Cerebrate Good Times

If you could be any movie monster, which would you be? There are the huge Cloverfield-type monsters that could lay waste to a whole city, or there are the little monsters that could hide in your house. Would you want to just scare people, make them laugh, or just eat brains? I suppose if I were to choose from among the classic monsters, I would go with Dracula, since he was a snappy dresser and had that sort of ninja-esque air of mystery about him. But if I could go with any monster in any movie, I’d have to choose Godzilla. He gets to be good sometimes, he gets to be bad sometimes, he has radioactive breath, and he gets to fight other giant monsters and step on people. That’s the life for me. What about you?

I admit that I like watching Deal or No Deal. I know it doesn’t exactly require any intelligence on the part of the contestant, but I find it entertaining. I often reflect on what I would do if I did win a million dollars. Of course, I wouldn’t do anything exciting with the money, so they wouldn’t choose me to be on the show. They like to pick people who have huge debts to pay off or a crippled relative who needs an operation. I would buy a house, give some money to my family, and save the rest. That doesn’t exactly make for exciting television. What would you do with that kind of cash? It better be exciting…

For some reason, as I was falling asleep last night, I began to wonder what my own personal hell would be like. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far: It would be really windy, all the time, and super hot and humid. Everybody, including me, would be renamed Dakota (Sorry to anybody who likes that name, if any of those people can read, but it’s my hell, not yours). I would be forced to listen to muzak versions of really bad jazz while cashiering endlessly. I would have to wear a Hot Dog on a Stick uniform, and every customer would be buying really sharp objects like porcupines and bits of broken glass. There wouldn’t be a bar code on anything, and whenever the line got down to one person a hundred more people would come up at once and start yelling at me to speed up. What would your hell be like? [ Update : One more thing that would happen is everyone would copy me . Just kidding, Jer.]

The new figures on international life expectancy just came out, with the U.S. ranking a dismal 42 nd . Still, the average life expectancy has increased to 77.9 years for the average person in this country. That doesn’t mean you’ll have a pain-free life, of course. You might have a chronic disease for decades, and you’ll probably spend several weeks every year sick with a cold. So here’s the question: Would you give up a portion of your life in exchange for having perfect health? Let’s say you could live to be 65 with perfect health, as opposed to 78 with health problems. What would you do? I'm betting the answer has to do with your overall health.

Suppose you are contacted by advanced being from another planet. They want to learn all they can about our species, and specifically our culture. What’s the quickest way to give them the most information on our culture and our society? You could give them a set of encyclopedias, but that just gives information without any commentary, and it’s about the mechanics of the world in general, as opposed to the nuances of our culture. You could point them to the Internet, but it’s not really something they could take with them, and there’s too much useless information to filter out. I would hook them up with DVDs of The Simpsons. It is loaded with cultural information and would, provided they understood the nuances of humor, give them a pretty balanced view of us as a people. What would you do?