2008-11-05 13:35:04: I voted. In my (mostly) white (entirely) suburban neighborhood, it took me longer to walk across the parking lot to the polling place than it did to stand in line to cast my ballot. My buddy Joe, OTOH, lives in a blue-collar multi-culti part of town, and the line at ...
2008-10-13 07:59:01: It would depend on how selfish I'm allowed to be. If I could do it for purely selfish reasons and for just, you know, hang-out time, I'd consider D. Boon from The Minutemen. Because I'd really like to hang out with D. Boon. But if it's someone I'm tasked with ...
2008-09-02 21:05:09: Disappear into the woods behind the house for hours at a time without setting off an Amber alert.
Jump on trampolines that didn't have padded sides.
Take a gun to school without being arrested (it was a prop in a play, OK? But it was a real gun.).
Get into bottle rocket wars ...
2008-08-27 10:26:19: Addendum: Tony's Hot Dogs thanks you for this question.
*burp*
2008-08-27 09:27:36: Catsup is an acceptable hot dog condiment in the following situations only:
1. You have purchased a sub-par dog (you can tell the sub-par dogs -- they are the ones that are individually wrapped in the foil packets and then fossilized under a heat lamp) and there's no options other than ...
2008-08-21 11:22:51: Well, I just linked both of them (and the BBQ, to boot) on my lame-ass blog, thereby reducing the credibility of all sites involved. (Nice work, Brandon -- the site looks great!)
2008-08-16 15:23:46: If I leave the closet door open, I can see him coming, and maybe I can make it out the window.
But leaving the closet door shut may delay him just long enough for me to make a break for it.
If I leave the light on, I can see him better ...
2008-07-23 13:48:40: A skillet, a spatula, an oven mitt, ice trays, a plate, a cup, a fork, a knife, a spoon.
An extra set of keys, a can of WD-40, a screwdriver, a hammer, a wrench, needle-nosed pliers.
Extension cords, power strips.
A hose, a rake, a pair of work gloves.
A pen, a stapler, a ...
2008-07-08 08:24:50: Abortions retroactive to age 18.
Anyone caught in public wearing droopy jeans and a backwards baseball cap gets one warning, then a bullet in the head. Same goes for turtlenecks and squnity little hipster glasses.
Sterilize all NY Yankees fans, along with all NASCAR fans. Toby Keith and Tim McGraw fans in ...
2008-06-29 07:22:15: I DID see Wall-E (It's brilliant! Go see it!) but I posted this question first, I swear. The question was actually prompted by my re-reading of Gene Wolfe's Urth of the New Sun. The way the Ship exists outside of time and has developed its own ecology and culture was ...
2008-06-26 11:51:52: Because then they'd still be enslaved by the evil robots, of course.
Did I not mention the evil robots? Yeah, there are evil robots.
2008-06-21 07:50:24: Never try to catch a falling knife (see above).
Ordering a shot of Jagermeister is your brain's way of telling you that you've been at the bar for an hour too long.
Don't take LSD on three successive days, even if it's really clean liquid and you've done it many times ...
2008-06-18 11:37:16: I don't know that I've made that many compromises yet. This is the advantage of having never really done much of anything to begin with.
I have recently begun pulling my trousers up to beneath my armpits, though. It's comfier that way. Especially with a belt AND braces.
2008-06-17 13:56:38: I read the obits every day in my local fish wrapper, but never online. It would never occur to me to read them online, unless I were looking for a specific death announcement. But the dead-tree version is a part of my morning coffee routine along with the crossword and ...
2008-06-07 13:45:13: I sleep from 4 AM to 9 AM, and then from 3 PM to 6 PM. Because taking care of a crazy little old lady with insomnia and dementia who tends to want to wander around the house in the middle of the night isn't conducive to a regular sleep ...
2008-05-30 17:10:43: Communicating with a truly alien intelligence would be next to impossible, it seems to me, unless there's some sort of anthropic principle in effect that leads intelligent life down very similar evolutionary pathways. We have exactly one model of consciousness, and it is woefully incomplete. How many more models exist? ...
2008-05-27 14:00:06: Sitting on the black vinyl bench seat of my dad's 1967 Dodge watching sunlight flicker through the branches of the magnolia tree beside the driveway and shadows twine patterns across the smeared windshield-- brilliant light then mottled blackness as the heavy leaves swayed. It was hot and the thick summer ...
2008-05-02 17:29:09: Commando, of course.
Boxers when I must. "Must" meaning when I know I'll be sweating all day, or when it's really cold, or when the only clean jeans are the ones with the holes in the ass so I hafta wear something under them or get arrested for exhibiting my sweet ...
2008-04-30 13:29:38: I vote every time I have the opportunity. I am the worst kind of voter out there, the uninformed moron just pullin' levers. Here are my voting criteria:
1) Candidates with whom I agree on the issues
2) Candidates who belong to the political party that best reflects my own views
3) Candidates ...
2008-04-22 16:14:17: Mister_A: I'd reuse it somehow, obviously. Know any little girls who'd like a dollhouse? That'd be cool. Or build yourself a nice liquor cabinet.
2008-04-21 16:26:52: I drive a hybrid, I've replaced most of the bulbs in the house with compact fluorescent bulbs, and I've replaced leaky flapper seals in the toilets and last year installed a high-efficiency HVAC system (got a tax credit for that....who knew?). I recycle paper, plastic, and aluminum ( mostly -- ...
2008-04-19 17:19:54: If I'd have had the looks to go with this silver tongue I really could have gone places.
I figure pretty people rent a lot more space in their own heads about their looks (good and bad -- smart pretty people are probably rightfully annoyed at being intellectually underestimated and stupid ...
2008-04-18 11:53:23: As a kid, my after-school afternoons often consisted of re-runs of Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch.
I suspect that playing GTA: IV would have been an all-around healthier activity.
Grumblebee is right on, though, when he points out that there's a sweet spot in gaming where one's attention/absorption ratio is perfectly ...
2008-03-17 13:28:10: Hell, if I thought I could get away scot-free and not hurt anyone, I'd rob banks all day long.
I won't run stop signs or stop lights, even if it's three AM and I'm alone on the road and I can see a mile in every direction. That would probably impede ...
2008-03-12 08:58:42: Taxes are protection money you pay to keep the state and federal thugs from fucking your shit up. One benefit of paying your protection money to the biggest, baddest shit-kickers around is that they will (ostensibly) try to keep others out of your shit. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. ...
2008-03-12 13:40:32: Yeah, that was pretty much totally tangential, huh? Sorry.
(I've been putting my taxes together this week, and It fills me with irrational bilious rage.)
2008-03-05 05:12:23: Yo mama so fat she freebase ham.
Yo mama so fat she invisible due to gravitational lensing.
These jokes only start fights if yo momma is, you know, really fat. It's kind of the latter-day equivalent of slapping someone with a glove to start a duel, a ritual that conveys little but ...
2008-02-07 08:54:52: There was a time when women would have saline-filled plastic bags implanted into their bodies for "aesthetic" reasons.
There were once people who believed in invisible sky wizards with such fervor that wars were fought over whose sky wizard was better.
People once stated in all seriousness that global corporate capitalism could ...
2008-01-23 09:56:50: At the funeral, to the grieving family: "I'm so sorry for your loss. Is there anything I can do to help?"
Outside the funeral home, after the service: "Man, what an asshole. Earth's a better place with him off it."
The different dynamics of online discourse make that handy social division/blatant hypocrisy ...
2008-01-12 13:33:56: A bong. Back in the 80s when art house theaters had smoking sections. It was a double feature of Harold Lloyd's "Safety Last!" and "Why Worry?"
2008-01-12 15:20:25: No. Information of such complexity and density requires storage and retrieval mechanisms well beyond the capability of human memory. (Imagine a government agency that consisted of nothing but Tax-Code Cenobites... *shudder*)
2008-01-14 18:16:24: What forms of error-correction would such a system have to use? Seems like it'd evolve toward one meaning per phoneme, whatever that means. A nested set of sound signifiers logically linked hierarchically so complex conceptual retrieval wouldn't be entirely dependent on memory. It would have to have built-in "checksums", ...
2008-01-01 13:49:08: I'm right there with you on the HFCS, FelliniBlank. That's kinda sorta my resolution as well. As soon as I finish all the cold delicious Dr. Peppers in the fridge.
I'm also going to get a comprehensive physical and finally get that dental work done that I've been putting off. *shudder*
And ...
2007-12-28 17:06:46: I would like to hear perspectives on this question from people who come from outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. Seems like many southeast Asian cultures have centuries of experience navigating this terrain. Look at the interplay of Shinto and Buddhism in Japan, for instance.
And speaking of the original AskMe, I'd be ...
2007-12-23 18:51:48: If I can't disrupt the space-time continuum, then fuck your time machine.
I concur with autarky & kickstart -- if it's a one-time shot, the future is too tempting to pass up.
2008-12-26 11:20:51: Immortality is a long, long time.
How about intermittent eternal life? Like, peek in every few years and see what's happening, go back to sleep for a few millennia if there's nothing interesting going on.
Kinda like God does now.
2007-12-13 10:17:03: I used to work with a guy who, when asked a rhetorical question along the lines of "You know what I saw today?" or "You know what's weird?" would always respond with, "A monkey fucking a goat?"
So that's my final answer. A monkey fucking a goat.
2007-12-10 10:18:03: A body. Or a crashed spacecraft. Habeas fuckin' corpus.
And there can never be "proof" of a bona fide miracle, because by definition a miracle is an event which supersedes the laws of nature, and so is not bound by empirical rules of evidence. IMHO.
2007-12-07 13:55:36: Hyperintelligent octopi would be terrifying.... if you lived underwater. Otherwise, not so much. And we've culled all the top predators down to an unthreatening population. So it seems to me that insects would be the only real threat. And even then ND¢ makes a great point: after the initial surge, ...
2007-11-30 11:31:45: Long ago I read Bill, the Galactic Hero and I vividly remember that Bill had had an arm replacement as a result of war wounds -- a black right arm had been grafted in place of his missing white left arm. "So Bill stayed up all night shaking hands ...
2007-12-27 08:17:52: I think a more interesting question (which looms on the horizon) is what happens to Pepsi and Coke's bottom line when corn syrup subsidies are removed from the next farm bill. Will they advertise more when a soft drink costs 2 to 3 bucks, or will they cut ancillary spending ...
2007-12-27 09:33:17: ...and if you're lucky you can find Passover Coke (made with sugar) in US markets during the season -- it's marked by a black cap and the kosher "K", and it does taste better than HFCS Coke.
2007-12-27 10:48:57: You're right about the farm bill, iguana. But we can always hope.
A cursory glance at the history of soft drink marketing shows how the focus has shifted from selling it as a medicine to selling it as a special-occasion treat to selling it as a cultural signifier and daily necessity. ...