things around. School books are useful for learning worthless information nobody will ever use outside of school. I think it would be better to protect paper bags with ripped up school books.

Soda cans are a big waste. You've got a whole hunk of metal, and its entire purpose in life is to keep one unit of soda from spilling everywhere. Once the soda's gone, the can's job is done forever. With modern technology, we can work around this inefficiency. I think we should have canless soda cans. There would be a force field around the soda to keep it in place. You pick it up, drink it through the hole in the force field, and the field contracts as there is less liquid to secure. When the soda is gone, the force field shrinks to nothing and disappears. Better yet, let's just have the factory teleport it directly into our mouths. You push a button on the wall for the soda of your choice, position your head just so, and bam, you're chugging down carbonation. Of course they'd have to make sure not to teleport it in too fast, or there would be a mess. And if they missed and got it in your nose, well that's just completely unacceptable. Soda in the nose is about as bad as life gets

I think shirts should double as web browsers. Web pages get displayed on the shirt, and you touch the links to follow them. The pages would be displayed upside down on the front, so you could surf while wearing it, and another browser would be right side up on the back, so if you're standing in line, the guy behind you can surf, too. If everybody wore these things, you'd never get stuck with nothing to do.

Skipping rocks across lakes would rule if it didn't take eons to find actual flat, round rocks. Every time I go skipping, I find only one really good skipping rock, which I mess up throwing anyway. All the other rocks are these bulky looking weird rocks that might be flat on one little piece, but of course that's never the piece that hits the water when you throw it. I've got a multi-trillion dollar idea. I'm going to manufacture biodegradable skipping pellets. They'd be perfectly shaped -- flat, circular, heavy, and rounded on the edges. There'd be a little nook to aid in adding spin, and they'd dissolve into an environmentally safe nothing in water. I think that would take all the fun out of skipping rocks, but I'd make a ton of money, so it evens out in the end.

Coffee tables serve two vital functions. They house magazines no one reads, and they trip you. Why do these units of furniture exist? I'm convinced no one actually likes them; I think people buy them just because they somehow became a mandatory living room component. Now if only I can get my wall mounted chair idea accepted into the standard furnishing convention, I'll be a zillionaire.

If you were data travelling over a phone line, I think you'd see a lot of interesting sights along the way. Actually, you wouldn't, because you'd have that rubber insulation all around you. And you'd be moving way too fast to see anything. And you wouldn't have eyes.

When a predator attacks a starfish, often what the starfish will do is purposefully detach one of its limbs and swim away, in the hopes that the predator will go after the severed limb instead of the rest of it. Why can't people do that? I think it would be awesome if we could. Like, this thug would be chasing you down a dark alley in New York City. Instead of getting beat up, you'd take your arm and fling it over somewhere.

The average duck diet must be the pretty sorry if they get all excited and competitive over soggy bread. I think it would be downright terrifying to see what they'd do over a fresh chocolate mousse. This leads me to my next billion dollar business idea: a restaurant for ducks. I could serve them barbequed pork ribs, shrimp hollandaise, chicken caesar salad, and all kinds of other scrumptious dishes, all at reasonable prices. There wouldn't be any competition; they'd be standing in lines miles long to make reservations. Every duck in the world times fifteen bucks a plate is...well, a whole lot of money.

We've got telephones. We've got video conferencing. But what if we could transfer smells electronically? I think this is a silly supposition, and I'm not going to talk about it anymore.

I think sleep is unfair. I don't object to a period of rest -- even a mandatory one -- during which our actions are limited. I can accept that we can breathe and roll over but not cook food, play poker, or go snowboarding. My problem is, what interesting stuff can you do while you're asleep? You can die. Oh, yay. Hold me back.

I want to be the only door to a small windowless room. Then people could swing me closed real hard, but the air pressure would keep me from slamming shut at the last second. I think that would be an awesome adrenaline rush.

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."

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.

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.

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."

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.

I'm glad I live in the northern hemisphere. Otherwise I'd never know when it's ok to eat cod. In the northern hemisphere, you can go by some handy rule about only eating cod in months with 'r' in it. Or 'y' or 'e' or something. You can't catch and eat them in the other months, because they have worms in them then. That rule doesn't work in the southerm hemisphere, with the seasons reversed and everything, so how do they know? I bet Australians and Argentinians and Antarcticans are constantly trying to eat cod, cutting into it, and saying, "Darn! I never remember when we can eat this stuff!" If I were cod, I think I would periodically migrate from one hemisphere to the other and fool everyone.

I think I'll open a restaurant that only serves food that is hard to eat. Then I'll spend the remainder of my days living in the apartment above it, looking through the one-way mirror that will serve as the restaurant's ceiling, and laughing at all the patrons. I'll serve peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but only with one slice of bread -- in the middle. And corn on the cob, but with two inches of the "cob" part scooped out of each end. And ice cream bars with no stick and no clean, chocolatey shell coating. And pizza with sauce and cheese on both sides of the crust. There won't be any silverware or napkins in the whole place. Also, the faucets in the bathrooms will spray water really hard in all directions. Some places have already beaten me to that idea.

I hate it when I'm riding with someone down the road, smell burnt oil or rubber and wonder, all paranoid, if it's our car or somebody else's. I think tires and motor oil should have custom smells, so we can identify right off whether we should be concerned or not. You start smelling vanilla cream on the highway, you know you're ok, but once the cranberry hits, pull over. No more paranoia. 

I think kids need to be protected from exposure to violence and sex.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.

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.

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 Canadians will have finally invaded.

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.

The lure of evil is powerful for some, but I never saw the attraction. So many people seem to thrive on succumbing to evil, though, that finally I figured I'd try it out and see what I was missing. I turned evil for a whole week. I squeezed toothpaste tubes from the middle. I left shopping carts in the parking lot. I even took the battery out of my smoke alarm. I never did figure out what's so fun about being evil, but one good thing came from the experience. I discovered just how neat it is to squeeze toothpaste around inside the tube. I think I spent like three hours squeezing toothpaste from one end to the other and making funny shapes.

I think it is supremely unfair that my consumption of snacks and desserts is curbed by the capacity of my stomach

Recently I ordered breakfast from a hotel restaurant. I ordered eggs and toast. I got eggs, toast, and a leaf. Garnishes are among the most absurd paradoxes of the universe. Is there anything so bereft of purpose as food you can't eat? It's crazy that we even have a word for it. Next time I get an inedible green thing on my dinner plate, I shall politely inform the waiter that the cook forgot to husk my meal. Here's another silly garnish: a paper-thin slice of orange, split along a radius, and twisted all around so it rests on the plate like it came out of some vegetarian's torture chamber. I got one of these once. I ate it to put it out of its misery, but I could barely taste it. For the amount of money that restaurant spent to have a chef slice that orange so thin and arrange it so meticulously, I could have had a whole orange. I think I'm going to open a restaurant that sells only garnishes. Nobody would go there, but I could show it as a performance art exhibit and get lots of critics praising me with big words on how aptly I expose and satirize how much value our superficial society places on hollow appearances.

I think it would be really cool if people molted. Imagine the practical jokes that would abound! You molt off a layer of skin, then prop it up somewhere and fake people out. You could stuff your own head and mount it on the wall and tell hunting stories. ("I remember when I shot me that me. It was back in aught two; I waited out in the chilly morning for three hours, but when I had me in my sights, I knew I was a goner.") The best part would be if you could steal someone else's skin, wear that, rob a bank, and nail the other guy for it.

Have you ever watched frogs get around? Even the tiniest little frog can just up and blip itself like twenty body lengths ahead, faster than the eye can see. With all the thinking I've been thinking about how we need to speed up personal transportation with flying cars or frictionless walkways, maybe the true answer is already inherent in nature. We need big honkin' legs. I think it would be great: imagine peering down the road at someone coming your way, and you're thinking, gosh, that person looks vaguely familiar, but I can't quite make out wh--WHOOSH!, suddenly, the target of your inspection has made a flying leap to right in front of you and is recalling those boisterous times you shared together in study hall once upon a time. Instant gratification is what I'm talking about. You wonder what's over somewhere, so you up and blip yourself over to see. Takes no time at all. Plus, you can scare the living daylights out of old ladies, and that's a bonus that pretty much makes anything worthwhile

Aquafresh toothpaste has three colors -- it squirts out, and there's a red strip, white strip, and blue strip of toothpaste. I think they have the right idea. I think we should employ this multi-colored chemical substance angle to every squirtable consumer product on the market in the hopes it would enrich the excitement of our environment. Shampoo could be purple, yellow, and pastel green. Red, mauve, and chartreuse ketchup would add more than spice to our hamburgers. Brown, orange, and wintergreen hand cream would add color to the lightest of skins. Gray, black, and vermilion lipstick would lend a first date some extra pizazz. Yellow, coral, and burnt sienna caulk would give a drab house some eye-catching highlights. I think burnt sienna is a silly name for a color.

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.

I don't understand sports cars. You pay extra money to get a car that gets bad gas mileage, attracts cops, rides so smoothly you think you're doing 30 when you're really doing 115, and has a bookshelf for a backseat. Maybe I'm just hopelessly practical, but I think there's an excellent untapped business opportunity here. I'm going to build and market the "sports bike." It'll have a cushy but non-body-forming seat that's so low it's between the wheels instead of above them. It'll have massive shock absorbers for a smooth ride. It'll have a huge pedal radius and an elaborate system of gears so you can go insanely fast. The chain guard will be comprised of sleek curves and tinted canary yellow. As a specialty feature, the kickstand will be too short to be functional, but -- and here's the good part -- it will be locked in the down position. If that isn't cool, I don't know what is. No stealing my trillion dollar idea, now.

You know those photographic booths where where passersby stick their heads through holes in the wall, and on the other side of the wall there's this funny drawing? I think I'd like to own a place like that, except when people stuck their heads in, I'd just punch them hard for no good reason.

Insurance companies must love those yellow tabby things they put down on newly paved roads to mark where the double yellow line will eventually be painted. Heck, I think the insurance companies are behind it all. Does anybody not try to swerve and run them over?

I think Chess is a sexist game. Some people think it's feminist, because the queen is the most powerful piece on the board, but that's just a superficial analysis. In the beginning, the queen starts on a square of her own color, while the king always starts on a square of opposite color. Why, because she's the one that would worry about clashing? Sexist, I say. Then the queen can go wherever she wants to, boss everyone else around -- but when the king dies, she's had it.

I think all floors and walkways should be giant air hockey tables. A little push to get you started, and you slide to wherever you're going. The last remnant of necessary daily exercise would be eliminated. Anyone could transport heavy boxes. You'd have an excuse not to stop and talk to irritating acquaintances you meet in passing. You could go ice skating, or the equivalent, year round. Malls would benefit the most. The whole idea of malls is braindead anyway. "Let's put a roof over this cluster of stores and make people walk from one to another instead of drive!" Lennox outlets would probably want to install sturdy bumper rails before putting in air hockey floors.

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.

You know, some city streets in this country are not safe. It's hard to believe, but street safety is not evenly spread throughout this country. I mean, New York City has tons of cops. The "NYPD," which are blue, are famous across the country for keeping the streets safe. Los Angeles has a police department with a reputation, too: the ever-reliable "LAPD," which can always be counted on to show up in an emergency and calm angry rioters. But take, for example, Miami. Who's ever heard of the MPD or the MIPD or whatever Miami's police department would be called if they had one? Yes, I'm pretty sure they don't even have a police force down there, because I've never heard of it. I've never been to Miami, but I know for a fact that all there is down there are drug smugglers open firing on each other on street corners pretty much all the time. I think Miami would be a bad place to live.

Is there anything more vulgar than the expression "sucking face"? I mean, is that all people see in the romantic art of kissing these days? "Passionately exchanging each other's very souls" is more like it. Why can't that be the common idiom? It's so much more refined and sensitive. I'd be like, "Hey baby, wanna go upstairs and passionately exchange each other's very souls?" And if I'm lucky, the reply would be, "Whoa, yeah! You give me yours first." And after eighteen years of marriage, she'd be like, "Hey, do you remember which one you've got? Is that your original soul, or is that mine?" And I'd be like, "I don't know. I think mine was the one with the scratch in the corner, but yours was the one with the bit of price tag glue still on it." And she'd be like, "Ok, just so we remember. When I die, I don't want to be stuck with the one that stuffed a half-chewed lemon doughnut down Johnny Wiederman's pants in the third grade."