I once laid to rest a pair of Jockey shorts that had accompanied me to high school some 23 years prior. It was a sad and introspective occasion, a farewell to a last link to childhood and yet a triumphant and bold declaration decrying the ruthless destructive potential of bleach and fabric softener. As I gave the now shredded elastic band one last pull for old times sake, and blew my nose in them for good measure (waste not, want not) before consigning their yellowed holey remains to the garbage, I thought - "if we can send a bunch of men to the moon for a couple of weeks without toilet facilities, why can we not engineer a decent set of underwear?"
Has anyone ever used the front exit of a pair of Jockey shorts prior to micturation? C'mon guys, have you ever known anyone to do anything other than pull over the leg hole to provide egress when standing before a porcelain goddess? If you do use the front door without anatomical trauma, have you ever been able to reconfigure that silly cotton airlock to once again reliably retain what otherwise slithers out at socially inopportune moments? Do the people who design these things ever wear them, or are they like the "commuter lanes" on freeways that are there because it is a proper, as compared to a useful, thing to do? I call for an ergonomic design and fabrication project to optimize the utility of the common man's tidy whities.
If Southern California Edison had MBAs with any BRAINS they would credit my stock dividends against my electric bills, saving us both postage and taxes. Wouldn't you invest in your public utilities if they credited dividends against bills, only billing you for the net? "Gee Marge, we had better buy another hundred shares of SoCalEd, these winter heating bills are killing us." If you want people to invest in America they have to realize some perceptible gain out of the bloody claws of the tax collector.
I visited the Post Office the other day and bought a roll of stamps, enriching the US Snail to the tune of $47. As a person whose idea of primary communication is e-mail courtesy of an affluent employer, I find that those hundred stamps disappear amazingly - impoverishingly - quickly. At nearly four bits a pop I suspect a certain degree of collusion between two phone companies, a power company, a gas supplier, some credit cards, a department store or three... and the identity theft industry. Why is it that the crap that fills my mailbox with pictures of missing brats and bright brochures describing the awesome delights of cheap oil filters from Cistern, Idaho rides for seven cents, and my bill payments are hauled five miles away for 47 cents? Let us create special commuter lanes for low postage mail, allowing delivery only if all of a company's unsolicited junk mail rides together. The only off-ramp will lead directly into a landfill, preferably in Blair, Nebraska, so that the trip will be a short one.
When you reach into your garbage disposal to pull out an undisposable bone or a fork that has adventitiously dropped into the hole, do you envision the thing suddenly starting up and converting the end of your arm into a bloody stump? Silly though it may be, I find myself checking and rechecking that switch on the wall each time I reach into that rubber rimmed hole in the sink. Imagine if the switch were to suddenly short out, or if lightening hit, or a truck rumbled by a bit too heavily... When you reach into your garbage disposal do you envision the thing suddenly starting up and converting the end of your arm into a bloody stump? Even now?