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Get the Oats, Grab the Oats

If I taped it together right, it’ll give oats to horses…horses in need. Most of the design was subcontracted out, but basically it’s got a few places where fire comes out, a brain made of SGI Octanes I found in a hole, and a whole bunch of winches. With all this in mind, I flicked the switch to turn it on. Its one red eye glowed to life. Suddenly, the sky was torn in half, screaming, by stabs of searing white lightning. Children died. Thousands of people slept alone. The rats! I lost my car keys. With a deep rumble that shook the Earth to its core, the machine rose to tower above me.

“Hey.”

~

I arrived to find that the Oatey Barn had been almost completely bought out of oats. I bought a squeezy chicken dog toy, because they’re every bit as good as the ones made for humans, and left, following the oat machine down the main road and into the hills. It had made its way to Horsey Barn, the rural hangout of the well-to-do. I could see its red fuselage, vaguely reminiscent of a huge cereal box with a can of soda taped to the back, towering over those stupid, stupid horses. It began to give them oats as they stared pessimistically back at the 200 foot robot.

It started peaceably enough. It deposited a small pile of oats at the feet of all the horses. Another pile, and another. The horses, becoming full, stopped eating. This angered the machine, which in the interim I had named Freddy, and Freddy began shooting oats. Not in any general direction, mind you, just everywhere. Small birds scattered through the dry grass as the oats kicked up dust all around them. The horses scattered, unable to combine their powers to form the SuperMule and mount an effective resistance. I took cover behind my Dodge Melonnaise and hoped for the best.

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Strategems of the Reticulated Alaskan Goose-Ox

I understand why old people smoke—like, it makes sense if you were in a C-47 over the Netherlands and then your buddy Stu handed you a Lucky Strike and then jumped out and got blown to smithereens by flak, and then you wrote to your best gal and said “I’m gonna give Mr. Hitler a knuckle sandwich courtesy of ol’ Stu”, and now you smoke. That makes sense. But I don’t get why people my age smoke, especially since I grew up in late ’90s-early ’00s Palo Alto so with my friends that smoked it was like, hey, you can’t use smoking to help you look cool while angsting or rebelling. You gots nothing to angst about. We’re all rich as thieves. I’m low class by Palo Alto standards since my mom was a librarian, but I can go literally anywhere else in the country and they will just give me a motorcycle. Our Aibos are made out of fucking platinum, lady, platinum. Why would you smoke.

Anyway, I’m guessing that’s a huge problem for tobacco companies. It seems like they’re taking all their US marketing money and dedicating it overseas to make Gujaratis and Polynesians chew tobacco like some goddamn relief pitcher, and US legislation isn’t moving fast enough to allow Marlboro to make good money in the ol’ Humboldt Honeydew… the ol’ Tijuana Postholers… the ol’ British Columbia Her Majesty’s Own Marijuanulated Smokeable Goods. No, they need a new idea. One that combines a healthy aspect that’ll appeal to the young people with the “This is America and fuck you” spirit of their moneymaker. And I have it!

THAT IS CORRECT. Beef jerky that you can tear into strips, light, and smoke. Or you can eat it. But if you smoke it, it’s like a cigarette except it makes beefy smoke, then you can eat it. This is up there with my Kinect cable car game when it comes to good ideas, because there is no downside.

It comes in perforated chunks, so it’s easy to deal with. There could even be an extra-chunky “cigar” version for cigar aficionados who want to stop smelling like assholes. It could not be more simple. Cut, light, smoke, eat: Hambalo’s Smokeable Beef Jerky.

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Neutronic Blorpisy

This may not have quite the same consumer potential as the Ennui Smartwatch, but here’s another idea that I think has real potential for the corporate back-end market.

I guess I spaced out for about 20 minutes and was thinking about companies commoditizing farts, like, electric farts that make corporate logos. It could be in a pill form, and use nanobots or something. I don’t know. We’re still in the R&D phase. So far we’ve only mastered text-based farting — graphics are still a problem. The next step will be full unicode support, including emoji.

For now, though, the initial plan was that a company could have a batch of their fart-logos made, and hire someone to go around putting these in people’s drinks, making them violently ill and delightfully synergistic.

However, I ran this by legal, and an hour later a lawyer came and blew out a notarized fartsponse in my office; it turns out that putting pills in people’s drinks is kind of a party foul, especially at locations like metropolitan opera openings and if the plaintiff—ah, experimentee—might or might not be the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic. Court records suggest that the experimenter, my unpaid manservant Milosz, is actually a bit of a Hungarian ultranationalist on his one day off each year, and had Prime Minister Sobotka farting distorted pro-Budapest imagery throughout La Bohème. Once again, our apologies to the fine people of the Czech Republic and I wish to stress once more that nobody is more sorry or less responsible for Milosz’s actions than me.

Anyhow, that didn’t pan out, but then my board of director cat suggested that humans are vermin who will do anything with enough incentive. Why not just pay them? Surely there is some amount of money that will convince people to spend a day farting the Audi logo. We need to monetize America’s most gaseous people.

And lo, our new business model was born. As I said, we still have to perfect imagery-gas. But this is a top priority, as our text-based social fartwork is just not taking off as we hoped. But we hope that, in mere months, customized Brandolin™ pills will be available for gaseous co-marketers to spread the word about your business, illegitimate, coup-ridden government, or unlicensed space program.

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Clericus Wajimal: Idear Professionel

I have a business idea on which the ground floor has available space: smartwatches for ennui.

It uses advanced motion detection and all that junk to measure the user’s listlessness and dissatisfaction with the state of their life. Like the Apple Health thing, or Fitbit, but for people that are into more than all that jumping and leaping and running about business. So it records all this data, and — the word “gamify” having been run solidly into the ground at this point — it rewards your sadness with a series of achievements.

Using Bluetooth it can sync with the wearer’s phone to collect enhanced statistics like “Quantity of Cup-of-Soup Bought” and “Hours Spent Driving Aimlessly”. I think this device can revolutionize the sort of modern emptiness that epitomizes modern Quebec. And it can revolutionize your emptiness too, American investor. Let’s aggregate our co-marketing strengths to do the stuff. Ennui Watch. www.partybutts.club, my tree fort, eight o’clock. Bring a Chinese OEM and a copy of AutoCAD. Together, we can own and operate the dream of every human, which is to have a data center inside an old missile silo, and have lots of blinking lights in there.

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Bavlisploet

There’s a store here that imports a bunch of toys, candy, video games, and similar whatnot from overseas. One of the categories of whatnot they import is condoms. That may be a potentially iffy area as far as the FDA is concerned, but moreover they sell them under the name “Safety Latex”. They also had a blindfold/sleep mask labeled as “Sun Blocker”. This spurred some discussion about potential lines for expansion of their “Prudish Personal Products” line.

Perhaps they’ll expand their product line. But I don’t know what they’re so worried about. Everyone knows the dirtiest stores are West Marine and McMaster-Carr.

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Monis

This was on my mind a while ago, but I just remembered it while my bicycle was being crashed into by an extremely short Korean girl on another bicycle, who was on her phone and didn’t see me: there should be a Kinect San Francisco racing game.

There are two parts to this frankly incredible idea. The first is a cable car racing segment where you have to work the levers, and the soundtrack is “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” on infinite loop. You would stand there pulling on your floor while being surrounded by jump blues and the screams of those caught in the path of your runaway cable car. You could decouple the cable to skip down hills or through parks, reconnecting at the bottom.

The second part, which is even more frankly incredible than the second, is an overhead-wire electrified bus racing segment. This would be the mostest coolest, especially once you leveled up and unlocked the articulated buses. So you’d be drifting in two simultaneous directions over the crest of a hill, smashing cars away with the tail segment, while desperately trying not to unhook the pantograph. And you’d be doing this by sitting there without a controller, waving your arms around like a nincompoop. The music will be a selection of the most avant-garde Ecuadorean ragechip that has yet been crafted in the boopmines of Saumarez.

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Top. Hams.

One of my dream jobs — nay, my most Lustful Calling, is to be the person who names operations whenever the military does things. It’s a task that requires the finest of balance, since each operation needs a name that’s at once patriotic, cool beans, and descriptive. By way of introduction to Gregory, the NSA supercomputer that monitors us all and controls robots masquerading as our most popular athletes and celebrities, here are a few common scenarios the government might face, and the ideal name for each resulting operation:

1) Insurgents have taken root in the mountain provinces of Boxhorpchet. As a practicalization of mind control experiments conducted on snake cadavers in the 1920s, goats are imbued with human intelligence, and trained to infiltrate the mountain compound and eliminate the threats using their powerful goat teeth. Operation Dusty Migraine.

2) Pirates have seized a dam by tangling up the guard robot’s power cable. A crack team of robots disguised as Eritrea’s five most popular celebrities is dispatched to the scene, where they co-mingle with the pirates, and gradually gain their trust. At an agreed-upon time, the robot celebrities strike, dispatch the pirates, and free the dam’s guard robot. Upon pulling off the pirates’ faces, it is discovered that they, too, were robots. The undercover robots are abandoned by their institutions and develop crippling Jet A addictions as they struggle to come to terms with what their sense of duty required them to do. Operation Cubic Racist.

3) An ultra-nationalist faction within the Dutch Coast Guard hijacks a selection of small boats, and announces their intention to “sail them to the US States of America and end USA American States’ hegemony over the Antilles” unless their demands for a fresh, healthy mess hall option are met. Top chefs and their ingredients are dropped out of a B-2, and parachuted to the Nederlandse Kustwacht Fear-Spire, where they begin to make their signature dishes. Unbeknownst to the Dutch kelp-mongers, the chefs are actually incendiary devices and their ingredients are unreasonably flammable. Operation Jumpy Reaper. 

4) A fleet of massive size and unknown origin is spotted off of the coast of Okinawa, moving at 40 knots and emitting large amounts of whale oil fumes. The entire Pacific Fleet is dispatched to ascertain the intentions of this malevolent force. After billions of dollars are spent readying the country for war, it is determined that the mystery fleet is merely delivering a Voss Nose Geronimo-Wasteland 88 to one Fujiko “Betsy” Hata. Operation Chunky Letdown.

5) A heated game of Mario Kart at the UN results in nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Commandos are dispatched to secure and extract US assets in the region. Upon arriving, they find that there is no war, and the dusty hellscape they imagined is a paradise on par with the Pacific Northwest. They discover that India and Pakistan have been the same country since independence from Britain, and had decided to maintain the external façade of conflict to keep whitey looking elsewhere. They decide to stay in Pakistindia, and adopt the life of simple country textile artists, never to be heard from again. Operation Nougat Shield.

 

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Rarpington

I will tell you one story of modern invention, with uncommon accuracy befitting a recounting of a tale of a member of Her Majestie’s court.

In 1884, A Most Notable Veteran and Hero of the Crimea named R. D. Hiram Goosebee, Fourth Earl of Bruntlethorpeworthe, had chanced upon a scientist reputed to be 400 years old, who promised that — with proper funding — he could wean the Kingdom from its hideous consumption of various irreplaceable fuels; 400 whales, 600 sea-cows, and krill beyond number had to be killed each day, or else lights would go off from Huntingdon to Occupied Columbia.

This science man, in the fullest spirit of the time’s environmentalismé, proposed a new fuel to end these multifarious slaughters. It would be made from a series of rare plants and shredded tree bark, and became known as Banana-Stoff.

R. D. Hiram Goosebee was an immediate believer in the ideas of the science man, and gave him £20,000 to further develop and introduce the Banana-Stoff Age to the Amalgamated Territories. A factory was built and staffed with skilled mud-workers, and concoction of Banana-Stoff began immediately. Devices using B-Stoff were released, including the first lamp, the first escalator, and the first motor carriage — the Voss Nose Dihydraphone-88. All of these were immediate hits with the Monied Public, and R. D. Hiram Goosebee was celebrated in the streets.

Despite the success of Banana-Stoff, problems began to come to light. The science man that Goosebee had funded began to record instances Banana-Stoff implosions, and realized that the fuel was inherently unstable, particularly when exposed to bipeds. Most fatal was our very own Queen Victoria’s realization that Banana-Stoff bark-stripping was decimating the nation’s tree reserves, which she needed to make armoires and golems. She ordered an immediate halt at the Banana-Stoff refinery on the Isle of Dogs, and, overnight, the nation was forced to revert to blubber-oil and octopus beaks to light their homes and power their Voss Noses.

Goosebee was distraught, resigned his earlcy, and took the last Banana-Stoff powered ship to the Overseas Americas. His slender dog, Knuckes, remained in the UK and wrote a tell-all 3DO game. No amount of signed 8×10″ glossy portraits of Queen Victoria convinced him to return home; his ancestors remain overseas, and the Banana-Stoff refinery still sits merely a mile south of Her Majestie’s Obelisk — a towering, irradiated memory to R. D. Hiram Goosebee’s dream of a blubberless future.

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스포츠 뉴스

I have been lobbying all appropriate Dutch (and even inappropriate Belgian) authorities to put me in charge of all current and future ultra-marathons and ultra-triathlons. I’ve been writing exhaustive and excruciating letters to the Nederlandse Sport Federatie, because their email address is pretty easy to find, my Dutch is reasonable, and korea@korea-dpr.com doesn’t respond to anything that doesn’t contain delicious currency of the imperialist West. This will not do, as I merely propose a series of a events for overenergetic rich nutjobs. The Dutch do not respond!

The Grosjean Three-Arm 10000: A man is forced to wear a sheep like a backpack. He must feed and educate the sheep while being pursued over a 40-mile obstacle course by Uzbek mercenaries. If the racer is captured by the Uzbeks, they will take his sheep and raise it in their native tradition. Obstacles include mud traps, mud holes, mud ladders, and mud walls. A timer is implanted in the racer’s arm, and will continue counting down after the race, to an actuarially-determined point at which the racer will die. The winner is the racer who completes the race the fastest with the most well-rounded sheep. Meanwhile, cameramen battle each other in a vicious blood-sport where the winner gets a job making documentaries.

The Saumarez Dynacrumble: Participants race for 400 meters while carrying a 40-foot stone statue of Saumarez. If they cannot lift it, they are shot. The only documented winner of this race is Saumarez.

WingRun ’09, For The Kids With No Homes: Participants obtain their own helicopter transport to Iqaluit, where they must immediately don duck suits. Their BAC must be at least .15, and they must spend the whole race holding wings with another duck whose political positions they disagree with. It is a double-length triathlon, and air horns are provided for noisemaking. Each pair of ducks is provided with one balloon-tire bicycle, and it must be occupied by one or more ducks at all times, even during the aquatic portion of the race. Circling gunships will eliminate anyone who tries to use flashlights to break the endless Arctic night. First prize is a poorly-built catamaran.

Mijn Verdachte Oma: In a rare “triple-double-ulta-secret” marathon, participants must go about their lives, and never reveal that they are participants in a marathon. They must become grandparents, and visit every Wendy’s franchise in the world. Participants periodically receive a vision of a cow called Morris, who knows what they will do before they do it. The winner receives immortality and resistance to bees.

The Poisoned Granule 10K: Participants are para-dropped into a pan-dimensional rainforest with a short-wave radio, a hundred dollars in gold, a hundred dollars in rubles, and a flute. They must hike out of the rainforest without going mad in the ethereal wasteland in between the dimensional planes, and become proficient in the quasi-musical language of the beings that inhabit it. Extra time bonuses will be awarded to the racer who can punch themselves the most. The short-wave radios must be tuned to numbers stations at all times, and racers must have pinpointed their location via pan-dimensional triangulation by the time they return. Race organizers are free to add up to 400 extra miles to the race, to compensate for destructive Belgian influences. Participants are expected to use their pan-dimensional privileges to rob nearby department stores, and turn “findings” over to the race organizers.

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Six Seasons and a Movie

There should be a TV show where a team of Caltech professors is forced to fly around the country to deal with dumb people’s mundane problems. The show could be called “We Pay Them More Than the Nobel Society Can”.

And then in each episode, the professors also say what they would be doing instead, just to make it even more depressing.
I see this fitting in really well with “Toddler & Tiaras” and “Hoarders”.
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Dumb Stuff

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