But then he did it again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

He was my only hero.

Excitation, Find Out What It Means

Did you hear about the man arrested for having sex with a bicycle?

I imagine the police interviewing him after his arrest. It probably went something like this:

Detective: Do you confess to having sex with a bicycle?

Bike Humper: Yes.

Detective: Was it a woman’s bicycle or a man’s bicycle?

Bike Humper: Dude, I’m not gay.

I have to wonder if the perpetrator is exclusively attracted to bicycles, or are other inanimate objects just as sexy? If so, I envy him on some level. There would be no such thing as a boring night at home. “Hellooooo, Lamp!”

He probably has his own set of private jokes he uses around the house: “Well, there’s nothing on TV tonight,” …pause for humorous effect…”except ME!”

If the perpetrator gets jail time, I would hate to be the other prisoner in his cell. I’d be afraid to fall asleep and appear inanimate for more than a minute. And I’d tape my toothbrush and tin cup to my chest. That would be a long five years.

My theory is that the perpetrator has a neighbor who keeps borrowing his shit, and this was his way of dealing with it. It almost worked. I’m practically certain no one will ask to borrow that bicycle. And his family will probably bury his bowling ball with him.

Or perhaps the man was too cheap to buy a bicycle lock and he was worried the cleaners would steal the bike. He had a choice of paying 20 bucks for a lock, or humping the bike in front of them. Either way, the odds of bicycle theft plummeted. The thing he didn’t count on was the cleaners turning him over to authorities. I can see how he’d make that mistake. If you tell me you knew there was a law against loving your bicycle too much, you’re lying.

Oxidation, Find Out What It Means

I wonder what kind of tricks the CIA is using against Al Qaeda these days.
If I were in the CIA, I would try to flood the terrorist communication channels with false orders. Some of the false orders would be simple stuff, such as “Everyone gather by the big rock and wait for a big delivery of explosives.”

Other times you might say, “Salame is a mole for the CIA. He must die.” I figure the terrorists are like any other bureaucracy, and the workers will focus first on whatever is sitting in front of them while ignoring long term planning. And it’s probably fair to assume that, like your workplace, no one really trusts anyone else. I think you could keep terrorists busy killing each other until they run out of recruits.

Terror networks are perfect targets for false communications. First, the real orders sound exactly like pranks. It would be hard to sort out the evil mastermind plots from the CIA practical jokes. For example, if you get the order to shove C4 up your ass and yell WALAWALAWALA while running toward a heavily armed American Checkpoint, is that a real one or a prank? It’s hard to tell.

Second, the lines of communication within terror networks are presumably ever-changing, and necessarily involve strangers who wouldn’t recognize the voice or face of the other. It wouldn’t take many stories of CIA compromises to the system before no terrorist trusts anything he hears. Any real orders would be ignored.

I assume the terrorists are avoiding electronic communications because those would be the first channels the CIA compromised. This puts the terrorists in the position of trying to run a virtual meeting with operatives across the globe by sending human messengers. Assuming these terrorists are no more capable than your own coworkers, you know exactly how that’s working out for
them:

Abdullah: Your orders are to blow up the Belgian Embassy in Waziristan.

Salame: What is a Belgian?

Abdullah: I think it’s some sort of American. Or a waffle.

Salame: I don’t think there are any embassies in Waziristan.

Abdullah: Maybe it was someplace else. It started with a W. Or an M.

Saleme: Perhaps you could get clarification and come back.

Abdullah: Fine. I’ll see you in four months. Oh, and Bin Laden wants your status report in front of his cave by 8 AM.

Indeterminacy, Find Out What It Means

Lately I have been looking at the moon and wondering if it will someday kill me. If I live for 70 more years I assume I will eventually be a robot, having shed my old skin and bones body and uploaded a scanned and digitized version of my brain to a machine. My fellow robots and I will live among the meat people for eons until the moon’s orbit degrades, either gradually or because a meteor gives it a nudge, and Earth is annihilated in the collision. You might say I worry too much. But I’ve successfully avoided death so far, so I say I worry just enough.

Because of this impending moon problem I have been planning an exit strategy. By the time the moon starts heading our way I imagine we’ll have the technology to send me into space in an escape rocket, searching for a habitable planet. I could power down my robot brain so the trip isn’t so boring.

But even if this plan works it will be lonely when I find my new planet. And then there is the issue of the 400 billion meat people and fellow robots I leave behind, including my hot robot wife and the rest of my robot family. I want a solution for them too. Sure, I could reprogram my brain to not care, but that’s not how I roll.

Unfortunately, I assume there would be no practical way to build and launch enough rockets for everyone to escape, at least not in time. So sending the entire population of Earth to the new planet isn’t going to work.

We need a better plan than that, and it goes like this: Once we have the technology, we begin scanning and digitizing everyone’s brain routinely, perhaps once a year during regular physicals. By then I’m sure we’ll have universal planetary healthcare. Remember, this is the far, far future.

Once the moon starts coming our way, we launch some of the robot people, including me, as scouts for the new planet. Each of us will carry a huge flash drive filled with all the scanned brains of the meat people and robots that will be left behind. We will also bring enough technology to build more robots on New Earth.

I suppose we’d also want to freeze a few regular humans and take them along in the cargo bin so we can begin breeding them on New Earth, just for old time’s sake. Obviously the meat people would be regarded as old technology, and a huge pain in the ass, always complaining about sinus problems and toothaches and whatnot, but we could turn off our robot ears when we visit them in the zoo on New Earth.

I look forward to my new robot planet. You might think that being a robot would be less fun than being human, but I think fun is exactly the sort of subroutine we’d design into the robot system. Or maybe we could just buy it at the iTunes app store.

Perhaps you think you would miss being human, but that’s a subroutine we’d leave out of the robot mind. You would be designed for happiness. And I’m not talking about ordinary happiness. I’m talking about the kind that makes you scream and curl your robot toes. It will be a happy robot planet.

Another possible future is that we are so invested in our humanity, with all of its flaws, that we design our future robotic containers to perceive ourselves and other robots as flesh and blood humans. In other words, there’s a good chance this plan already happened and you’re a robot living on New Earth. You’re only programmed to believe you are human.

Yeah, you knew I was going there.

But here’s the kicker: Your spouse loves to cook, and you hate to clean up, especially after a long day and a big meal. As you wipe down the table and wash the extra-high pile of pots and pans from the extra-special meal, which thought do you have?

1. My spouse gave me something special tonight.

2. I got screwed in this deal.

Go.

Recently i read in a newspaper that a female Indian athlete who recently won a silver medal in a regional competition has failed a gender test. Seriously.

I have to think that of all the tests you could fail, a gender test would be the most embarrassing. The article is a bit sketchy on the test itself but it reportedly involves an endocrinologist, psychologist, and gynecologist.
I have to wonder what the psychologist’s test looked like, since other experts were checking her junk. I assume there was some sort of highly offensive, stereotypical, and sexist written exam. It probably looked like this:

1. Shopping is…
a. A fascinating experience that is even better when shared.
b. A method used to extract secrets from terrorists.

2. What does “nothing is wrong” mean?
a. Start guessing and apologizing or I’ll kill you in your sleep.
b. Oh shit.

3. The best time for sex is…
a. When your mood and your schedule are right.
b. Do you mind if I masturbate a little while I take this test?

4. When you observe a man doing a simple task, you think…
a. That frickin’ baboon is doing it wrong and ruining everything.
b. Why would I watch a man do a simple task?

5. When a man doesn’t notice your new hair color it means…
a. He no longer loves you.
b. Hair has different colors?

6. After a man explains the undeniable logic of his point of view…
a. It proves that he just doesn’t get it.
b. Case closed!

7. Your reaction to this test is…
a. Bastard!
b. Ha Ha! You’re dead, Dude.

Allow me to introduce my sidekick “Leonardo”, the brains behind my world domination plans. He also happens to be the action figure from the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic ever… He is currently taking part in a stop motion animation experiment by moi.

Quantization, Find Out What It Means

Every now and then I come up with a hypothesis that sounds correct and has the added benefit of being totally impossible to verify. That’s almost as good as knowledge.

My hypothesis for today is that a person’s need for social interaction is inversely related to the quality of his or her imagination. In other words, if you have an excellent imagination, you might enjoy people, but you’re equally happy to be alone with your thoughts for large stretches. To put it bluntly, you fascinate yourself.

A key part of my hypothesis is the assumption that people have widely different powers of imagination. This seems likely. People are all over the map for every other mental ability. Whatever is happening inside the mind of the person with the worst imagination on earth is clearly very different from what’s happening in the mind of the most creative.

Presumably, if you have no imagination whatsoever, you need to get all of your stimulation from the environment, mostly from other people, or at least TV shows about other people. You wouldn’t want to be alone with your thoughts for more than two minutes because your thoughts would bore the living piss out of you.

On the other end of the spectrum, if your imagination is extraordinary, interaction with other people will just get in the way of the incredible experiences you could otherwise be having entirely in your head.

Coming Soon: The application would enable you to share comments you make here with your facebook buddies… lemme know if you can think more uses….
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As you know, when people use headphones, they talk too loudly because they can’t hear themselves. I learned that this phenomenon extends to nasal sounds in the sniff-snort category. Mr. Clean on crack was rocking out to his iPod and sniff-snorting so loudly every few seconds that the flight crew kept looking out the window to see if a pterodactyl was attacking the fuselage.

Oh, I’m just getting started.

The World’s Most Annoying Person enjoyed whatever was on the little airplane TV after the feature film. He displayed his happiness by rocking back and forth and making a sound like a horse with his ‘nads caught on a barbed wire fence. It went something like EEYOOOREE-SNORT-SNIFF-EEEEYOOOREEE! If you have ever tried to take a nap when Mr. Clean on crack is gelding himself next to you, then you know it isn’t easy.

The World’s Most Annoying Person ordered a beer before takeoff. And another every half hour. Add to this picture his bladder that was the size of a mosquito’s pancreas, and you can imagine how many times I had to unbuckle and rebuckle. Several times he had to go see his “assistant” in the back of the plane, which turned out to be a failed mission twice because of a beverage cart and once because she was either asleep or pretending to be dead to avoid him.

I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet.

He was a tall, lanky guy with, with fingers like breadsticks. Every few minutes he would grab some note paper and a pen, assume the “brilliant idea” pose, and then, I’m guessing, realizing he was more drunk than inspired, write a few words and…God help me…drum his fingers.

Now when I say “drum his fingers,” I do not mean softly or just a few times. I mean every few seconds for an hour he would go into a drum solo on his tray table that was apparently intended to jumpstart his brain and squeeze out that nugget of brilliance that was drowning in Heineken somewhere in his cerebellum. I glanced over at his notes a few times just to see if he was writing a solution to string theory or the first chapter of a great novel. But I think it was a cross between gibberish and whatever aspires to be gibberish. The finger drumming, like his snort-sniffing, was extra loud because he still had on the headphones. Those breadstick-fingers were banging louder than Paris Hilton locked in a steel drum with a hot robot. It bothered me so much that I lost my ability to make good analogies.

He tried once to make conversation with me. “Going home?” he asked. I avoided that trap like a hamster avoids a Richard Gere film festival. (See? I’m damaged.) “Going to study,” I answered. Had he asked what kind of education, I was ready to explain my career as an actuary. No one can survive that for more than five minutes without slipping into a coma. It’s a drastic measure, but at that point it was either him or me. And my level of self-loathing didn’t even come close to my desire to kill him. So it would have been him. Luckily for him, he went back to his nonverbal methods of being annoying, and thus inadvertently saved his life.

Next month when i get back to india, I’m walking.